Is Migadu cheaper than Zoho Mail?

It depends entirely on how many mailboxes you need. Zoho's free tier covers up to five users at no cost, which Migadu can't match at any price. Past that, Zoho bills per user while Migadu's price is set by storage alone — so a dozen mailboxes cost the same on Migadu as one does, and Zoho's bill multiplies. The crossover comes quickly: run the arithmetic against your own headcount rather than comparing entry prices.

What are Migadu's daily message limits?

Migadu publishes a per-tier daily cap on both incoming and outgoing messages: Micro allows 200 in and 20 out per day, Mini 1,000 in and 100 out, Standard 3,000 in and 500 out, and Maxi 10,000 in and 2,000 out. These are on Migadu's own pricing page but are frequently left out of comparisons. If you send meaningful outbound volume, the cap rather than the storage figure is likely to decide your tier.

Does Zoho Mail's free plan support IMAP?

No. Zoho's Mail Free tier is listed without IMAP, POP, or ActiveSync access, which means it's webmail and Zoho's own apps only. IMAP and POP are included from Mail Lite upward. If you plan to use Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or another third-party client, the free tier won't work for you and the comparison becomes Migadu's $19/yr against Zoho's cheapest paid tier.

Does Migadu have a calendar like Zoho does?

We could not find a calendar or contacts product advertised on Migadu's public marketing pages as of the checked-on date below. Zoho Calendar and Zoho Contacts are separate apps within the same suite and are bundled from the Workplace tiers. If calendar sync is a hard requirement, verify directly against Migadu's current docs before switching — absence from a marketing page isn't proof of absence from the product.

Which one is better for a small team?

Zoho, in most cases. Its Workplace tiers bundle document collaboration, admin controls, and compliance features built for organizations, and it has a real free tier to start on. Migadu's flat per-account pricing can be dramatically cheaper for a team that's comfortable managing shared mailboxes itself, but it publishes no team-management or compliance features, and the daily send caps apply to the whole account rather than per user.

What does Folio cost compared to these two?

Folio is $2.99/month billed annually ($35.88/yr) for up to 3 domains, $12/month for up to 10, and $29/month for unlimited — more than Migadu's $19/yr entry tier and more than Zoho's free plan. We publish this page and we are not the cheapest option on it, nor the only one with a free tier. What the gap buys is a single inbox across every domain instead of one account per domain, reply-From chosen automatically by the receiving domain, and per-domain DKIM generated at bind time. With one or two domains, that gap buys you very little.

Folio

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Third-party comparison · not affiliated with either

Migadu vs. Zoho Mail: priced by the gigabyte vs. priced by the person.

Migadu charges per account by storage — $19/yr for 5 GB up to $990/yr for 500 GB — with unlimited domains and unlimited mailboxes on every tier, but caps daily messages per tier (200 in / 20 out on Micro, up to 10,000 in / 2,000 out on Maxi). Zoho Mail offers a permanent free tier (5 GB/user, 1 domain, up to 5 users, no IMAP/POP) and bills per user on every paid plan from around $1/user/month, scaling into Workplace tiers with eDiscovery, S/MIME, and Data Loss Prevention. Migadu is cheaper once you pass a handful of mailboxes; Zoho is the only one you can start on for free and the only one with enterprise compliance controls.Folio, which publishes this comparison, is priced on a third axis: not per gigabyte like Migadu or per user like Zoho, but per operator — $2.99/month billed annually ($35.88/yr) for up to 3 domains, $12/month for up to 10, $29/month for unlimited. It is built for one person running several businesses: every domain lands in one inbox, reply-From follows the domain a message arrived on, and each domain is DKIM-signed with its own key. It has no free tier and no office suite, so if either of those is your requirement, Zoho Mail is the better fit — and if you just want many cheap mailboxes, so is Migadu.

These two get compared because both let you run mail on your own domain without Google or Microsoft — but they meter completely different things. Migadu sells one account with unlimited domains and unlimited mailboxes, and charges you for storage: $19/yr for 5 GB up to $990/yr for 500 GB. Zoho Mail gives you a genuinely free tier and then charges per user, forever, on every paid plan.

We make Folio, a different kind of product: one inbox for an operator who runs several businesses. We're saying that up front rather than burying it, and it changes nothing below — both vendors are scored on their own published pricing and docs, and each one beats us outright on several rows. If what you want is a cheap mailbox or a free one, this page is meant to tell you which of these two to buy, not to sell you ours.

Updated August 16, 2026 (2026-08-16)

Where Folio fits — and what it costs More head-to-heads

I · The verdict

In one sentence.

Migadu is far cheaper once you have more than a handful of mailboxes — the price is set by disk, not by seats, so the tenth mailbox costs nothing. Zoho Mail is the only one of the two you can start on for free, and its higher tiers carry compliance controls (eDiscovery, S/MIME, Data Loss Prevention) plus a bundled office suite that Migadu doesn't offer at all. The decisive detail most comparisons miss: Migadu caps daily message volume per tier — the $19/yr Micro plan allows only 20 outbound messages a day. If you send more than that, Micro is not the plan you think it is.

