--- title: GnuPG Reviews meta_title: 'GnuPG Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 11 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how GnuPG works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.2 review_count: 11 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-05-05' parent_category: name: Confidentiality url: https://www.g2.com/categories/confidentiality --- # GnuPG Reviews **Vendor:** GnuPG **Category:** [Encryption Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/encryption-software) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 11 ## About GnuPG GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign your data and communication, features a versatile key management system as well as access modules for all kinds of public key directories. ## GnuPG Reviews ### 1. GNUPG: Email/File Privacy for Everyone **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David H. | Founder, iOS/OSX Developer / Due Diligence Expert / Writer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 09, 2018 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** - Steady workhorse encryption, available on every/any platform. - Can automated and used to sign tings like data from sensors, processes, etc. - Doesn't require an expensive enterprise tool suite to run and can even be embedded inside applications. - **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** - Key discovery is limited and hard to use. To be fair this isn't a limitation of GPG per-sec, but rather a baked in limitation/legacy of the distributed key repositories created in the 1990s.. - Depending on the target platform the key management interface can be less than intuitive - any external integrations (such a monitoring for usage, requests for keys, etc) are external to GnuPG and you would have to build such integrations yourself. - Not a lot security vendors allow integration of 3rd party encryption applications, so you can find yourself having to invent workarounds if your package doesn't support GnuPG. **Recommendations to others considering GnuPG:** If you need to implement security in you apps (I,.e., to ensure data integrity) or want an encryption solution that is not bound to a commercial software provider GnuPG is a good solution. Having said that, it should be implemented by people who have some experience in securing systems and services as there is critical information that must be installed along side GnuGP such as private keys; the security of these is critical else there is not security. **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** Sending info securely or guaranteeing the integrity of data with or without support of traditional corporate products ### 2. Powerful encryption tool to protect your file/emails **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nicola C. | Open Source Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 16, 2017 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** GnuPG is a powerful tool to help you encrypt your data and your email. You can easily encrypt your email using an extension for your email client (like Enigmail for Thunderbird). GnuPG will help you increase the confidentiality of your communication using the most powerful encryption algorithm. Furthermore, since the interface is all CLI based, you can easily integrated gpg inside your CI system. So you can make sure that Jenkins or other build tools send encrypted emails. **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** The setup process is not really easy. Is mostly CLI based and can be pretty hard for new hires/interns. Furthermore, if you use it on Gapps, you can't read your email from the webmail and/or from your phone. Finally, losing the key is really painful since you have to deal with revoke certificates. **Recommendations to others considering GnuPG:** Please read a quick tutorial before starting typing random commands on the CLI **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** Communication confidentiality. ### 3. Encrypting Digital Codes **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2018 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** GnuPG worked well for users who were familiar with the software. I used this program on a daily basis when I was responsible for handling digital codes with a large monetary value. **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** GnuPG was hard to explain over the phone or via email when I needed to communicate with vendors who were using the software. The documentation seemed to be lacking, and the program didn't act the same on various platforms. It often causes a lot of issues with our clients, and we would sometimes use a different method to encrypt or decrypt codes. **Recommendations to others considering GnuPG:** I would ensure that everyone using the program has been trained on the ins and outs. I would suggest that the owners of the product create a more user friendly documentation and have a FAQ section that could help users. **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used GnuPG to encrypt and decrypt digital codes for a large loyalty based platform. ### 4. The best software I used till date for file encryption/decryption **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2018 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** The ease of use is one of the best feature in this product. It is very easy to guide a very new user through usage of this tool, and a quick 2 minutes demo is enough to start using this. I personally like the speed of encrypting/decrypting files. **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** There is nothing that I dislike about this software. **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** We secure sensitive files using this software by encrypting ### 5. All the features and no fun **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rodolfo A. | Presales, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 21, 2016 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** It has all known and familiar features for encrypting, decrypting and managing keys. It´s the de-facto tool for all encryption needs **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** There are some GUI tools, which are not very intuitive. The best way to get what you want, the way you want it, is with the console arguments and manual configuration. **Recommendations to others considering GnuPG:** Balance security needs with ease of use. When a tool is simple to use it fails with security considerations. **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** Encrypting communications, email mainly, has become a very important issue in corporate environment. Small, mid and big sized organizations need to encrypt information, but actually doing it requires an understanding of the process and many disperse and unfamiliar tools. If made simple with a tool usually sacrifices certain security considerations. ### 6. Trustworthy in one word **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Phil C. | Community Volunteer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2015 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** Reputation of software is just perfect, we owe a lot to its authors (as well for PGP's PZ) knowing it is backed up by the GPU project is more than enough to trust it. The fact that this system can be used out of any infrastructure makes it more powerful than ever (and resilient). **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** Of course this freedom is at the price of complexity, I tried to setup a gpg applet on javacard using some tutorial but I had no idea of what I was doing, I