Thunderbird vs. Outlook: Email App Showdown!
Posted Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 10:05 pm by Dave Moyer
I use Gmail. I love the online access, it's speed, ease of use, oh what the heck- go read my post on the subject. However, lots of people just aren't ready to take the plunge to an all-web app yet.The two biggest desktop email applications right now are Microsoft Outlook, a favorite of business, and the open-source Mozilla Thunderbird. And it can be quite a conundrum to pick between the two! To help expel the confusion, misconception and fear about these apps, and help you make a good choice, it's time for...E-mail App Showdown!
Today, we're throwing two desktop email clients into the ring to duke it out to the death. There will be five rounds of bloodthirsty mayhem, so get comfortable as we enter the first round of our fight:Price
If your company isn't supplying you with a client, you'll always need to factor in affordability. Outlook costs $109.95 standalone, or it can be purchased as a part of Microsoft Office, $499 for the 2007 Edition on Windows.Thunderbird, on the other hand, is open-souce. Therefore, it's free. I don't think there's any way to beat that price. Plus, it would take a Tesla Roadster to make Outlook look cheap. Therefore, for this round, I'm giving Outlook a score of 2 out of 5, and Thunderbird a 5.TOTALS: Thunderbird: 5 | Outlook: 2It's time for round two...Features
Outlook has a built-in calendar application, as well as a to-do list, making it the only application you'll ever need for organization in most cases. Thunderbird doesn't include anything but email out of the box, but it can be integrated with Mozilla's Lightning add-on. However, the fact that Thunderbird supports extensions like Lightning or those from third parties makes its' feature repertoire ostensibly unlimitedTherefore, I'm making this round a tie, giving both apps a 4.TOTALS: Thunderbird: 9 | Outlook: 6You want your email fast! That's why we should sprint into our third round...Speed
This is obviously open to interpretation, and speed really depends on the system you're using these apps on, what you're using them with, and how you're using them. However, in all of my experience with these programs and the vast majority of benchmarks around the web, you'll see that Outlook tends to be a bit sluggish compared to Thunderbird. I'm giving Outlook a 3, and Thunderbird a 4.TOTALS: Thunderbird: 13 | Outlook: 9Thunderbird's pulling ahead, beating Outlook by 4 points! Can Redmond's gold envelope catch up? It's time for our penultimate round...Security
A Tweet I received today from jayhmt pretty much sums up this round:a) Thunderbird not ripe for virus exploits/attacks b) see: aThis is pretty much true! Because Outlook has a lot more users in the business environment and with not-so-tech-savvy folks who just use what was at the top of their Start menu when they got their computer, most of the email app vulnerabilities will be found in Outlook!Also, Thunderbird is open-source, which usually gives it a big advantage in developing and releasing patches. Microsoft tends to have a cycle of releasing patches, which can also attribute to their programs' security flaws. In this round, I'm giving Outlook a 3, and Thunderbird another 4.TOTALS: Thunderbird: 17 | Outlook: 12Thunderbird's building up distance with 5 points on Outlook! It looks grim for Microsoft's champ- can it pull ahead in our fifth, and final round...
Oh, yeah! Mozilla pwns Microsoft!
This “showdown” is a complete joke. As much as I like Thunderbird… it’s obvious you are incredibly biased towards it.
Thanks for the comment, Steve! I think you may be right there, so I’d love to see you write a showdown in this department that would crown Outlook the winner! Maybe I missed some points.
Also, just for the record, I don’t use either Outlook or Thunderbird, and I would say that it would be much more unfair if I used one or the other regularly.
Again, thanks for the comment, and let me know if you come up with something to counter my argument! I’d appreciate it. For now, I’d like to hold onto my “complete joke” as a balanced article.
- Dave
It may be balanced, but it’s balanced in its ignorance. I currently use Outlook 2007 and noticed that Mozilla had its own e-mail client, so I wanted to see some comparisons. However, a comparison between the two by someone who has not used either client seems a little silly. The facts and evidence you provided for comparison stopped at prices and vague feature references.
It looks like you spent more time on formatting the text and pulling images than researching and writing this. Oh well, I suppose you have better articles somewhere…
Mike T; You exactly what i wanted to say. This is probably the most moronic review I have seen. Clearly the guy has never used ethier of the clients. This review makes me laugh
To clarify yet again, (quoting from another comment I posted below)
Did I say that I have never used either client? Nope. What I DID say is that I do not use either regularly as my personal email client to check my email. Does that mean I have no knowledge of either program? Absolutely not! Do you think the editors at CNET’s Download.com use every single program they review? Does Roger Ebert watch the same movie every day? Of course not! But does that mean their reviews cannot be trusted?
From my point of view you missed out entirely on corporate usage. Thunderbird has 0 points for that and Outlook has about 6 (considering Lotus is another big entity). Also, as an email client it interfaces with Active Directory which Thunderbird does not (aka another 0 for thunderbird and a 10 for outlook). Anything other than home use and Thunderbird is pretty much not even a viable option.
Corporate usage is not even remotely as wide spread as individual usage.
Very nice and balance (*wink) article. Sometimes less is more and that concept ties in with this comparison very well. To be honest, that’s why I haven’t switched over to vista from xp.
Very good point- the simplicity completely justifies using Linux, it is really starting to become a usable system. I personally think that in the Windows front, Vista beats out XP even if only for security, but either way simplicity is important.
[REPLY TO MIKE T'S COMMENT- REPLIES DON'T NEST FAR ENOUGH TO CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION ON THIS THREAD.]
