Reviewed by Francesco D'Alessio
Skiff has now been acquired by Notion.
You can read all about the acquisition in more detail here.
Skiff Review
Skiff is a secure email, documents and calendar application that many people have been turning to in an effort to be more secure with their information and escaping Gmail etc.
What was Skiff?
Skiff is a privacy-protected space for emails, pages and your calendar.
What did Skiff do?
You can also use the Skiff drive to save your work, with up to 10GB of storage. People are turning to Skiff in an attempt to better secure their data as Skiff has E2E and open-source focus.
You can use Skiff within your team, or for personal use, either way, whatever you create, send, share or save will be end-end encrypted, there are no trackers and it's open-source audited. If you're looking to communicate freely, ensure information is kept secure, and email your team within a safe environment, check out Skiff.
Good Bits of Skiff
Some of our favourite things in Skiff email & beyond:
1. @Skiff Domain for Email
Don't badger us on email now, but get a @skiff email domain when you sign-up even without a paid account as part of your Skiff account which is very impressive. Something that you have to pay $99 per annum in Hey Email, if you wanted something like this.
2. Calendar is Fast
Calendar management is really good inside of Skiff Calendar. Comparing these to the speed of tools like Vimcal and Rise Calendar that are touted to be the speediest calendar apps online, well Skiff lived up to the same speed quality (on the web) which is impressive.
The ability to create, add details and move things around was very fast indeed.
3. A Good Combo of Tools
Being able to use document creation, calendar event management, email handling and even storing of files from day one is brilliant. They've really made a smashing product here in Skiff and the speed in which they all work is brilliant.
Bad Bits of Skiff
These are some of bits we didn't enjoy in Skiff:
1. Video Conferencing
A small thing but inside of Skiff when you create a new event in the Skiff calendar you aren't able to automatically create and generate a video conference link. You can add a custom one or use Jitsu Meet, but something if you're used to using that in day to day life, might be a shame that you cannot add them.
Is Skiff Legit?
Strangely enough Skiff have a large team and are based out of the offices Notion formerly were in in San Francisco, from their about page there's an assumption everything is legitimate with a good credibility in the development and expertise in this space.
Skiff Pricing
Let's unpack the pricing for Skiff and how much it is.
How much does Skiff cost?
Pricing for Skiff is really reasonable for how much they pack into the experience. You can sign-up to Skiff for free, then the first plan called Essential is starting from $3 and this will give you one custom domain to use then the plans are $8 and $12 for more team-based options which for combining pages, storage, email and calendar is not bad.
Skiff Verdict
Is Skiff right for me? To be honest, if you want to move away from the Google ecosystem - it will give you a good starting point but maybe not the depth of features you'd get with Google. Skiff Email works great, but comes with its own domain - almost starting you again - yes, you could forward all email from Gmail, but doesn't that defeat the point?
This is a big decision to move to something like Skiff for teams and much easier to people that are using their own email and calendar experiences.
We'd recommend checking out Skiff if you're interested in going off the grid from Google and Microsoft options and unlocking their tools - their calendar, pages and drive impressed us too, including their email, as a well produced, well designed product.
Skiff Alternatives
The best alternative that focuses on security we can find is Proton Mail.