fear it's breaking the Keep it simple stupid (KISS) principle and they confuse users and produce in the end an opposite effect, but as I have no better answer I am learning gpg and you should do the same this is a necessary pain. **Recommendations to others considering GnuPG:** Understand what web of trust realy mean and why you should respect the procedure when signing keys. Remember the straight of a chain is the straight of its weakest link and you probably don't want to be that one. So print fingerprints on papers checks ID and then upload signed keys if unclear don't. **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used gnupg to deliver software releases to our partners, the packages were signed and encrypted using partners public keys and then shared though ftp that way we achieved fast deliveries and avoid someone to move elsewhere in person just to give a file safely. ### 7. encrypt your data **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Fernando J. P. | DevOps Automation Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 22, 2016 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** this is a great openpgp client. the best part of this client is that it is cli. there are various frontends available, but gnupg itself does not have a graphic interface. **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** there is nothing about gnupg that i dislike. even the documentation is extensive and has plenty of examples. **Recommendations to others considering GnuPG:** it is sometimes a pain to share public keys with others in order to encrypt. keyservers are a great solution to this problem. register your pukeys at https://pgp.mit.edu/ to simplify key sharing. **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** encryption of secrets. a common use case would be to encrypt via gnupg in order to submit to source control. if you are committing unencrypted secrets to source control, you are doing it wrong. another common use would be to encrypt the body of an email before sending to recipient. ### 8. Great tool for organizations with internal needs of security and privacy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Semiconductors | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 01, 2015 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** GnuPG is a very handy utility. The command line interface is fined-grained and thus enables the user to specify exactly what she wants. Performance is very good, the same goes for reliability. It's free and open-source nature are also attributes that beat other implementations. **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** Many times the user experience is confusing and/or cryptic, either because of GnuPG's interface design or because cryptography has it in it's nature. Nevertheless the situation could be better both for new users and experienced ones. **Recommendations to others considering GnuPG:** In the beggining you have to be patient. Find sources in the online communities to really understand what each command does, and define exactly what are your needs from this tool. Before using something new, make some tests to make sure you got it right. Whenever you end up with a method that solves a task for you, script it or at least document it, because after some time without using this procedure, it is very possible to forget all the dirty-little-details needed by GnuPG. **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** GnuPG is useful as an single-point of control for the security structure of teams. Encrypting and signing emails, signing git commits are some everyday (many times per day) tasks that GnuPG helps to accomplish them fast and easy. ### 9. Excellent Encryption **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Edward L. | Linux System Administrator & Programmer, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 18, 2016 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** The command line interface. Simple and intuitive. It does encryption and signing using the OpenPGP standard. **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** There isn't anything that I really dislike about GnuPG. **Recommendations to others considering GnuPG:** Read the man page. There are also tons of tutorials online about using gpg. **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** It provides encryption of files as well as verification files from software vendors and open source projects. ### 10. excellent performance **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris K. | Senior Account Director, Telecommunications, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 15, 2015 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** user interface was unreal and intuiitive. **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** help is som what complex, I don't have any other feedback **What problems is GnuPG solving and how is that benefiting you?** efficiency and costs ### 11. Amazing Counterpart to PGP **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael F. | Senior Technical Account Manager, Team Lead, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2012 **What do you like best about GnuPG?** Besides it being free, GnuPG **What do you dislike about GnuPG?** Most commands are done via a command line interface, and without the GUI (which is easy to get), most users will be lost. **Recommendations to others considering GnuPG:** If you work with people who use PGP, try out GnuPG as it is the free counterpart. It works amazingly and provides all of the same functionality! - [View GnuPG pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/gnupg/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-05+01%3A41%3A56+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=00183285-5825-46b1-82f1-e8fc785bbb2a&secure%5Btoken%5D=ad1f1f00c8fa9a6a2c38282ed476e8a604a5b73ac5a2652d9da5f96da863a778&format=llm_user) ## GnuPG Features **Functionality** - Durability - Envelope Encryption - Automation **Encryption Techniques - Email Encryption** - Encryption Algorithms - Transport Encryption - End-to-End Encryption **Encryption** - Email Encryption - Messaging Encryption - File Transfer Encryption - Data Encryption - Document Encryption - Full-Disk Encryption **Compliance** - Access Management - At-Risk Analysis - DLP Configuration - Sensitive Data Compliance **Availability** - API/Integrations - Service Integration - Regional Support - Scalability **Authentication, Verification, and Access Controls - Email Encryption** - Revocation Mechanisms - Access Controls - Digital Signatures - Certificate Authorities **Compliance** - Authentication - Policy Enforcement - Access Management **Administration** - Database Management - Deduplication - Backup - API / integrations **Administration** - Auditing - Compliance - Management Console **Security Enhancements and Auditing - Email Encryption** - Malware Scanning - Reporting - Audit Trails - Data Loss Prevention (DLP) **Management** - Backup - Recovery - File Management - Anomaly Detection **Security ** - Multi-Factor Authentication - Data Transport - Data Types - Security Tools **Integration, Compatibility, and Usability - Email Encryption** - User-Friendly Interfaces - APIs and SDKs - Email Client Integration - Automation ## Top GnuPG Alternatives - [VeraCrypt](https://www.g2.com/products/veracrypt/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (50 reviews) - [Virtru Email Encryption](https://www.g2.com/products/virtru-email-encryption/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (411 reviews) - [Egnyte](https://www.g2.com/products/egnyte/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (1,135 reviews)