II · Feature by feature

Feature by feature.

CAPABILITYMigaduZoho Mail

Free tierNone — paid from day one, cheapest tier $19/yrYes — Mail Free: 5 GB/user, 1 custom domain, up to 5 users
Entry paid price$19/yr (Micro, 5 GB, annual billing only)Mail Lite, publicly listed around $1/user/mo billed annually (~$12/user/yr)
Pricing modelPer account, tiered by storage — user count doesn't change the billPer user on every paid tier, billed monthly or annually
Mailboxes / usersUnlimited addresses on every tier, no per-seat chargeUp to 5 on the free tier; every paid mailbox is a separate per-user charge
Domains per accountUnlimited (fair-use, no hard cap stated)1 custom domain on Mail Free; multiple domains on paid tiers
Daily message limitsCapped per tier — 200 in / 20 out per day on Micro, rising to 10,000 in / 2,000 out on MaxiNo per-day send cap published on the pricing page
IMAP / POP accessSMTP, IMAP4, POP3, webmail on every tierNot included on the free Mail Free tier; included from Mail Lite up
Calendar / contactsNot advertised on the public marketing pages we checkedZoho Calendar and Contacts are separate apps in the same suite, bundled from Workplace plans
Compliance / enterprise controlsNot advertised — a lean, independent hosteDiscovery, S/MIME, Mail Data Loss Prevention, retention on Premium and above
Office suite bundlingNone — mail transport onlyWorkplace tiers bundle Zoho's document and collaboration suite

III · How to choose

Pick the right one.

Choose Migadu if

You're hosting many domains or mailboxes and want one flat account price with no per-seat multiplier.

You run several small brand domains and don't want the bill to grow every time you add an address.
You mainly need reliable SMTP/IMAP/POP3 and plain webmail, not a calendar or a document suite.
Your outbound volume is genuinely low — check your daily send count against the tier caps before you pick Micro or Mini.

Choose Zoho Mail if

You want to start at zero cost, or you'll eventually need compliance controls and a bundled suite.

You want a real, permanent free tier for up to five mailboxes before paying anything.
You expect to need eDiscovery, S/MIME, or Data Loss Prevention as the organization grows.
You send enough mail daily that a hard per-tier outbound cap would be a problem.

IV · A deeper look

The pricing axes don't line up, so compare at your actual scale

Migadu's four tiers — Micro $19/yr (5 GB), Mini $90/yr (30 GB), Standard $290/yr (100 GB), Maxi $990/yr (500 GB) — include unlimited domains and unlimited mailboxes at every level. The constraint is disk. Zoho Mail's constraint is people: Mail Free covers up to five users at no cost, and every paid tier multiplies by headcount.

That makes the winner entirely dependent on shape. One person with one domain: Zoho's free tier costs nothing and Migadu costs $19/yr, so Zoho wins outright. Twelve mailboxes across four brand domains with light traffic: Migadu's $19–$90/yr covers all of it while Zoho's cheapest paid tier is already ~$144/yr for the same twelve seats. Run the numbers against your own headcount rather than the headline price — the crossover comes fast.

V · A deeper look

The daily caps are the part that surprises people

Migadu publishes a daily inbound and outbound message limit on each tier, and the entry tier is tight: Micro allows 200 incoming and 20 outgoing messages per day. Mini raises that to 1,000 in / 100 out, Standard to 3,000 in / 500 out, and Maxi to 10,000 in / 2,000 out. Those caps are published on Migadu's own pricing page but rarely appear in comparisons, which tend to reduce each tier to a storage number.

For a low-traffic personal domain, 20 outbound a day is fine. For anyone doing sales outreach, support, or transactional sending, it isn't — and the fix is a tier upgrade, not an add-on. Zoho's pricing page doesn't publish an equivalent per-day send cap, though sending limits do exist on most hosted mail and are usually documented separately from pricing. If high outbound volume is your use case, verify the current limits with both vendors directly before committing a domain.

VI · A deeper look

Independent host vs. one product inside a suite

Migadu is a small, independent operation whose public pages describe the mail transport layer and little else — SMTP, IMAP4, POP3, aliasing, catch-all (which their own docs discourage). Zoho Mail is one product line inside Zoho, a large, privately held, bootstrapped software company, and its upper tiers add features that only make sense at organizational scale: eDiscovery, S/MIME, Data Loss Prevention, intranet access, and the Workplace document suite.

Neither posture is wrong. It's the difference between buying infrastructure you configure yourself and buying a product line you grow into. What it does mean is that a feature Migadu doesn't advertise is often genuinely absent rather than merely undocumented — worth checking against their current docs if calendar sync or admin controls are a hard requirement.

VII · What each tier actually costs

The numbers, in US dollars.

