Gmail for Business Alternative

A Gmail for Business Alternative Without the Advertising Company

Gmail is the reason most small companies are on Google Workspace, and the thing they are most nervous about replacing. Every MassiveGRID Nextcloud Hub plan includes a mailbox per user with Nextcloud Mail, Calendar and Contacts, in the same workspace as files, office and chat, from $5.90 per user per month in the U.S., E.U., U.K. or Asia. This page is about whether the mail part is good enough, and how to move it without losing a message.

See Nextcloud Hub Plans Migration Service

Included

Mailbox per user

$5.90

Per User / Month

IMAP

CalDAV, CardDAV

Regions you choose

Gmail against Nextcloud Mail

Honest, feature by feature

	Gmail (Google Workspace)	Nextcloud Hub email
Price	In Google Workspace from about $7 per user per month	Included in Starter ($5.90), Business ($12.90) and Enterprise ($19.90) with files, office and chat
Search	Best in class across mail and Drive	Full-text search in Mail and across the instance; good, not Gmail
Filters, labels, snooze	Labels, filters, snooze, categories	Folders, filters, Sieve rules (Sieve forwarding since Hub 26 Summer), tags
Spam and phishing	Google's filtering	Server-side filtering on the platform; you can add your own Sieve rules
Calendar and contacts	Google Calendar and Contacts	Nextcloud Calendar and Contacts, shared calendars, room booking
Clients	Gmail web and app; IMAP optional	Nextcloud Mail in the browser and app; Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Outlook over IMAP
Where the mail lives	Google's regions	The region you choose
Business model	Advertising company (ads are off in Workspace, the company is not)	Hosting provider; your subscription is the revenue
AI in the inbox	Gemini, bundled since 2025	Nextcloud Assistant only if you enable it, on dedicated Ultimate instances, with models you choose

Where Gmail still wins

Say it before you move

Search. Gmail's search across years of mail and Drive is the best in the business, and a company whose staff find everything by searching rather than filing will notice the difference. The ecosystem of Gmail add-ons and the integrations that assume a Google account are the other gap. If those two things define how your company works, our plan-by-plan comparison says stay. If mail is mail, read on.

How a Gmail migration works

Without losing a message

Gmail exports over IMAP or as MBOX through Google Takeout; calendars export as iCal and contacts as vCard, both of which Nextcloud imports directly. Mailboxes are copied before the MX records switch, the old Gmail keeps receiving in parallel, and the last messages sync across after. Phones and desktop clients get the new IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV accounts in ten minutes each. The Google Workspace export guide walks through it, and the migration service runs it with the old account read-only for 30 days.

The rest of the suite comes with it

Mail is one of six apps

Files

Drive's replacement with 100 GB per user on Starter and 1 TB on Business, versioning, share links and desktop sync.

Office

Documents, spreadsheets and presentations edited together, DOCX, XLSX and PPTX native.

Talk

Chat, calls and screen sharing with guests from a browser; Meet and Chat's replacement.

Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

For a company that wants its mail in a region it chooses and no advertising company behind it, the mailbox included in a Nextcloud Hub plan, with calendar, contacts, files, office and chat for $5.90 per user per month. Proton is the alternative if end-to-end encrypted mail is the priority above collaboration.

Yes, one per user on every plan: Standard Email on Starter and Business, Enterprise Email with delegation on Enterprise. Nextcloud Mail also reads any external IMAP account, including a Gmail account you keep during the transition.

Ask about domain options when you order a Hub plan; organisations that need their own domain on the whole workspace, including the login page and share links, use a dedicated Nextcloud Enterprise instance, which includes custom domain and branding.

No. Mail copies over IMAP or MBOX, contacts and calendars export as vCard and iCal, and the MX switch happens only after the copy, with Gmail still receiving in parallel. The migration service keeps the old account read-only for 30 days.

It is a capable mail client with folders, filters, Sieve rules, a unified inbox and attachments straight from your files. Gmail's search and add-on ecosystem are better; where the data lives and who runs the company behind it are the reasons people switch.

Same suite, your region, from $5.90 per user

Order a Nextcloud Hub plan and the first month is $1 with coupon code NEXTCLOUD. Move one team, run a month of real work, then decide.

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