A SimpleLogin alternative is what users typically start shopping for when they want richer per-sender intelligence than SimpleLogin’s dashboard ships with, when they prefer not to consolidate their entire privacy stack inside the Proton ecosystem, or when they hit the seasonal limits of SimpleLogin’s free tier. SimpleLogin is a credible, open-source, Proton-owned forwarding service — but its feature emphasis is deliberately narrow, and the searches that drive people toward a SimpleLogin alternative cluster around leak attribution, exposure analytics, free-tier depth, and vendor diversification. This guide compares the strongest options in 2026, with honest notes on what each one does better than SimpleLogin and where SimpleLogin still wins.

What is SimpleLogin?

SimpleLogin is an open-source email forwarding and alias service that was acquired by Proton AG in April 2022 and is now part of the broader Proton privacy stack. You generate a random or pattern-based alias — for example iz4ck2@aleeas.com or signup.amazon@yourdomain.com — hand it out instead of your real address, and SimpleLogin’s servers forward inbound mail to the real inbox sitting behind it. If a sender starts spamming or sells your address to a third party, you disable the alias and the leak stops at SimpleLogin’s edge, leaving your real inbox untouched. The free tier ships with 10 aliases on shared SimpleLogin-owned domains; the paid tier (around $4 per month, billed annually) unlocks unlimited aliases, custom domains, send-from-alias, and a catch-all.

The architecture is the same forwarding primitive every alias service uses — incoming SMTP terminates at the provider, the envelope is rewritten, and the message is re-sent to the real destination address. We walk through the full pipeline in our explainer on how email aliases work under the hood, and the same pipeline applies to SimpleLogin, to EmailAlias.io, and to every other service on this page. The differences between providers are not the forwarding mechanic — they are what each one layers on top: leak attribution, custom-domain depth, deliverability tuning, exposure analytics, send-from quality, and the export story when you eventually want to leave.

SimpleLogin’s appeal is straightforward. The codebase is open source and self-hostable, the parent organisation has a long privacy track record, and the pricing is fair for what you get. The SimpleLogin alternative search exists because that same focus leaves a handful of gaps that matter the moment you start running aliases for serious sign-ups — and because some users actively prefer not to consolidate their inbox, password manager, VPN, and alias service inside a single vendor.

Why people look for a SimpleLogin alternative

The reasons users start hunting for a SimpleLogin alternative cluster into six recurring buckets, ordered roughly by how often they appear in Reddit, Hacker News, and Proton’s own community forums in 2026:

  • No real exposure analytics or sender-risk attribution. SimpleLogin will tell you which alias received how many messages and let you disable a noisy one, but it does not score sender domains for risk, surface a per-alias breach digest, or flag when an alias starts seeing senders that look correlated with a recent data leak. Users who came to alias services specifically for breach attribution outgrow this gap quickly — the Have I Been Pwned corpus shows the median active email now appears in seven or more breaches, and attribution is what makes mask-per-service strategies worth the effort.
  • Vendor concentration inside the Proton ecosystem. Since the 2022 acquisition, SimpleLogin sits alongside Proton Mail, Proton Pass, Proton Drive, and Proton VPN under the same corporate umbrella. That’s convenient if you already pay for Proton Unlimited, but it concentrates inbox, vault, file storage, and alias governance inside one vendor. For users running a deliberate “don’t put all eggs in one basket” stack, a non-Proton SimpleLogin alternative is the diversification step.
  • Ten-alias free tier on a shared domain. Ten aliases on @aleeas.com and the other rotating shared domains is fine for a casual user, but each one carries the SimpleLogin brand and is not portable. The moment you want a real custom domain on your own name, you are on the paid tier, and the case for paying SimpleLogin specifically (versus a different vendor at the same price) reopens.
  • Send-from-alias quirks. Sending a fresh outbound message from a SimpleLogin alias works but has subtle quirks — the From header includes a SimpleLogin reply-suffix that some recipients flag as suspicious, and Apple Mail in particular has historically rendered the suffix in a way that confuses replies. Dedicated alias services that handle send-from natively avoid the suffix entirely.
  • UI density and discoverability. SimpleLogin’s web UI is functional and dense — closer to a sysadmin tool than a consumer SaaS dashboard. Users who want a cleaner, opinionated, fewer-knobs experience often cite UI fatigue as the reason they look for a SimpleLogin alternative, especially after a year of accumulating dozens of aliases.
  • Jurisdiction and forwarding region. SimpleLogin operates under Proton’s Switzerland-anchored corporate structure with forwarding infrastructure to match. That’s a strong privacy posture, but some users — particularly US-based developers integrating alias services with Amazon SES downstream or compliance-bound businesses preferring US data residency — actively want a non-Swiss SimpleLogin alternative for predictable jurisdiction.

