Paubox is a healthcare encryption product with a signed BAA on every plan. We are a professional email platform with verified sender identity. These solve different problems, and only one of us will tell you that.
Choose Paubox if you need a signed BAA. They include one on every plan and publish a HITRUST CSF certification. We do not currently offer a BAA at all. If your risk assessment requires one — and for most covered entities handling PHI by email, it does — that decision is already made, and no amount of feature comparison below should change it.
Choose WS Mail if the problem is impersonation rather than encryption, if you want a free tier to start on, or if you need ordinary mailboxes for a whole practice — including the non-clinical staff who never touch PHI — rather than an encryption layer over an existing provider.
| Dimension | WS Mail | Paubox |
|---|---|---|
| Signed BAA | Not offered | Included on every plan |
| Third-party certification | None held | HITRUST CSF certified |
| Recipient experience | Normal inbox delivery | Normal inbox delivery, no portal |
| Verified sender identity | Credential-checked badge with a public verification page | Not offered |
| Free tier | Five inboxes plus two on your domain, no expiry | Paid plans only |
| General-purpose mailboxes | Full mail platform with admin console | Focused on secure healthcare messaging |
| IMAP / SMTP access | Included from the free tier | Works with your existing provider |
Paubox's core proposition is that outbound mail is encrypted automatically and the recipient reads it in their normal inbox — no portal, no password, no extra step. That is a genuinely good answer to a real problem, and the portal-free delivery is the part competitors find hardest to match.
What it does not address is who the sender is. An encrypted message from a lookalike domain is still a fraudulent message, and healthcare is one of the most impersonated sectors in phishing. Our verified badge exists for that gap: a credential checked against the public NPI registry, reviewed by a person, published at a link a patient can open.
The two are complementary more than competing. If you need a BAA today, use them. If what keeps you up at night is a patient acting on a message that was not from you, that is the problem we work on.
Not for a practice that needs a business associate agreement. Paubox includes a signed BAA on every plan and we do not currently offer one, which for most covered entities handling PHI by email is the deciding factor. We are a better fit where the concern is sender impersonation rather than message encryption, or where you need ordinary mailboxes for a whole practice.
Yes. Mail arrives in the recipient’s normal inbox with no portal, password or extra step, the same as any standard email. Neither service makes recipients log in to read a message.
Verified sender identity. Your professional credential is checked against a public register and reviewed by a person, then published at a link the recipient can open. Encryption proves a message was protected in transit; it says nothing about who sent it, and that is the gap the badge fills.
The free tier has no expiry and no card, so evaluating us costs nothing but the signup.
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