Should You Go Against the Flow? Virtru vs. FlowCrypt PGP Encryption

There's a saying we have at Virtru: "Encryption is easy. Decryption is hard." 

Encrypting an email is not difficult. Strong ciphers are commodity technology, and there are good tools that will scramble a message before it leaves your browser. The hard part is everything else: Getting keys into the right hands, keeping non-technical recipients from abandoning the experience, proving to an auditor that a message was protected, and — increasingly — retaining some measure of control after the message has already landed in someone else's inbox.

That framing is the most useful way to compare Virtru and FlowCrypt. Both encrypt email content on the client side, before it reaches a mail server. But they come from different philosophies, and they diverge sharply once you get past the moment of sending.

What FlowCrypt Is Good At

FlowCrypt an OpenPGP browser extension that layers PGP encryption and signing directly into the Gmail interface, with mobile apps and a public key lookup service alongside it. It is open source, standards-based, and free for organizations with fewer than 100 users per domain. For teams that believe in PGP and have a small IT budget, that combination is genuinely appealing.

The enterprise tier adds the pieces a security team would expect: An enterprise server deployment, an admin panel, domain-wide settings and restrictions, server-side key management, auditing, custom security rules, SSO through OIDC identity providers, an SLA, and a DPA. Admins can enforce message signing, disable private key backups, require a passphrase per session, mandate an internal key server, and integrate with existing key servers, LDAP, or HSMs. 

For recipients without PGP, FlowCrypt sends password-protected messages with configurable expiration, and those recipients can reply securely without installing anything. Attachments are supported up to 25 MB.

Where the PGP Model Struggles

The limits show up as organizations get larger, more regulated, or less homogeneous.

PGP is a key management commitment. Public keys must be discovered, distributed, and trusted; private keys must be generated, backed up, and rotated. Notably, passphrases must also be remembered. FlowCrypt smooths a great deal of this, but the model still puts key hygiene at the center of the user experience — and it still requires the external recipient to participate in that model or fall back to a password-protected message.

FlowCrypt is Gmail-first. FlowCrypt's center of gravity is the Gmail web interface plus its own mobile apps. Organizations running Outlook and Microsoft 365, or a mix of both, have to solve for that separately.

Protection ends at decryption. With PGP, once a recipient decrypts a message, the plaintext is theirs. There is no supported way to revoke access to a message you already sent, expire it after the fact, prevent it from being forwarded onward, or see who opened it and when. 

The governance features live behind the enterprise tier. Free FlowCrypt is deliberately unmanaged: no admin panel, no domain-wide policy, no auditing, no SLA or DPA. That means the free tier is not really a compliance posture, as it doesn't provide visibility or actionable insights to an IT leader.

How Virtru Approaches Client-Side Encryption

Virtru also encrypts email client-side, inside the tools people already use — Gmail and Outlook, on desktop and on mobile. The difference is what the encryption is wrapped in. Virtru builds on the Trusted Data Format, an open standard that binds the encrypted payload to a policy and to metadata about who may access it. Because the policy lives with the object rather than only in the sending system, control does not end when the message is delivered.

Take Action on Content After It's Been Shared

Practically, that means a sender can revoke access to a message after it has been sent, set or change expiration, disable forwarding, watermark attachments, and see access and forwarding activity for the messages they've sent. Protection persists on attachments after they're downloaded, so a spreadsheet that leaves the inbox is still governed by the same policy rather than becoming a loose file. Administrators get centralized policy, DLP-style rules that can encrypt automatically based on message content, and audit trails they can hand to a regulator.

One of Virtru's customers, a Chief Compliance Officer at Total HIPAA, put it this way: 

“Just having data encrypted point-to-point doesn't solve the problem. It's just one issue, but if that's all it took, then Gmail, Google Workspace, and Office 365 would be sufficient. The real issue is, ‘What do you do when you send PHI to the wrong person?’ We have people with multiple ‘Johns’ in their contact list — they may send it to the wrong John. We had a client going through a major breach because of social engineering: Someone spoofed a member of upper management, and an employee sent out a file with names and PHI. It became a real issue — we had to report it as a breach to The Department of Health and Human Services. If they’d had Virtru, they could have just denied access to the email and this entire crisis could have been averted. The impact would have been limited, it would have had tracking, and they could have changed the access controls. Now, the horse is out of the barn. The barn is on fire. It’s, ‘What do we do now?’’“

Don't Overlook the Recipient Experience

Recipients matter as much as senders. A recipient with Virtru reads the message in place. A recipient without Virtru — the far more common case — opens it in a browser-based Secure Reader and can reply securely without installing an extension, generating a keypair, or managing a passphrase. There is no "Do you have PGP?" negotiation, which in practice is the single biggest determinant of whether FlowCrypt encryption actually gets used.

Key control is available without asking you to run the whole stack: the Virtru Private Keystore lets an organization hold its own keys — including in its own cloud tenancy or an HSM — so that Virtru never has access to the plaintext, while users keep the same one-click experience. And Virtru's compliance coverage is oriented toward regulated buyers, spanning HIPAA, CJIS, ITAR and export control, CMMC, FERPA, and GDPR use cases across healthcare, financial services, education, government, and defense.

Head to Head, FlowCrypt vs. Virtru

Which Fits Your Organization's Workflow? 

FlowCrypt is a good fit for a small, technically confident, Gmail-only team that wants open-source PGP, is comfortable owning key management, mostly collaborates internally, and does not need post-send control or audit evidence. Under 100 users, the price is hard to argue with.

Virtru is the better fit when encryption has to survive contact with the real world: mixed Gmail and Outlook environments, external recipients who can't be expected to install new software, regulated data with an audit requirement, and a security team that wants the ability to pull a message back after someone hits send on the wrong thread.

Email Is Just One Piece of the Collaboration Puzzle

Most organizations don't have an email problem. They have a sensitive-data problem that happens to be most visible in email. The advantage of a policy-bound format like TDF is that the same protection extends outward, which is where the rest of Virtru's portfolio comes in.

Secure Share covers the files that are too large or too sensitive for an attachment, giving teams encrypted file sharing and a secure upload path for outside parties — useful when a client or applicant needs to send you documents rather than the other way around.

Virtru Collaborate provides a secure, FedRAMP-authorized workspace for uploading, storing, and sharing sensitive files with external contacts. This works especially well for M&As, partnerships, and repeated information workflows with a client or external entity like a law firm. 

Virtru Private Keystore is the answer to "we can't let a vendor hold our keys," letting you retain key ownership while keeping the end-user experience unchanged. It's frequently the piece that unlocks approval in financial services, government, and defense reviews.

Gateway-level encryption complements client-side encryption with server-side protection, protecting application-generated statements, notices, and system mail that need to be encrypted automatically based on policy rather than by a user clicking a toggle.

Protection for Google Drive and Microsoft SharePoint/OneDrive, including support for Google's client-side encryption, extends the same controls to documents, spreadsheets, and PDF files shared outside of Google Drive and Microsoft SharePoint. 

Application and workflow integrations bring the same encryption into the systems where customer data actually accumulates, such as Salesforce and Zendesk, so support tickets and CRM records aren't the weak link.

Ready to Go Against the Flow? 

Encryption is table stakes. Control, evidence, and reach are what actually reduce risk. Ready to learn more about Virtru as a FlowCrypt alternative? Contact our team today for a demo.