None of these are reasons SimpleLogin is a bad product. They are the reasons people who started on SimpleLogin actively go shopping for a switch once their usage gets serious or their threat model evolves. The rest of this guide is built around closing those specific gaps.

How we evaluated each SimpleLogin alternative

Each option below was scored against the gaps a SimpleLogin user actually leaves over — not generic “best email service” review checklists. The six criteria:

  • Exposure analytics and sender-risk attribution. Does the dashboard tell you which sender domains have hit each alias, score them for risk, and surface a digest of which aliases are leaking? This is the single biggest gap in the SimpleLogin experience for users who picked alias services as a breach-detection tool.
  • Vendor independence from the Proton ecosystem. Is the alternative governed by a different parent organisation? Users specifically looking for diversification should treat Proton-owned options (including Proton Pass hide-my-email) as the same vendor as SimpleLogin and skip them — which is why this list does not include Proton Pass hide-my-email.
  • Custom domain support. Can you bring @yourname.com and route every alias through it on the free or low-cost paid tier? A subdomain on the vendor’s own brand is not the same thing as a real custom domain — the long-term portability difference is laid out in our email alias portability guide.
  • Free-tier depth. Is the free tier generous enough to validate the SimpleLogin alternative before committing? SimpleLogin gives 10 aliases on shared domains; a credible competitor matches or exceeds that without forcing you onto a credit card.
  • Send-from and reply quality. Can you both reply to and start outbound messages from an alias without a reply-suffix that confuses recipients? Send-from quality is one of the quietly important differentiators between forwarding services.
  • Portability and export. Can you walk away with your alias list, and ideally keep the addresses working, if the vendor pivots? CSV or JSON export, plus a one-click DNS handover on a custom domain, are the green flags. Data portability is the regulatory term for what you want here.

Pricing is captured in the comparison table below — it is a deciding factor for some users, but it is not a criterion in itself. A SimpleLogin alternative that is $1 cheaper but missing exposure analytics is not actually cheaper if you are paying for the analytics feature.

SimpleLogin alternatives compared

At a glance, here is how the strongest SimpleLogin alternative options stack against SimpleLogin itself on the criteria above. The table is sorted in roughly the order they appear in the rest of the guide.

ServiceFree aliasesCustom domainExposure analyticsSend from aliasPaid plan
SimpleLogin (Proton)10 on sharedPaid onlyBasic countersYes, with suffix~$4 / mo
EmailAlias.io10 on sharedPremium onlySender-risk scoring + weekly digestYes, no suffix$4 / mo
Firefox Relay5 masksSubdomain on @mozmail.comNoReply only~$0.99 / mo
addy.ioUnlimited on sharedFree tier supports itPer-alias countersReply only on free$1 / mo (Lite)
DuckDuckGo Email ProtectionUnlimited on @duck.comNoTracker strippingReply onlyFree
Apple Hide My EmailUnlimited inside iCloud+iCloud Custom DomainNoReply only in MailFrom $0.99 / mo (iCloud+)
Forward EmailOpen-source self-hostFirst-classDisposable detectionYes$3 / mo
SimpleLogin alternative comparison diagram showing forwarding layers
Every SimpleLogin alternative in this comparison uses the same SMTP-forwarding primitive — the differences are the leak-attribution, exposure-analytics, and custom-domain layers each one stacks on top.

1. EmailAlias.io — best SimpleLogin alternative overall

EmailAlias.io is built on the same forwarding primitive as SimpleLogin, but the product is opinionated about exposure intelligence in a way SimpleLogin is not. The free tier ships with 10 aliases on shared domains, a clean dashboard, weekly high-risk sender digests, and a passwordless magic-link login. The Premium tier ($4 per month, $36 per year) unlocks unlimited aliases (with a 150-alias soft cap and a 20-per-day creation rate that exists to keep abusers off the platform), up to five custom domains, send-and-reply without a reply-suffix, AES-256 at rest, and the full Exposure Intelligence dashboard with per-sender risk scoring.

