SimpleLogin vs addy.io vs EmailAlias: 2026 Comparison

If you’ve decided to stop handing your real email to every website, the next question is which alias service to use — and three names come up again and again. This SimpleLogin vs addy.io comparison (with our own EmailAlias in the mix) breaks down how the three actually differ in 2026: their free tiers, pricing, custom domains, open-source status, and the one thing each does best. We verified every competitor’s plan against their live pricing before writing, and — since one of the three is us — we’ll be upfront about where SimpleLogin and addy.io beat us, not just where we shine.

What All Three Have in Common

Before the differences, it’s worth being clear that SimpleLogin, addy.io, and EmailAlias are all doing the same core job. Each gives you email aliases — separate forwarding addresses you hand to websites instead of your real one. Mail sent to an alias forwards to your real inbox, and you can disable any alias when it starts attracting spam. It’s the same fundamental privacy model behind all three, and if the concept is new, our explainer on how email aliases work covers the mechanics.

They also share the essentials you’d expect: forwarding to your existing inbox, the ability to turn an alias off, and paid tiers that unlock custom domains and higher limits. So this isn’t a question of which one “works” — they all work. It’s a question of which model, price, and standout feature fit how you actually use email. With that framing, here’s each in turn.

SimpleLogin: The Proton-Backed Option

SimpleLogin is owned by Proton, the company behind Proton Mail, and that backing is its defining feature. It’s mature, well-funded, fully open source, and can be self-hosted if you want total control.

Free tier: 10 aliases, 1 mailbox, unlimited bandwidth, reply-from-alias, browser extensions, and iOS/Android apps. Premium: $4/month or $36/year, which unlocks unlimited aliases, unlimited custom domains, catch-all support, unlimited mailboxes, PGP encryption, and — because it’s Proton — bundled Proton Pass premium features. You can see the current plans on the SimpleLogin pricing page.

Where SimpleLogin shines: if you already live in the Proton ecosystem (Mail, Pass, VPN), it slots in perfectly, and a single Proton Unlimited subscription can cover it. Its multi-mailbox support is genuinely strong — you can route different aliases to different destination inboxes — and PGP encryption plus open-source transparency appeal to the privacy-serious. The apps and extensions are polished and long-established.

Where it’s less ideal: the tight Proton integration is a double edge — the more of your life sits inside one company, the more you’re consolidating rather than separating. And unless you self-host, you’re trusting a single large provider with a lot. For a Proton devotee that’s a feature; for someone deliberately spreading their trust around, it’s worth noting. Our dedicated SimpleLogin alternative piece goes deeper on that trade-off.

addy.io: The Flexible Open-Source Option

addy.io — formerly AnonAddy, renamed in 2024 — is the tinkerer’s favourite. It’s open source, self-hostable, and offers the most granular control and the cheapest paid entry point of the three, with an unusually generous free tier in one specific respect.

Free tier: unlimited “standard” aliases (aliases on its main domain that you make up on the fly), but with real caps elsewhere — 10 active shared-domain aliases, just 1 recipient address, 2 alias domains, and a 10 MB/month bandwidth limit. Lite ($1/month, billed yearly): 50 shared aliases, 5 recipients, 1 custom domain, 50 replies/day, 100 MB bandwidth, and tracking-pixel blocking. Pro ($3/month yearly, or $4/month monthly): unlimited shared aliases, 30 recipients, 20 custom domains, 200 sends/day, unlimited bandwidth, PGP, and regex rules. There are also Duo and Family plans. The full breakdown is on the addy.io site.

Where addy.io shines: flexibility and price. The Lite plan at $1/month is the cheapest real paid tier here, self-hosting is genuinely supported, and the granular controls — recipients, per-alias rules, regex, multiple domains — give power users a lot of rope. If you want to run your own alias infrastructure or micromanage exactly how mail is handled, addy.io is built for you.

