Kolab Now sells Swiss jurisdiction plus a full open-source groupware suite. JustEmails sells unlimited domains at $49/year flat. Two honest answers to two different questions.
Picture someone paying Kolab Now for their consultancy, their partner's bakery, and two side projects they haven't touched since 2024. Four domains. Six mailboxes. One human being who actually reads any of it. They want a Kolab Now alternative for one reason: to stop paying per person.
That's the whole comparison in miniature. Kolab Now isn't overpriced — it's priced for a different shape of customer than the one asking that question.
And it's a serious product. Swiss company, Swiss servers, Swiss jurisdiction, built on Kolab Groupware — genuinely open source, not open-source-flavored marketing. Calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, files, and Kolab Meet for video, all inside one Roundcube-based webmail instead of scattered across four tabs. If you need to replace Google Workspace entirely, under Swiss law, they're one of very few credible options.
JustEmails is a much narrower product. $49/year flat. Unlimited domains, unlimited mailboxes, 10 GB storage, full IMAP/SMTP/POP3, and a transactional email API bundled in. No calendar. No files. No video. Email hosting that doesn't charge you more when you add a mailbox.
Two products, two different questions. Here's how to tell which one you're asking. (Weighing open-source hosts more broadly? The Forward Email comparison covers another one.)
TL;DR: Kolab Now wins if you need Swiss jurisdiction, real groupware, or both — and your seat count is small and stable. JustEmails wins if you're carrying multiple domains, adding and removing mailboxes constantly, and already own a calendar you don't want to replace.
One person, one domain, everything in one place under Swiss law? Kolab Now, easily. Agency juggling client domains where the mailbox count keeps creeping up? Per-seat pricing taxes you for growth. Flat-fee doesn't.
| Feature | JustEmails | Kolab Now |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat $49/year per account | Per-seat, billed in CHF (check kolabnow.com for current rates) |
| Domains | Unlimited | Custom domains supported on their group account types |
| Mailboxes | Unlimited, free to create | Billed per seat |
| Storage | 10 GB included; +100 GB at $99/year (stackable) | Per-plan quota — see their pricing page |
| Webmail | Clean and functional, email only | Roundcube-based, groupware-integrated |
| Calendar / contacts / tasks | No | Yes |
| File storage | No | Yes |
| Video conferencing | No | Yes (Kolab Meet) |
| Mail access | IMAP / SMTP / POP3, any mail client | IMAP / SMTP plus ActiveSync, CalDAV, CardDAV |
| Data jurisdiction | No jurisdictional claim — TLS 1.2+ in transit and at rest | Switzerland |
| Open-source stack | No — managed service | Yes (Kolab Groupware) |
| Transactional email API | Bundled — 1,000/month, then $25/year per 10K tier | No |
| SPF / DKIM / DMARC / MTA-STS | Auto-configured | See their documentation |
| Spam filtering | Rspamd + ClamAV | Included |
Look at the shape of that table, not the rows. Kolab fills the productivity column and charges by the head. We leave it empty and charge by the account.
I'm not going to quote you a CHF number.
Not because it's secret — it's on their pricing page — but because too many comparison posts quote a competitor's price from eighteen months ago and quietly become misinformation. A stale number is worse than no number, because you'll budget against it. Their site, not my summary of it.
So go read kolabnow.com/pricing. What you're checking isn't the headline figure — it's the unit. Per user, per month? Multiply by seat count, then by twelve, then compare to $49. That single comparison is the whole post.
This is their real product, and it isn't something we can match by trying harder.
Switzerland is in neither the EU nor the US, so a Swiss host isn't compellable under the US CLOUD Act. For consultancies handling legal, medical, or financial client data — or anyone whose procurement checklist literally says "data must not leave Switzerland" — that's a hard requirement, and no amount of TLS on our end satisfies it.
We encrypt in transit and at rest and we don't sell data. But we make no jurisdictional claim. If you need one, believe the people making it.
Kolab Groupware has been in development since the early 2000s, originally commissioned by the German federal government — decent pedigree. Calendar and contacts aren't a separate app sharing a login. They're the same object store your mail lives in.
That matters more than it sounds. Shared calendars work properly. Free/busy lookups resolve. Tasks link to mail. If you've ever duct-taped a standalone calendar onto a mail host and watched invitations arrive as unparseable .ics attachments, you know why people pay for integration.
We don't offer any of this. Deliberately — and if you need a calendar from your mail host, that's a dealbreaker, and it should be.
My less charitable take, and weigh it against the obvious fact that I have a stake: most people who buy a full groupware suite use the mail, use the calendar, and quietly ignore the tasks, the notes, and the file storage forever. Not everyone. But "one vendor for everything" is often a story people tell themselves at signup and stop living by month four.
The Kolab stack is open source, so in principle you can take your setup and self-host it. Whether you will is another matter — running a groupware server is a real job, and most people who plan to eventually don't. But the exit exists.
We're a managed service. Your exit from us is a standard IMAP export, which is fine but isn't the same thing.
Back to the four-domain consultancy from the top of this post.
Four domains, six mailboxes, one person reading them. Under any per-seat model you pay six times — even though five of those mailboxes are forwarding destinations that catch a contact-form submission twice a month.
JustEmails: $49/year. All four domains. All six mailboxes. Add a seventh at 2am for a domain you bought on a whim — still $49.