What makes EmailAlias.io the strongest SimpleLogin alternative for most users is the analytics layer. Every inbound message is scored on sender-domain reputation, breach correlation, and frequency — so when an alias starts seeing senders that look correlated with a recent leak, the dashboard surfaces it before the spam volume grows. SimpleLogin will show you a count; EmailAlias.io shows you a reason. For users who picked alias services specifically to detect which sign-ups are leaking their address, that distinction is the entire product.

Features

  • Sender-risk scoring with weekly digest of high-risk hits per alias.
  • AES-256 encryption at rest, zero-knowledge architecture, SPF / DKIM / DMARC alignment.
  • Up to five custom domains on Premium; first-party catch-all on each.
  • Send and reply from any alias without a SimpleLogin-style reply-suffix.
  • Passwordless login via magic link; no password storage to breach.
  • CSV export of the entire alias list at any time — the export story is part of the contract.

Pricing

Free for 10 aliases on shared domains. Premium is $4 per month or $36 per year (25% saving on annual). No upsell tier above Premium — the most you can pay EmailAlias.io is $4 per month, which keeps the SimpleLogin alternative pricing comparison honest. Full pricing details sit alongside the Premium signup flow.

Pros

  • Strongest exposure analytics in this comparison — the single biggest gap in SimpleLogin’s dashboard.
  • Independent vendor — not part of the Proton ecosystem, so it counts as real diversification.
  • Clean send-from with no reply-suffix.

Cons

  • Free tier lacks custom-domain support; you need Premium for @yourname.com aliases.
  • Not open source — if self-hosting is non-negotiable, see addy.io or Forward Email below.

2. Firefox Relay — best Mozilla-backed SimpleLogin alternative

Firefox Relay is Mozilla’s mask service, launched in 2020 and operated alongside Firefox, MDN, and Mozilla VPN. The free tier gives you five masks on @mozmail.com; the paid tier (roughly $0.99 per month) adds unlimited masks plus a custom subdomain on @mozmail.com. It is the cheapest credible SimpleLogin alternative on this list and the only one backed by a long-standing non-profit-adjacent browser-vendor brand.

The trade-off is feature depth. Relay does not expose per-sender risk attribution, does not support a real custom domain (only a mozmail subdomain), and does not currently match SimpleLogin or EmailAlias.io on send-from quality. For a casual user who wants a SimpleLogin alternative for sign-up masking and is happy on a mozmail subdomain, it is hard to beat at the price point. We compare the broader Relay lineup in our standalone Firefox Relay alternative guide for users who eventually outgrow it.

Pros

  • Cheapest credible paid tier on this list.
  • Backed by Mozilla, with a long privacy-product track record.
  • Native integration in Firefox itself for one-click alias creation on signup forms.

Cons

  • No real custom domain — only a subdomain on @mozmail.com.
  • No exposure analytics or per-sender risk scoring.
  • Free tier capped at five masks — half of SimpleLogin’s free-tier depth.

3. addy.io — best open-source SimpleLogin alternative

addy.io (formerly AnonAddy) is the leading open-source SimpleLogin alternative. The codebase is on GitHub, the service is self-hostable, and the hosted free tier supports custom domains out of the box — something SimpleLogin reserves for the paid tier. The Lite plan starts at around $1 per month for richer limits, and the Pro plan ($3 per month) covers most power-user needs. For users specifically diversifying away from Proton-owned SimpleLogin but still wanting an open-source forwarding service, addy.io is the obvious destination.

What addy.io does not match is exposure analytics — the dashboard surfaces per-alias counters and bandwidth usage but not sender-risk scoring or breach correlation. Send-from on the free tier is reply-only; outbound-initiation needs the Pro plan. That said, the open-source posture, the generous custom-domain free-tier policy, and the maintainer’s hands-on community engagement put addy.io in a different category from any non-open-source SimpleLogin alternative.

Pros

  • Open-source codebase; self-hostable.
  • Custom domains supported on the free tier.
  • Cheap entry-level paid tier (Lite at $1 / month).