Where it’s less ideal: the free tier’s 10 MB monthly bandwidth cap is easy to hit — a few image-heavy newsletters and you’re throttled — and the per-day send limits and recipient caps mean the free and Lite tiers can feel restrictive for everyday use. The granularity that power users love can also feel like complexity to someone who just wants a simple alias and no dials to turn. Our addy.io alternative guide covers who tends to outgrow it.

EmailAlias: The Exposure-Analytics Option

That’s us — so we’ll keep it fair. EmailAlias is a focused, straightforward alias service whose distinctive feature is exposure intelligence: it doesn’t just forward mail, it watches for signs that an alias has leaked or that the service you gave it to has been breached, and surfaces that so you can react before the spam or fraud starts.

Free tier: 10 aliases and basic forwarding. Premium ($4/month): effectively unlimited aliases, custom domains, send/reply from aliases, higher sending limits, and the exposure analytics. The full plans are on our pricing page.

Where EmailAlias shines: simplicity and the leak/breach monitoring. If your goal is “give every site its own address and tell me the moment one is compromised” without configuring recipients, domains, and regex rules, that’s the experience we optimise for. The exposure analytics are the thing neither SimpleLogin nor addy.io positions front-and-centre.

Where we’re honestly weaker: we are not open source and not self-hostable — both SimpleLogin and addy.io are, and if that’s a hard requirement, they win outright. We’re also a smaller, younger service than SimpleLogin’s Proton-backed operation, so if maturity and scale are your top priority, that’s a fair point against us. We think the exposure analytics and simplicity are worth it for a lot of people — but “it depends,” and we’d rather say so than pretend otherwise.

SimpleLogin vs addy.io vs EmailAlias, Compared

Here’s the head-to-head at a glance. Prices and limits are current as of 2026 and verified against each provider’s live pages.

The table makes the shape of it clear: addy.io wins on price and self-hosted flexibility, SimpleLogin wins on ecosystem and mailboxes (and matches on open-source), and EmailAlias’s differentiator sits in the last row rather than the price row. No column sweeps the board — which is exactly why the right pick depends on you.

SimpleLogin vs addy.io vs EmailAlias: Which Should You Choose?

Rather than crown one winner, here’s the honest per-person answer for the SimpleLogin vs addy.io vs EmailAlias decision:

• Choose SimpleLogin if you already use Proton (Mail, Pass, VPN), you want polished apps and strong multi-mailbox routing, or open-source with a large, well-funded team behind it matters most. It’s the safe, mature default.
• Choose addy.io if you want the cheapest entry ($1/month Lite), you plan to self-host, or you love granular control — recipients, regex rules, multiple domains. Just watch the free tier’s 10 MB bandwidth cap.
• Choose EmailAlias if you want a simple, no-dials alias experience with leak and breach monitoring built in, and open-source/self-hosting isn’t a requirement for you. It’s the “set it and be told when something’s wrong” option.

And a reasonable non-answer: if you’re not sure, all three have real free tiers, so you can try them. SimpleLogin and EmailAlias both give you 10 free aliases; addy.io gives unlimited standard aliases within a tight bandwidth budget. Spend a week routing a few signups through each and the right fit tends to reveal itself. If you’d rather see the wider field first, our roundup of the best email alias services compares more options side by side.

Open Source and Self-Hosting

This deserves its own section because it’s a genuine dividing line. Both SimpleLogin and addy.io are open source and can be self-hosted; EmailAlias is neither. If you want to read the code, run the service on your own server, and never depend on a third party at all, that immediately narrows your choice to SimpleLogin or addy.io — and that’s a completely legitimate priority for a privacy tool.

It’s worth being clear-eyed about what self-hosting actually involves, though. Running your own alias server means managing a mail server’s deliverability — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, IP reputation, and the constant fight to stay out of spam folders — which is real, ongoing work that trips up even experienced admins. For most people, “open source that I could self-host but run on the provider’s infrastructure” is the practical middle ground, and both SimpleLogin and addy.io offer exactly that. EmailAlias’s position is different: we run the deliverability so you don’t, and we accept that closed-source is a trade some people won’t make. If transparency-by-code is non-negotiable for you, we’d genuinely point you to the other two — and note that the same forwarding privacy applies whichever you pick, as our piece on the best private email service discusses.

