IceWarp Cloud Review | PCMag

IceWarp Cloud offers significant bang for your buck. While you have to sign up with a minimum of 10 users, which may turn off solo shops and very small teams, it includes a number of features typically available only in top-tier email hosting solutions, like our Editors’ Choice award winners Google Workspace Business Standard and Microsoft 365 Business Premium.

Just like those platforms, IceWarp serves up more than just your typical email and calendaring. You’re also getting a suite of collaboration and document editing tools as well as basic video conferencing. Each user gets 100GB of email storage in addition to 1TB of FileSync cloud storage similar to Microsoft’s OneDrive. Considering its low price point, that sounds like a lot of value. The problem is that IceWarp mainly wants to work with IceWarp. The platform won’t play nice with other tools, and though it has some third-party app integration, it’s weak compared to the rest of the field.

IceWarp Pricing

IceWarp comes in three pricing tiers, all among the lowest of any email hosting provider we’ve tested. The service starts with a Lite plan that’s $2.50 per user per month and includes 5GB of email storage and 20GB of FileSync space.

Next up is the Standard plan that we tested, $3.90 per user per month with 100GB of email storage and 1TB of FileSync. At the top end, the $7 Professional plan offers 500GB of email retention and 5TB for FileSync data. If you’re making the wise choice to evaluate potential email hosts, IceWarp’s landing page offers a 14-day free trial.

Compared to the $20 per user per month or more that you’re looking at if you opt for Google, Microsoft, or even Zoho Mail, IceWarp’s numbers are enticing. Just be aware that all those platforms have a deeper feature set than IceWarp and better third-party integration, too, with the possible exception of Zoho.

Getting Started

After signing up and receiving your credentials, the first step with IceWarp is to set up a domain, unless you want your emails coming from a randomly generated subdomain. Fortunately, IceWarp makes this setting readily available on the dashboard. After navigating there, you can click on the plus symbol at the top of the screen and choose a domain. From there, you’ll need to set up your DNS (Domain Name Service) records appropriately, according to the supplied instructions. Once verified, you’re ready to add some accounts.

Adding users is a snap. Using the same plus icon, you can add a user with a specific plan type—a bonus since you don’t have to commit to everyone using the same type of license. You can mix and match Lite, Standard, and Professional users as needed. This is a welcome option and very similar to how Zoho handles this step. 

Once your account is ready, you have the option of setting up shared folders and enabling various account features such as SMTP, archiving, and access to document and collaboration tools. These are enabled by default. There are also quick shortcuts to downloading the mobile apps, desktop client, and Microsoft Outlook sync, which lets you use Outlook for calendaring and such. If you don’t care to use the IceWarp web or desktop client, POP3 and IMAP are also available.

If you need to establish email rules and limits, it’s easy to set up simple disk quotas and send limits as well as when to delete old emails and set account expirations. These things are often difficult with enterprise solutions such as Microsoft 365 or Gmail, so having all of this on easy-to-access pages is a nice change of pace.

The spam queue is also handy and has whitelist and blacklist options on the same page to make things a bit easier to manage. Overall, I was impressed at how well-thought-out the design was. Spam can be filtered by sender, owner, and domain. Anything caught can be released to the user or officially added to the whitelist or blacklist for the future.

Not surprisingly, IceWarp has upgraded its web client design to more closely track its competitors. The layout feels vaguely reminiscent of Zoho Mail while taking some visual cues from Microsoft Office. Everything you want is available as an icon in a streamlined toolbar at the left. It’s obvious that the designers were aiming to keep clutter to a minimum. All the document editing tools work with the familiar Microsoft Office formats and closely resemble their Microsoft counterparts. I felt very much at home in terms of changing layouts and formats.

Perhaps one of the central features of IceWarp Cloud is the ability to share and collaborate on a document with multiple coworkers. Combining this with the conferencing capability really adds that in-office camaraderie that’s often missing when working remotely.  For more casual daily conversations, there’s a TeamChat application that’s reminiscent of Microsoft Teams and has similar functionality in most cases. The abovementioned FileSync service is another nice touch that can easily replace similar products such as OneDrive or Dropbox.

If there’s a real downfall, it’s that IceWarp is powerful but non-inclusive. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace can get away with this because of their huge user bases, but IceWarp is still growing. That said, the platform has a big presence in India now and is likely to continue assuming more market share. As that happens, it’s likely that more third-party applications will integrate with the platform.

IceWarp Security and Third-Party Integrations

IceWarp generally does well when it comes to security. All applications use TLS/SSL to encrypt connections, and various intrusion prevention measures are in place to limit authorization attempts and block obvious attacks. The app can also scan compressed files using Kaspersky Labs‘ antivirus solution.  IceWarp doesn’t use third-party data centers and can support HIPPA compliance if needed. The company has a number of US-based data centers, which eases the minds of security-conscious folks like myself. If you’re still not convinced, you can even buy an IceWarp Server to run on-site and skip cloud hosting altogether.

IceWarp Cloud provides a configurable API that can be controlled on a per-user basis. I was impressed by the breadth of the options available. What you won’t find, however, are ready-to-go integrations with third-party tools. As mentioned, this isn’t terribly surprising considering how self-contained the IceWarp environment is.

Full-Featured With Some Lock-in Issues

IceWarp checks all the boxes when it comes to being a well-designed and functional office suite for cost-conscious businesses. It lets you mix and match its affordable license types and it even lets you add people that aren’t IceWarp users to meetings.

Overall, it feels a bit more polished than Zoho Mail, but falls far short of the strength and market presence of Gmail and Microsoft Office. That said, it’s worth checking out and should be a candidate if you want a full office suite without breaking the bank.