Proton or Infomaniak for a law office?

Two Swiss providers, both in Geneva, both outside the CLOUD Act. The difference is not sovereignty, it is the philosophy of encryption. Guide published on 13 September 2026.

The question practices ask

A law office, a notary's office, a psychology practice or a group medical practice share the same problem: professional secrecy applies to mail, and mail is often with a US provider chosen by default. Once the decision to leave is taken, two names come up: Proton and Infomaniak. Both are Swiss-law companies, hosted in Switzerland, with no foreign parent. The choice is made on something else.

Proton: end-to-end encryption as a principle

• Messages, calendars and files are encrypted on your device; Proton itself cannot read them. It is the strongest guarantee that exists for confidential correspondence.
• Between two Proton addresses, encryption is automatic. To a client on Gmail or Outlook, you can send a password-protected message the recipient opens in a browser.
• Proton Mail, Calendar, Drive and Pass (password manager) form a coherent set; Proton Workspace Standard sits around CHF 11 to 13 per user per month, Premium around CHF 17 to 20, depending on billing (noted September 2026, prices shown in dollars or francs by country).
• The constraints of end-to-end encryption are real: searching the body of old messages relies on local indexing on each device, Outlook and Apple Mail need an intermediary program (Proton Bridge), and a lost password without a recovery key means lost messages.

Infomaniak: classic business mail, hosted in Switzerland

• Encryption in transit and at rest on the servers, but Infomaniak holds the keys: the usual hosting model, with Swiss law and mutual legal assistance as the protection.
• All the comfort of business mail: instant full-text search, calendars and address books shared between partners and secretariat, mailbox delegation, native compatibility with Outlook and phones.
• kSuite Standard CHF 5.54 and kSuite Pro CHF 9.42 per user per month excluding VAT (September 2026), with kDrive, kMeet and kChat included.
• For truly sensitive documents, kDrive offers password-protected, time-limited shares, and SwissTransfer replaces WeTransfer.

The criterion that decides

Ask yourself one question: who must be able to read, and from where?

• If correspondence with clients is the heart of the risk (litigation lawyers, psychologists, anything under art. 321 of the Criminal Code), and your team accepts learning a slightly different tool: Proton. End-to-end encryption is an argument you can write in black and white in your privacy policy.
• If your office runs on shared calendars, an assistant managing three partners' mailboxes, searches across ten years of archives, and practice software that sends mail: Infomaniak. Security is good, the habits do not change, the cost is the lowest.
• Both is a frequent and reasonable answer: Proton for partners and sensitive files, Infomaniak for the secretariat, accounting and calendars. Two domains can coexist, or one domain with mailboxes split.

What matters more than the choice of provider

In the practices I review, the weak link is almost never the server's encryption. It is the account shared by the whole secretariat since 2018, the missing two-factor authentication, the trainee who still has access, and the practice software backup nobody has ever restored. Migrating to Proton or Infomaniak without fixing that is fitting an armoured door to a house with no walls.

Frequently asked questions