Privacy Tool Comparison Hub

By State of Surveillance Published: 2026-08-17

How to Use This Page

  • Pick the group that matches the decision being made, not the product name someone happened to mention.
  • Work from the top down. The first groups apply to every account at once; the later ones cover a narrower surface.
  • Each entry links to a full head to head guide. The label names the tools that guide covers; the text after it names the question it answers.
  • Read how to read any tool comparison before treating a single ranking anywhere as the final word.
  • The complete library, including explainers and guides that are not comparisons, is at Guides.

Start with the change that covers the most accounts

It is common to arrive at a comparison with one product name already in mind, usually because a friend or a video mentioned it. That is a reliable way to end up with a different browser and an otherwise unchanged situation. The changes that alter the most at once sit underneath everything else: how accounts get logged into, how mail arrives, where files rest. A tool that touches one app can only ever fix one app.

The ordering here is deliberate rather than alphabetical. Accounts and logins come first, because a password manager and a second factor apply to every service at once. Mail follows, because an email address is the reset lever for everything attached to it. Files, browsing, devices and network come after, each covering less ground than the group before it.

Your accounts and logins

These four decide who can get into an account and what they need in hand to do it. They apply across every service at once, which is why they are worth settling first.

Your mail and messages

An email address is the recovery path for nearly every other account, and a message thread is a record of who spoke to whom. Both decisions carry a social cost the others do not: changing a mailbox means telling people, and changing a messenger means asking them to install something.

Your files and documents

Storage decisions split along one line: whether to change who holds the files, or to keep the provider and make what they hold unreadable. Both approaches appear below, along with the option of holding the storage yourself.

Whole ecosystems

Many readers already live inside a suite that supplies mail, files, calendar and documents together, which makes the suite itself a decision. The useful question is not which brand is best but which parts of it are encrypted in a way the vendor cannot undo.

Your browsing

This is the busiest group because the terms overlap and get used interchangeably. Several guides below exist to separate things that sound related but do completely different jobs.

Your devices

Changing an operating system is the largest commitment in this index and the hardest to reverse on a phone. These four cover the system, the hardware underneath it, and the option of running something that keeps nothing after shutdown.

Your network

Everything above still travels through a router and out through an internet provider. These two cover the equipment at that boundary, and where a self hosted service should physically run.

Your data trail and money

The last group covers information that has already escaped, and transactions that are permanent by design. In both, the tool chosen decides who ends up holding a record.

How to read any tool comparison

Comparisons are useful and also easy to misread, including the ones linked above. Four habits make the difference between a decision that holds up and a decision that only sounds decided.

  • "Encrypted" describes several different architectures. A service can encrypt data in transit, encrypt it at rest on disks it controls, or encrypt it so the provider holds no key capable of reading it. All three get advertised with the same word. Ask not whether encryption is present, but who could hand over readable content if compelled to.
  • Self hosting changes who holds the data, not whether it is readable. Moving a service onto hardware you control removes a company from the picture and adds a maintenance obligation. It does not by itself make the contents unreadable to anyone who reaches the machine. Treat it as a change of custody, and add encryption if the point was confidentiality.
  • A default matters more than a setting most people never find. Two products with identical option lists behave differently if one ships protection switched on and the other buries it three menus deep. Compare what happens out of the box, then what has to be changed by hand.
  • This category churns. Products get acquired, change ownership, alter their terms or shut down outright, so a recommendation copied from an old listicle can point at something that no longer exists in the form described. Check that a product is still maintained and still owned by whoever the article assumed.

A comparison also answers which tool, never whether a tool is the answer. Some problems here are solved by installing something; others are solved by closing an account, using a different address, or declining to supply information that was never required.

The rest of the library

The guides indexed here are the head to head comparisons. The full Guides library also holds step by step walkthroughs, explainers on how specific surveillance systems work, and background on the laws and companies behind them. If the decision at hand is not a choice between named products, start there instead.