A Year of Alias Protection: What You Actually Pay

Monthly prices are easy to compare in isolation and misleading in practice, so here’s what a full year of each paid plan costs and what it buys. SimpleLogin Premium runs $36/year and unlocks everything — unlimited aliases, unlimited domains and mailboxes, PGP — a flat, no-tiers deal. addy.io is the most granular on price: Lite is roughly $12/year and Pro roughly $36/year, so you can start at a dollar a month and step up only when you outgrow it. EmailAlias Premium is $4/month, in the same ballpark as SimpleLogin annually, and includes the exposure analytics that are the reason to pick it. Across the board you’re looking at the price of a couple of coffees a year to stop bleeding your real address to every website — which reframes the whole SimpleLogin vs addy.io decision as “which $12–$36 fits me,” not “can I afford this.”

The genuinely free path deserves credit too: all three have real free tiers, and for a lot of people free is enough forever. If you create ten or fewer aliases and don’t need a custom domain, SimpleLogin or EmailAlias will cover you at no cost indefinitely, and addy.io’s free tier works as long as you stay under its bandwidth ceiling. Paying is about unlimited aliases, custom domains, and each service’s premium feature — not about unlocking basic privacy, which is free everywhere here.

A Word on This Comparison

You should know exactly what you’re reading: this SimpleLogin vs addy.io vs EmailAlias comparison is published by EmailAlias, one of the three services being compared. That’s an obvious conflict of interest, and rather than hide it we’ve tried to defuse it — by verifying every competitor’s pricing and limits against their live pages before writing, by crediting SimpleLogin’s and addy.io’s real strengths in full, and by stating plainly where they beat us (open source, self-hosting, SimpleLogin’s maturity and multi-mailbox routing, addy.io’s price and flexibility). If a comparison written by a competitor still tells you that competitor wins every category, close the tab. We’d rather earn a reader who picks addy.io or SimpleLogin because it genuinely fit them than mislead one into a wrong choice. The whole point of using aliases is taking back control of your inbox — and that starts with honest information about your options.

Deliverability: The Part Nobody Compares

Comparison posts love to line up feature checkboxes, but the thing that actually determines whether an alias service is any good is boring and rarely charted: deliverability. An alias is worthless if the mail it forwards lands in spam or gets silently dropped. When a website sends a confirmation link to your alias, that message has to travel two hops — from the sender to the alias provider, then from the provider on to your real inbox — and the second hop is where things break. If the provider’s forwarding servers have a poor sending reputation, your bank’s verification email quietly vanishes.

This is a hidden argument in favour of using an established, well-run provider over a hastily self-hosted setup. SimpleLogin, riding on Proton’s mail infrastructure, has strong deliverability; addy.io’s hosted service is well-regarded too; and a managed provider’s entire job is to keep those forwarding IPs clean. The moment you self-host, that reputation becomes your problem — you inherit the full weight of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment, and a single misconfiguration can route your forwarded mail straight to junk. It’s the single most common reason self-hosted alias setups get abandoned after a month.

There’s also the subtler issue of forwarding and DMARC alignment. When a service forwards your mail, it has to rewrite the envelope sender correctly or the receiving inbox may reject it as spoofed. All three managed services handle this properly; it’s exactly the kind of unglamorous engineering you’re paying for (or trusting the open-source project to have gotten right). If you want to go deeper on why forwarded mail is technically fiddly, our guide to what DMARC is and why forwarded mail needs it walks through the hops. The short version: for most people, a managed service — any of these three — will deliver more reliably than a weekend self-host, and that reliability is worth more than any feature checkbox.