Our flat-fee vs per-mailbox breakdown runs this out at agency scale. Against Google Workspace's $84/user/year list price (Business Starter, checked September 2026), six seats is over $500/year before anyone sends a single email.
My opinion, and not everyone shares it: per-seat mailbox pricing is a licensing habit inherited from desktop software, not a reflection of what a mailbox costs to run. Mailbox number seven costs close to nothing. Charging like it's a workstation seat is a choice.
When mailboxes are free, you stop rationing them.
Every domain gets hello@, billing@, support@, and a catch-all. Every client project gets its own address so you can kill it cleanly when the engagement ends. Every form sends somewhere specific instead of everything landing in one inbox you stopped opening.
That's a workflow change, not a pricing change, and it only happens once the meter stops running.
(Team members are our one exception — $2/member/month for additional people with their own dashboard logins and roles. Owner's included. Mailboxes stay free regardless.)
This one keeps surprising people.
$49/year includes 1,000 transactional emails a month through a REST API — password resets, receipts, signup confirmations. Idempotency keys, delivery webhooks, message logs. Need more? $25/year per additional 10,000-emails-per-month tier. A tier raises the monthly quota only: API and mailbox sends share one daily sending cap, and no tier lifts it. API access starts with the paid plan, not the trial.
Kolab Now doesn't do this. Not a gap in their product — just not what they built. But if you run a company inbox and an application, the alternative is bolting Postmark or SES onto Kolab and maintaining two sets of DNS records, two dashboards, two invoices.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS. Four standards, each with its own way to be subtly wrong.
We generate the records, check each one, and show which are still missing. A DKIM record with one extra trailing character fails as surely as a missing one.
On a host that leaves DNS entirely to you, that's fine for a sysadmin and less fine for a bakery owner. Doing it by hand either way? Our DMARC enforcement guide walks p=none to p=reject without nuking deliverability.
Pick Kolab Now if:
Pick JustEmails if:
These two barely compete. They surface in the same search results, which is a search-engine artifact more than a market reality — and I'll admit it grates a little, writing posts framed as a fight that isn't one.
Kolab Now sells jurisdiction plus integration, and they've been at it for over a decade. If the Swiss angle is why you're reading this, go sign up — nothing in our feature list changes that requirement.
JustEmails sells one narrow thing: email hosting whose price doesn't move when you do. We're a young product from Velocity Digital Labs, we don't have a decade of history, and we deliberately don't do calendars. Our webmail is fine. "Fine" is the honest word for it — twenty years of groupware polish, it is not, and any IMAP client, Apple Mail or Thunderbird included, works with it. Want the full suite? We're the wrong tool, and I'd rather say so than sell you a trial you'll cancel.
So: are you buying email, or your whole workday? Kolab answers the second. We only answer the first.
(If the shared calendar turns out to be load-bearing, better to learn it on day three than in week six. That's what the 7-day trial is for; it covers one domain and two mailboxes, enough to test the workflow.)
Comparing more than two? The business email pricing survey puts 18 hosts side by side. Questions: support@justemails.app.
It's better for jurisdiction, which is a narrower thing than privacy. Switzerland sits outside both the EU and the US, so Swiss providers aren't reachable by US CLOUD Act requests the way a US-based host is, and Swiss data protection law governs the provider. That's a real, structural difference — not marketing. What it isn't: end-to-end encryption. Standard IMAP hosting, theirs and ours alike, stores mail in a form the server can read. If your threat model is a subpoena from the wrong country, jurisdiction matters a lot. If it's zero-access encryption, neither of us is the answer.
Yes, because Kolab Now speaks standard IMAP. Our migration tool connects to your existing mailbox over IMAP, copies messages across, and preserves the folder tree — the same tool also handles Google Workspace and Zoho migrations. Run it per mailbox, verify the counts match, then cut your MX records over. Once the domain is verified with us, sending from it is capped at no more than 50 a day in the first week, 200 in the second, and up to 500 from day 15. Allow extra time for a large archive and keep the old account alive for a week as a safety net. The part that doesn't migrate is your calendar, contacts, and files, since we don't host those — export those to standard formats before you cancel.
Whatever you're already using, honestly. JustEmails is email-only on purpose — no calendar, no contacts sync, no file storage, no video calls. If you already have a calendar you like and a file sync you pay for, the groupware half of Kolab is duplicate spend. If it isn't duplicate for you — if Kolab Meet is genuinely how your team does standups and the shared calendar is load-bearing — then you'd be replacing one bill with three, and that math usually doesn't work out in our favor.
No. Kolab Now is mailbox hosting plus groupware, not a sending platform for application email. If your SaaS needs to fire password resets and receipt emails, you'd add Postmark, Resend, SendGrid, or Amazon SES on top — a second vendor, a second bill, a second set of DNS records to keep straight. JustEmails bundles a REST API with 1,000 transactional emails per month inside the $49/year, with more monthly capacity at $25/year per 10,000-email tier (the daily sending cap stays the same). For a solo founder running both a company inbox and an app, that consolidation is often the whole reason to switch.
Unlimited custom domain email hosting for $49/year flat — unlimited domains, unlimited mailboxes, 10 GB storage, full IMAP/SMTP. Built for agencies, freelancers, and anyone managing email across more than one domain.