Cons

  • No sender-risk scoring or exposure analytics layer.
  • Send-from-alias is reply-only on the free tier.
  • UI density is similar to SimpleLogin — busier than a typical consumer SaaS.

4. DuckDuckGo Email Protection — simplest SimpleLogin alternative

DuckDuckGo Email Protection is the simplest SimpleLogin alternative on this list. It is free, it gives you one personal @duck.com address plus unlimited per-site generated addresses, and it strips known trackers out of inbound messages before forwarding them to your real inbox. There is no paid tier and no upsell — DuckDuckGo positions Email Protection as part of its broader privacy product line, not as a revenue product.

The trade-offs are obvious. There is no custom-domain support, no send-from-alias initiation, and no exposure analytics. Every address ends in @duck.com, which some senders treat with extra scrutiny (although DuckDuckGo’s deliverability has been steadily improving since launch in 2022). For a user who wants a frictionless free SimpleLogin alternative for sign-up masking and tracker stripping, it is the lowest-effort option on this page. For a user running aliases on financial or government accounts, it is too thin.

Pros

  • Completely free, no paid tier.
  • Strips known email trackers before forwarding.
  • Unlimited per-site generated addresses on @duck.com.

Cons

  • No custom-domain support.
  • No send-from-alias.
  • Every address is @duck.com, which some senders flag for extra scrutiny.

5. Apple Hide My Email — best SimpleLogin alternative for Apple users

For users who are already paying for iCloud+ (and pretty much every Apple user with more than 5 GB of photos is), Apple Hide My Email is the cheapest SimpleLogin alternative they will ever see — because the marginal cost is already sunk. iCloud+ starts at $0.99 per month for 50 GB, and Hide My Email comes bundled. Aliases land on @icloud.com (or your iCloud Custom Domain if you have configured one), they integrate natively with Sign in with Apple, and the system is set up by default in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

The trade-off is that Hide My Email lives entirely inside the Apple ecosystem. Replies are easy from Apple Mail; replying from Outlook on Windows or Gmail on Android is more awkward. There is no exposure analytics layer, no sender-risk scoring, and no send-from from non-Apple clients in a way that feels first-class. For a user committed to Apple devices, Hide My Email is a solid SimpleLogin alternative for low-stakes signups. For a user who needs a cross-platform alias workflow, it is the wrong tool.

Pros

  • Already included with iCloud+ (which most Apple users already pay for).
  • Native integration with Sign in with Apple.
  • iCloud Custom Domain support for power users.

Cons

  • Replying / sending from non-Apple Mail clients is awkward.
  • No exposure analytics or sender-risk scoring.
  • Tightly coupled to the Apple ecosystem — useless if you switch to Android.

6. Forward Email — most transparent SimpleLogin alternative

Forward Email is an open-source, custom-domain-first SimpleLogin alternative with an unusually transparent operational posture. The codebase is public, the documentation is unusually detailed about how messages are processed (including a deliberately short message-retention window), and the paid plans start at $3 per month for the Enhanced Protection tier. For users who want an open-source SimpleLogin alternative and first-class custom-domain support without the Proton-ecosystem tie, Forward Email is one of the cleanest options on this list.

The gaps versus SimpleLogin are similar to addy.io’s: no sender-risk scoring, no exposure-intelligence dashboard, and a more sysadmin-feeling UI than EmailAlias.io’s. The strengths are the opposite: a transparent operational model, custom-domain-first design, and a maintainer who publishes the kind of “what we do with your mail in the seconds between SMTP receipt and forwarding” documentation that most providers leave out.

Pros

  • Open-source, self-hostable, unusually transparent operational documentation.
  • Custom-domain-first design.
  • Disposable-domain detection inbound.

Cons

  • No sender-risk scoring or exposure analytics layer.
  • UI is functional, not opinionated — closer to addy.io than to EmailAlias.io.
  • Brand recognition is lower than SimpleLogin’s, which matters when recruiters or merchants see the domain.

