# Looking for a Paubox alternative?

> Paubox is HITRUST-certified healthcare email with a BAA on every account — if you need a BAA, choose them. Email Fast differs on one axis: who holds the keys.

Canonical: https://emailfast.dev/compare/paubox-alternative

Start with the disqualifier: Paubox includes a BAA with every account and is HITRUST
CSF certified first-party, and Email Fast does not offer a BAA today — if HIPAA
governs your email, choose Paubox, full stop. For general senders outside healthcare
compliance, one line in their security docs frames the rest: master encryption keys
are held in their cloud KMS. Provider-held. Ours can be yours.

## The comparison

| | Paubox | Email Fast |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare compliance | HITRUST CSF certified, first-party; BAA included with all accounts | No BAA offered today — if you need one, choose Paubox |
| Key custody | Master encryption keys held in their cloud KMS — provider-held | organizations can bring their own encryption keys — enroll, rotate, suspend, or revoke — and revocation fails closed: new sends are rejected and stored secrets become unreadable, to us included |
| At-rest message content | — | BYOK organizations can additionally enable at-rest message encryption: recipient, subject, and body stored as ciphertext under per-recipient keys wrapped by the customer's key — revoke the key and the stored content is unreadable everywhere, instantly |
| Recipient experience | No-portal delivery — recipients read mail as mail, credit where due | Standard email delivery; no portals either |
| Pricing | Per-sender, with 5-seat minimums | Volume-based; contacts and subscribers are never billed — we price sending, not the size of your audience. ([pricing](/pricing)) |
| Developer surface | Strong SDK, MCP, and llms surface — credit where due | SDKs for the browser (EmailJS-compatible), Node.js, Python, PHP, Go, and Ruby, plus a zero-dependency CLI and a published OpenAPI specification |

:::tradeoffs What customer-held encryption costs
encrypted sends give up click-tracking, send-time optimization, and per-recipient analytics — that is what “we can't read it” costs, and we say so.
:::

## Custody is the axis

Their security docs are candid enough to answer the only question that matters here:
who can decrypt. Master keys in their cloud KMS means the provider can. That answer
is the industry's answer — as of July 2026, none of the twelve competitor platforms we surveyed offers customer-held encryption keys for message content — the closest, a healthcare email provider, documents that its master keys live in its own cloud KMS. We built the other one:
organizations can bring their own encryption keys — enroll, rotate, suspend, or revoke — and revocation fails closed: new sends are rejected and stored secrets become unreadable, to us included. And when delivery itself needs proving, delivered messages can mint an Ed25519-signed delivery certificate — receiving mail server, TLS details, the server's SMTP response, and timestamps, with the recipient stored only as a keyed hash — chained into a tamper-evident ledger and verifiable without trusting us. More for
security teams: [enterprise](/enterprise).

## Where Paubox is the right choice

- **HIPAA applies to you.** A BAA on every account, first-party HITRUST CSF, and a healthcare-specialist product — this isn't close, and pretending otherwise would say more about us than about them.
- **You want the no-portal recipient experience** with healthcare compliance behind it.
- **Per-sender pricing fits a defined clinical team** — a bounded set of senders may cost less that way than by volume.

## Switching

Only if you don't need the BAA — we won't help you talk yourself out of a compliance
requirement. For general senders: start with a [sandbox key](/get-started) —
sandbox keys (ef_sandbox_…) that run the real pipeline dry: real validation, real rendering, real events, a hosted capture inbox — and no email leaves. Live delivery opens at launch.

*Paubox is a trademark of its owner; Email Fast is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Facts about Paubox were verified on their public pages on the date above — corrections: [hello@emailfast.dev](/contact).*

## Does Email Fast offer a HIPAA BAA?

No. If you need a BAA, choose Paubox — they include one with every account and hold first-party HITRUST CSF certification. We'd rather lose the comparison than blur that line.

## Who holds the encryption keys at each?

Paubox's security docs state master encryption keys are held in their cloud KMS — provider custody. Here, organizations can bring their own encryption keys — enroll, rotate, suspend, or revoke — and revocation fails closed: new sends are rejected and stored secrets become unreadable, to us included. And you can go further — BYOK organizations can additionally enable at-rest message encryption: recipient, subject, and body stored as ciphertext under per-recipient keys wrapped by the customer's key — revoke the key and the stored content is unreadable everywhere, instantly — and encrypted sends give up click-tracking, send-time optimization, and per-recipient analytics — that is what “we can't read it” costs, and we say so.

## Is Email Fast SOC 2 or HITRUST certified?

Neither. We hold no third-party attestations today and list exactly that on our open security page , alongside what we ran instead — a 19-stage adversarial security review, run to zero confirmed findings. That review was internal and adversarial — a documented find→refute→fix→re-verify loop — not a third-party audit. We say exactly which one we have.

## Who is each product for?

Paubox serves healthcare senders who need compliance included; Email Fast serves general senders who want key custody, proof of delivery, and owned infrastructure. Different jobs, honest boundary.