Zoho Mail Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
Zoho Mail worked well as a provider for my email on my custom domain. It has all of the features you would need out of a typical email provider, like Gmail​ or Outlook. It was simple to set up, just by adding an MX record into my DNS which took until 5 minutes. The UI is simple but powerful, and their advanced search tools helped me find emails from long ago that I wouldn't be able to find otherwise. Since my only user was myself and an additional service account for miscellaneous sending purposes, I was using the "free" version, which is fully featured, but limited to 5 users. While the free version includes quite a lot of mail features, it is ultimately limited on mail storage, eventually causing me to move away. The free version also included access to some of Zoho's other products, including their contacts and calendar suite (expected with any email provider these days), as well as their office suite (think Word/Excel/Powerpoint). These were nice features to have included, but I ultimately did not use them too much, except for Contacts and Calendar.

Cons
Zoho is the underdog in the category of SaaS business suites, competing against GSuite and O365. While the product is fully featured and includes plenty of powerful tools, what it lacks is widespread support and integration, which ultimately made me move to O365, after using Zoho for 5 years. Their propriety storage and document solution are​ basically unheard of compared to Office Online (with OneDrive) and Google Docs (with Drive). Their IMAP/POP3, CalDav, and CardDav solutions are basic and fragmented, though the features are there. Furthermore, with the free account, I didn't get/expect any customer support so any problems were left to myself to fix (not many came up anyways). Primarily, you lack integration with third parties and industry leaders with their services. They don't provide many plugins or connectors to external parties, and when they do, the options are lackluster. Don't expect to be able to automate things with Zoho.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
Ability to scale up and work as a team is the most approaching benefit of Zoho Mail. further to it, on use I did find: 1. The Administrator can be a team and not just one person. 2. Role set up and Employee Addition, even with custom roles are very helpful for medium scale enterprises. 3. Has a good ability to make a company-wide policy for better implementation of compliances and related kinds of stuff without hassles. 4. The advanced and simple mode selection also helps for quite a good lot of employees. 5. The email authenticity details in every email are quite a helpful feature that will save a life from spams not available in Gsuite and likewise applications to extend Zoho has.

Cons
The Cost expenses of running full premium features are a setback to most of micro and nano scale enterprises. The Company does provide good lot feature even at free of cost but the overall pricing deters such enterprises to buy paid plans, thus reducing the inflow of such paid customers. The privacy policies of companies present a loophole of the ability of admin to peek in an employee's email. It is like a sword with two edges, both beneficial and destructive too.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
I use this daily and it's great. It is totally separate from my website hosting email and with a few settings on the server & on my domain registrar, my mail was set up. I use it on my local computer/devices OR I can also login and manage email on the web. I set up folders, filters, blacklist/whitelists, and love that I can create an alias email to give out if I don't want someone to have the private email. Their support is good, despite taking a few days to get a response sometimes, but they are very friendly and always want to help you solve your problem. A few times, i've gotten phone calls and they've accessed my screen to help me troubleshoot an issue they aren't able to replicate which is miles above other support services these days. If you choose, you can also use several other features like their contacts manager, calendar, tasks, and several other Zoho branded products (some free, some not). It's straightforward and basic but to be clear: this is not a replacement for the mail system hyou use on your comptuer... it is an email HOSTING service = where your emails are stored. You still need to use an app on your computer/device to send/receive messages. HUGE Pro: move to a new web host is a. All I need to do is change a few MX records at my domain registar, I never have to worry about losing email. The steps involved "may" require help but not hard to do. You can set up a spam management system to either allow, bounce or quarantine msgs.

Cons
It seems like my email sometimes appears to be offline in my computer mail app. It's usually brief but it happens. The more recent setup for anti-spoofing settings were a pain in the butt to set up and I had to contact support for help b/c their instructions were wrong (but, like I said, they did help me and were eager to please). The spam filtering feels limiting. I can only block emails/ domains. I wish I could add a spam filter based on subjects, keywords or phrases to swipe them in one action. The type of spam that we seem to get with the same topic yet comes from infinite number of addresses makes it a huge pain to manage. You have to login, go to your Control Panel & add the addresses/domains to the blacklist. If I could do this based on the subject line or keywords, I'd have to do this less often. I drown in emails & too many still get through (even if in my Junk folder), I don't want to ever see them. Then, I seem to get a lot of false negatives. Legitimate people sometimes do not get through & again, need to check the spam settings, add them to the main whitelist & check the quarantine folder. These are more recent changes but it's increasing the time I spend, instead of reducing.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The value for the money is obvious once you start using the software. Features for even the lowest tier paid plans include white and black lists, spam filtering, mailing lists, custom groups for email accounts, and a plethora of other things. Absolutely worth the measly cost they charge per year. Out of the box you have full control via the admin panel to enable or disable pop or imap, create unlimited aliases per email, add signatures and company wide disclaimers to emails. They have their own web interface, desktop and mobile applications that come included as well. One if my absolute favorite features is the zohomail admin application for mobile which allows me to, in seconds, change any employees password if they forget it regardless of where I am. Ssl, dkim, spf, are all available out of the box as well.

Cons
One of the most frustrating features of the software is the Streams feature. You can compare this to an email client trying to merge email with their own version of social media. For those looking for a feature such as this it may not be a huge issue for you, however I run IT for approximately 100 users and not a single person wants this feature, the problem being is it comes turned on by default. Shut it off you say? If it were that easy I wouldn't be so annoyed by it. There is no admin level switch to turn off streams company wide. To do so every single user must individually log into the web application, find the streaming filter, and shut it off manually one by one... The stream feature creates 2 folders called notifications and newsletters automatically that begins sorting mail based on zohos own specifications. If you have employees who are older and not tech savvy it is extremely difficult to train everyone to check 3 different folders (including inbox) for their mail when everything use to be located in the inbox alone. After browsing through forums, support threads, etc it appears many companies and users have begged for an off switch company wide due to the exact same issue we still are plagued with for years now, however nothing had been done to rectify this time consuming and hassle of s "feature".

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
The amount of internal organization this software has, has propelled the rate at which I'm able to get work done. I absolutely love the way you can filter through your emails based on an almost mind boggling amount of search fields. I especially love the attachment filter, as so many of my emails have pictures and PDFs. Even further, the interface for the server is very legible, and as you click through to your emails, the new windows cascade and expand to the right, making it easy to quickly scan for necessary information. The extra applications/plug-ins such as Group Calendars, Streams, Tasks, etc. make internal company communication SO EASY! Honestly, I could talk about the inter-connectivity of the software all day. Not to mention, it's very easy to configure your email with a custom domain server, and as a webmaster, that's just one less headache I want to deal with.

Cons
I first started using Zoho Mail when I was still learning how to write basic HTML and CSS code, and at the time there was a bit of a learning curve for myself when it came to the initial setup of the product. Some of the vocabulary I had yet to learn was throughout the email client, and made it somewhat hard to understand exactly what I was doing. With that being said, Zoho has literally hundreds of resources that are both directly from the company, and from other reliable sources, on how to overcome the "language barrier" and take you through the setup process set by step. So, although there is a learning curve with certain steps, there's still innumerable amounts of resources to help you through the process.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10