Tier	Migadu	Zoho Mail
Free	— (no free tier)	Mail Free — $0, 5 GB/user, 1 domain, up to 5 users, no IMAP/POP
Entry paid	Micro — $19/yr, 5 GB, 200 in / 20 out per day	Mail Lite — ~$1/user/mo billed annually, 10 GB/user
Mid	Mini — $90/yr or $9/mo, 30 GB, 1,000 in / 100 out per day	Mail Premium — ~$4/user/mo billed annually, 50 GB/user
Higher	Standard — $290/yr or $29/mo, 100 GB, 3,000 in / 500 out per day	Workplace Standard — ~$4/user/mo billed annually, 30 GB/user + shared storage
Top	Maxi — $990/yr or $99/mo, 500 GB, 10,000 in / 2,000 out per day	Workplace Professional and Enterprise — higher per-user tiers

VIII · A note from the people who make Folio

We make Folio · here are its limits too

Neither one is trying to solve one inbox across several brands — that's a different problem.

Migadu and Zoho Mail both host custom-domain mail well at opposite ends of the market: one flat and minimal, one free-to-start and suite-shaped. Folio isn't a cheaper or richer version of either — it targets a specific operator shape: one person, several distinct business identities, one reading view.

Folio starts at$2.99/mo billed annually ($35.88/yr) · $3.50/mo month-to-month Up to 3 domains on Solo, 1,000 sends a month, per-domain DKIM included. 14-day trial, no card to start.

Where Folio fits

You run several distinct brands or LLCs and want one reading view instead of switching accounts or webmail tabs per domain.
You want reply-From chosen automatically by the domain a message arrived on, rather than picking a send-as identity by hand each time.
You want per-domain DKIM generated for you at bind time instead of managing DNS TXT records per domain.

Where Folio doesn't fit

You need a free tier. Folio doesn't have one and Zoho does — if paying nothing is the requirement, Zoho Mail is the answer on this page.
You're hosting a dozen mailboxes cheaply and don't need multi-brand identity switching. Migadu's flat per-account pricing is purpose-built for that and costs less than Folio for it.
You need enterprise compliance controls — eDiscovery, DLP, S/MIME — today. That's Zoho's Premium and Workplace tiers, and Folio does not offer them.

Start free — no card How Folio handles mail for multiple LLCs

Not ready? Check a domain's mail records first — free, no account.

Common questions

Questions readers ask.

Is Migadu cheaper than Zoho Mail?: It depends entirely on how many mailboxes you need. Zoho's free tier covers up to five users at no cost, which Migadu can't match at any price. Past that, Zoho bills per user while Migadu's price is set by storage alone — so a dozen mailboxes cost the same on Migadu as one does, and Zoho's bill multiplies. The crossover comes quickly: run the arithmetic against your own headcount rather than comparing entry prices.
What are Migadu's daily message limits?: Migadu publishes a per-tier daily cap on both incoming and outgoing messages: Micro allows 200 in and 20 out per day, Mini 1,000 in and 100 out, Standard 3,000 in and 500 out, and Maxi 10,000 in and 2,000 out. These are on Migadu's own pricing page but are frequently left out of comparisons. If you send meaningful outbound volume, the cap rather than the storage figure is likely to decide your tier.
Does Zoho Mail's free plan support IMAP?: No. Zoho's Mail Free tier is listed without IMAP, POP, or ActiveSync access, which means it's webmail and Zoho's own apps only. IMAP and POP are included from Mail Lite upward. If you plan to use Thunderbird, Apple Mail, or another third-party client, the free tier won't work for you and the comparison becomes Migadu's $19/yr against Zoho's cheapest paid tier.
Does Migadu have a calendar like Zoho does?: We could not find a calendar or contacts product advertised on Migadu's public marketing pages as of the checked-on date below. Zoho Calendar and Zoho Contacts are separate apps within the same suite and are bundled from the Workplace tiers. If calendar sync is a hard requirement, verify directly against Migadu's current docs before switching — absence from a marketing page isn't proof of absence from the product.
Which one is better for a small team?: Zoho, in most cases. Its Workplace tiers bundle document collaboration, admin controls, and compliance features built for organizations, and it has a real free tier to start on. Migadu's flat per-account pricing can be dramatically cheaper for a team that's comfortable managing shared mailboxes itself, but it publishes no team-management or compliance features, and the daily send caps apply to the whole account rather than per user.
What does Folio cost compared to these two?: Folio is $2.99/month billed annually ($35.88/yr) for up to 3 domains, $12/month for up to 10, and $29/month for unlimited — more than Migadu's $19/yr entry tier and more than Zoho's free plan. We publish this page and we are not the cheapest option on it, nor the only one with a free tier. What the gap buys is a single inbox across every domain instead of one account per domain, reply-From chosen automatically by the receiving domain, and per-domain DKIM generated at bind time. With one or two domains, that gap buys you very little.

Sources & further reading

Where the claims come from.

Adjacent comparisons

Other head-to-heads.

Open the first letter

Check your daily send volume before you check the price.

The storage number is what gets compared; the daily message cap is what actually bites. Both vendors' pricing pages are linked below — read the limits, not just the tiers, and confirm current figures directly, since either company can change them without notice.

Start free — no card Read the FAQ

Updated August 16, 2026 (2026-08-16)