Key features to look for in a SimpleLogin alternative

When you are scoring a SimpleLogin alternative against your own threat model rather than against this guide’s recommendations, the features that actually separate the long-term winners from the short-term cheap options are:

  • Exposure analytics and sender-risk attribution. If the dashboard does not tell you which sign-up is leaking, you are paying for forwarding rather than for breach detection. This is the single biggest reason users move off SimpleLogin and it is the feature most providers under-build.
  • Custom domain on the paid tier. A real @yourname.com domain is the only address shape that survives provider migration. A vendor subdomain — @aleeas.com, @mozmail.com, @duck.com — looks identical at sign-up but does not migrate.
  • Send-from-alias without a reply-suffix. If outbound from an alias requires a recipient to figure out a confusing reply-to-suffix address, you will get worse engagement on the outbound message. Recipients who are used to clean addresses tend to assume suffixes are phishing.
  • Export contract. CSV export, JSON export, or a documented DNS handover on your custom domain. If a SimpleLogin alternative will not let you walk away with the list, you have a lock-in problem, not a privacy product.
  • Independent vendor governance. Diversifying away from Proton is one of the most common reasons users come to this comparison in the first place. A “diversification” recommendation that turns out to be the same parent company is no diversification at all.
  • Reasonable free tier. A SimpleLogin alternative that does not let you validate without payment is unserious about its own product confidence. Ten aliases on shared domains is the minimum acceptable floor.

If a SimpleLogin alternative checks five of those six, it is competitive. If it checks all six, it is a credible long-term home for your alias addresses.

How to migrate from SimpleLogin

Migrating off SimpleLogin onto a different SimpleLogin alternative is straightforward as long as you treat the alias list itself as the unit of work, not individual addresses. The five-step playbook:

  • Export your alias list from SimpleLogin. The web UI exposes a JSON / CSV export of every alias, the destination it forwards to, and the notes you have written against it. Pull that file before you cancel anything — it is your authoritative list.
  • Audit the list for “what is actually still in use”. A typical year-old SimpleLogin account will have 30 to 60 aliases, of which fewer than 15 are still active. Disable the dead ones at SimpleLogin’s edge before you migrate so you carry less debt forward. We walk through the audit process in our portability guide.
  • Decide on a domain strategy. If you were using a SimpleLogin custom domain, the cleanest move is to point that same domain at your new SimpleLogin alternative — your aliases keep working without any sign-up form updates. If you were on shared SimpleLogin domains, the new aliases will be on your new provider’s shared domains, and you will have to update sign-ups one at a time as senders next contact you.
  • Recreate high-value aliases first. Banking, brokerage, healthcare, primary email recovery — these are the addresses where downtime hurts most. Recreate them on the new SimpleLogin alternative, update the senders, and verify a test inbound on each one before you decommission the SimpleLogin equivalent. We cover the specific case for financial accounts in should I use an email alias for my bank account?
  • Keep SimpleLogin running for 30 days in parallel. Do not cancel SimpleLogin the day after you finish setting up the new vendor. Run both for a month so that late-arriving senders (annual newsletters, government renewals) catch the SimpleLogin address and trigger you to update the relevant sign-up. After 30 days of zero inbound, the SimpleLogin account is safe to close.

The reason this playbook works is that the SimpleLogin alternative you are migrating to is, mechanically, the same forwarding pipeline you are migrating from. The only thing that needs to change is which provider receives inbound SMTP for each alias. With a custom domain, that is one DNS change. With a shared vendor domain, it is one sign-up update per active sender.

Common use cases

The SimpleLogin alternative you should pick depends heavily on what you are using aliases for. The most common patterns we see when users describe their workflows:

  • Breach detection per sign-up. One alias per service so you can identify exactly which sign-up leaked when spam starts arriving. EmailAlias.io’s sender-risk scoring is purpose-built for this; SimpleLogin’s counters are not.
  • Newsletter consolidation. Run a single alias for all marketing newsletters and disable it when you want a clean inbox. Any SimpleLogin alternative works; the cheapest credible one is Firefox Relay.
  • Job search. Use a per-recruiter alias to track who is sharing your resume and to mute aggressive outreach when a search ends. Send-from quality matters here — both EmailAlias.io and addy.io Pro handle it cleanly; Hide My Email is awkward outside Apple Mail.
  • Custom-domain professional identity. You own @yourname.com and want every alias on it. EmailAlias.io Premium, addy.io, and Forward Email all support this; SimpleLogin does too, on the paid tier.
  • Sign-up masking for non-critical accounts. DuckDuckGo Email Protection is the simplest free SimpleLogin alternative for this use case, with tracker stripping as a bonus.
  • Diversifying away from Proton. Any non-Proton-owned SimpleLogin alternative on this page works; the cleanest options are EmailAlias.io (for analytics depth) or addy.io / Forward Email (for open source).

