Stow vs Google Takeout
Both give you a copy of your Gmail. Takeout gives you a file, once. Stow gives you an archive on your Mac that stays up to date and that you can search and read.
What Google Takeout does well
- It is free and it is Google's own. Every Google account has it.
- It covers far more than mail. Drive, Photos, Calendar, Contacts and most other Google services, in one export.
- It uses an open format. Mail comes as an mbox file, which many email apps can open.
- It works on any computer. Windows, Mac or Linux.
If you are closing your Google account and want everything, Takeout is the right tool.
Side by side
| Google Takeout | Stow | |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | A zip file containing an mbox file | An archive inside an app on your Mac |
| Stays up to date | No. A new export every 2 months for a year, if you schedule it | Yes, in the background |
| Search and read | Needs another app to open the mbox file | Built in: every account, offline, including text inside PDFs and Word files |
| Encryption | The file is not encrypted | Encrypted on your Mac, with your own recovery key |
| After you delete from Gmail | Old exports keep what they had | Stow keeps everything, and tells you what is safe to delete first |
| Other accounts | Google accounts only | Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com together |
| Other Google data | Drive, Photos, Calendar and more | Email only |
| Computers | Any | Macs with Apple silicon |
| Price | Free | €30 once, 14-day free trial |
Things to know about Takeout
- An export can take from a few minutes to a few days.
- The download expires after about 7 days, and each archive can be downloaded 5 times.
- Choose a 50 GB file size, or a large mailbox is split across several files.
- If you send the export to Google Drive, it counts towards your Google storage.
Where Stow is different
Stow is a private email archive for Mac. It brings years of old email down from the cloud into an encrypted, searchable archive on your computer. It downloads straight from Gmail, so you do not need a Takeout file, and it keeps going as new mail arrives.
The difference shows when you want to free up space. With an archive you can search on your Mac, you can delete years of old mail from Gmail and still find any of it in seconds. Stow shows the date up to which everything is safely archived and gives you step-by-step instructions for deleting older mail yourself.
You are not locked in: Stow exports everything as standard mbox files, one per account, at any time.
Stow cannot open an existing Takeout file yet.
Which should you use?
- Takeout if you are leaving Google, need your Drive and Photos too, or want a free one-off copy.
- Stow if you want to keep using Gmail with less in it, and keep every old email searchable on your Mac.
- Both if you want belt and braces: a Takeout file in a drawer, and Stow for everyday searching.
Stow is coming soon. Join the waitlist and we will email you once, the day it launches.