Privacy and Trust: Who Holds Your Mail

Every alias service sees your mail pass through it — that’s inherent to forwarding — so trust in the provider matters as much as any feature. The three take slightly different postures here. SimpleLogin’s answer is Proton: a company whose entire brand is privacy, based in Switzerland, with a long public track record and audited open-source clients. addy.io’s answer is transparency by code plus the option to self-host, so you never have to trust anyone but yourself if you don’t want to. EmailAlias’s answer is a focused privacy policy and the exposure analytics that actively work in your favour — but, as we’ve been honest about, without open-source code to inspect.

The right frame isn’t “which one can I trust absolutely” — no forwarding service is zero-trust unless you self-host — but “which trust model matches my threat level.” For most people avoiding marketing spam and data-broker profiling, any of the three is a massive improvement over handing your real address to every site. For someone with a genuinely high-stakes threat model, the self-hostable open-source options (SimpleLogin or addy.io) let you remove the provider from the trust equation entirely, and that’s a real, meaningful edge we won’t pretend away. It’s the same reasoning we lay out in our take on whether to use your real email online: match the tool to the threat, don’t over- or under-buy.

Real-World Scenarios

Abstract feature lists only get you so far. Here’s how the SimpleLogin vs addy.io vs EmailAlias choice actually shakes out for a few common situations:

• “I use Proton Mail and want aliases to just work.” SimpleLogin, no contest — it’s part of the same family and a Proton Unlimited plan may already include it.
• “I want the cheapest possible paid plan and I’ll self-host eventually.” addy.io. Lite at $1/month is the lowest real entry price here, and the self-host path is well-trodden.
• “I sign up for a lot of services and want to know the moment one leaks or gets breached.” EmailAlias — the exposure analytics are built for exactly this, turning each alias into a tripwire.
• “I’m a power user who wants regex rules, many recipients, and total control.” addy.io’s Pro tier gives you the most dials to turn.
• “I just want to stop giving my real email to shops and newsletters, minimum fuss.” Any of the three free tiers does this today; EmailAlias and SimpleLogin’s flat 10-alias free tiers are the simplest to reason about.
• “I need to route different aliases to different inboxes (personal vs work).” SimpleLogin’s multi-mailbox support is the strongest here.

Notice that the “winner” changes with every line. That’s not a cop-out — it’s the actual answer. A comparison that names one product for all six scenarios is selling, not comparing.

Common Mistakes When Picking an Alias Service

A few traps catch people regardless of which service they land on. Avoid these and any of the three will serve you well:

• Chasing “unlimited” you’ll never use. If you’ll realistically create a few dozen aliases, a plan that caps at 50 is plenty. Don’t pay for unlimited to feel safe — pay for what you’ll actually create.
• Ignoring the bandwidth cap. addy.io’s free tier looks generous with unlimited standard aliases, but the 10 MB/month bandwidth limit is the real ceiling. Read the limit that’s easy to hit, not the one that sounds impressive.
• Not using a custom domain when portability matters. If you ever want to switch providers without re-registering every alias, put your aliases on your own domain from the start. All three support it on paid tiers.
• Treating open source as automatically more private. Open source is genuinely valuable for auditability and self-hosting, but running the hosted version of an open-source service still means trusting that host — the code being public doesn’t change who operates the servers.
• Over-buying for a low-stakes threat model. If your goal is dodging marketing spam, you don’t need PGP and self-hosting. Match the tool to the actual risk.

Final Thoughts

The SimpleLogin vs addy.io vs EmailAlias question doesn’t have a single right answer, and any comparison that tells you it does — especially one written by one of the three — is worth distrusting. What’s actually true in 2026 is that these are three good services solving the same problem from different angles: SimpleLogin with Proton’s ecosystem and maturity, addy.io with open-source flexibility and the lowest price, and EmailAlias with a simple experience and built-in exposure analytics. Match the one whose strengths line up with what you care about — ecosystem, control and cost, or simplicity and leak monitoring — and you’ll be well served. Whichever you choose, the important move is the one they all enable: stop giving your real address to every site, and start handing out aliases you can switch off. That single habit does more for your inbox than agonising over which of three capable tools to use.

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