Final thoughts

SimpleLogin is a credible product and it is hard to argue against it on raw mechanics — the forwarding works, the codebase is open source, and the parent company has a long privacy track record. The SimpleLogin alternative search exists because privacy-focused users are increasingly suspicious of putting their entire stack inside a single vendor, because exposure analytics is now the feature that separates “forwarding” from “breach detection”, and because the original product appeal — a small, focused, independent alias service — is no longer quite what SimpleLogin is, post-acquisition.

For most users coming off SimpleLogin in 2026, our recommendation is straightforward: EmailAlias.io if you want the strongest exposure analytics and you are willing to pay $4 per month for it, addy.io if open-source posture is non-negotiable, Forward Email if you want both open source and a transparent operational model, Firefox Relay if you only need basic masking on a tight budget, and Apple Hide My Email if you are locked into the Apple ecosystem anyway. DuckDuckGo Email Protection sits underneath all of those as the simplest free SimpleLogin alternative for low-stakes sign-up masking. Try EmailAlias.io free for 14 days if you want to see what the analytics layer looks like before you migrate the full list.

Frequently asked questions

Is SimpleLogin still being actively developed under Proton?

Yes. Proton has continued to ship SimpleLogin updates after the 2022 acquisition, and the codebase remains open source on GitHub. Users looking for a SimpleLogin alternative typically do so for feature-depth or vendor-diversification reasons, not because the product is unmaintained.

Can I export my SimpleLogin aliases before switching to an alternative?

Yes. SimpleLogin exposes a JSON / CSV export of every alias, its destination, and any notes you have written against it from the web UI. Pull that file before you cancel anything — it is the authoritative list you will use to migrate to your chosen SimpleLogin alternative.

What is the difference between SimpleLogin and Proton Pass hide-my-email?

They share a vendor (Proton AG) and broadly the same forwarding pipeline. Proton Pass hide-my-email is bundled inside Proton’s password manager, while SimpleLogin is the standalone alias product. Because they share a parent company, neither one counts as a “diversification” SimpleLogin alternative — that is why this list does not include Proton Pass hide-my-email.

Does SimpleLogin offer end-to-end encryption on forwarded messages?

SimpleLogin can encrypt forwarded messages with your PGP public key if you upload one, but most users do not configure PGP. The realistic security model is transport-level encryption between mail servers and at-rest encryption on the provider side, which every SimpleLogin alternative on this list also implements.

How much does a SimpleLogin alternative typically cost?

The paid tiers cluster between $0.99 / month (Firefox Relay) and $4 / month (EmailAlias.io, SimpleLogin itself). addy.io Lite is $1, Forward Email Enhanced Protection is $3. Apple Hide My Email is included with iCloud+ from $0.99. DuckDuckGo Email Protection is free with no paid tier.

Can I keep using a custom domain after migrating from SimpleLogin?

Yes — that is the easiest migration path. Point the same custom domain at your new SimpleLogin alternative’s MX records and every alias on that domain keeps working without any sign-up form updates. If you were on shared SimpleLogin domains, the new aliases will be on your new provider’s shared domains and you will need to update sign-ups one at a time as senders next contact you.

Is there a fully open-source SimpleLogin alternative I can self-host?

Yes. addy.io and Forward Email are both open source and self-hostable. SimpleLogin itself is also open source and self-hostable; some users self-host the SimpleLogin codebase specifically to avoid the Proton-hosted instance, which is a third option worth considering before switching vendors.

Will switching to a different SimpleLogin alternative break my existing alias addresses?

Only if those aliases live on SimpleLogin’s shared domains (such as @aleeas.com). If you were using a custom domain on SimpleLogin, you can point it at the new vendor and the same aliases keep resolving. For shared-domain aliases, the realistic migration is to run both providers in parallel for 30 days so you catch every active sender and update the sign-up form before retiring the SimpleLogin address.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.