Thanks for your comment, Mike- I’m glad you read the post and thanks for the feedback.
Let’s start from the beginning! First, the phrase “balanced in its’ ignorance” really isn’t clear and doesn’t make much sense. Am I ignorant enough to make the post balanced? Or am I equally ignorant on both sides to make things balanced. Or maybe my readers have to be ignorant to see the balance? Hmm…
Also, let’s check out a quote from my comment that you’ve referenced, shall we?
Did I say that I have never used either client? Nope. What I DID say is that I do not use either regularly as my personal email client to check my email. Does that mean I have no knowledge of either program? Absolutely not! Do you think the editors at CNET’s Download.com use every single program they review? Does Roger Ebert watch the same movie every day? Of course not! But does that mean their reviews cannot be trusted?
Also, I do agree with you that the rationale used in this article only scrapes the surface; you’re correct there. However, you’ll notice that this piece is extremely long as it is. I really only have enough time and space to go over each feature quickly, not give an in-depth tutorial with screenshots on each. That would make something that would take me days to write, and hours to read. Who wants that?
As for the assumption that formatting the text and finding pictures for the post was the majority of the work, I guess that’s possible. However, looking at the times between when the draft of this post was started and when it was published would mean that I would either have to type really really fast or have someone do the writing for me, and I don’t really think that it would take anyone that long to add pictures.
Plus, if you want to really get this technical, the majority of the design elements you see are formatted and added in automatically through multiple stylesheets that form the layout of this whole website. Also, I use a WordPress plugin called PhotoDropper to search for pictures and add them in easily so I don’t have to spend much time at all working on that sort of thing. But it’s an interesting idea!
Again, thanks for your comment, and I appreciate the feedback, even though it didn’t really do much besides flame my writing and make superfluous and erroneous statements. I hope you’ll keep reading my blog, and maybe someday I’ll write something that you’ll like.
thumbs up for the pretty good comparison :)
Thumbs up for the pretty good comparison – i am a huge fan of thunderbird! :)
Thunderbird is all well and good….until you need to use various e-mail templates and stationery. I had to switch to Outlook 2007 today because Thunderbird doesn’t support it and the 3rd Party Addons for it don’t work.
You can create and save your own email templates at the touch of a button with Thunderbird.
Notice your comment was a year later than the original lol
I tried thunderbird and I agree on you on EVERY aspect, but I went back to outlook… why? Because it coordinates with MS word (I can email from MS word to outlook), I can go in excel and email immediately from inside that program via outlook. Also, all my addresses, birthdays, etc. etc. are in outlook and it coordinates with allt he other programs like access. Also, I use YNAB that coordinates with Excel, so its all interwined within each other. When I use thunderbird, I find myself going in and out the program a lot to do basic stuff.
Hope thats something to consider
Julie Ann
Excellent Article! I have been an Outlook user since it came out, but each six months or so, we format and reinstall everything just to keep our systems running at top speed and efficiency. And each time, it takes me several hours to reinstall and setup everything in Outlook. This is Outlook 2003 I’m writing about – Office 2007 has so many bugs in it, I actually uninstalled it and went back to 2003.
Last night I downloaded and tried Thunderbird on one of my client’s recommendations, and I was up and running in about 15 minutes. It imported all of my Outlook files and settings seamlessly and after a few minor tweaks, I was ready to go.
One has so much more flexibility with Thunderbird, especially with folder organization. It’s excellent and I won’t be going back to Outlook anytime soon. Thank you Mozilla, for simplifying my life once again!!!
“I use Gmail. I love the online access, it’s speed, ease of use,”
Another crap incomplete review by someone who never really spent time with either
Perhaps another point may be allowed here to shift the debate context a little. I have recently become a die hard GMAIL user. So much so I have entered the paid Google Apps arena wherein a domain is integrated into the GMAIL / Google system, with all mail, incoming and outgoing, from any client, is captured and archived. Security provided by the Postini app is unbelievable and spam filtering is awesome.
If one takes some time to understand labeling versus file folder storage, mail manipulation for large email collections is incredible, for the free GMAIL user or the app user. Since this blog isn’t about Google, let me now swing around and concur with Dave, on a point I think he almost made, in the cloud email applications are positioned to dwarf resident email applications in so many ways.
The features Outlook provides are dwarfed right now by Google App features, especially in the collateral communications area, like live chat, which makes virtual collaboration, for any reason insane and free. So if you are going to use an email client, to add some things, like signature graphics, etc… A light version such as Thunderbird is absolutely the way to go.
If its feature sets that get you going, then look to the clouds and check out the new features on GMAIL. Now I understand, why 10 years ago Bill Gates was so uptight about the Google threat, when it looked like Microsoft owned the world. Scratch the Google surface, and see how deep you can go. That is where the future is, and outlook wont be there.
Again, I didn't say I haven't spent time with either. Do you really think that someone like me would go through all this trouble to write a review for something I haven't really used? Of course not! I said that for day to day email, I use Gmail. It's still my favorite.
I have also spent extensive time with both Outlook and Thunderbird to try them out not only from a review standpoint, but to see if they're something I want to use! I went to Gmail because in my opinion, it's the best. (I've written another post on that also.) Do you think that in order to review something it has to be the client I use? I'd think that would make me more biased, wouldn't it? ;)
MOZILLA ROX. I downloaded it a few days ago and it's so much easier to use than effing Outlook. And it's free.
Dave, I'm a daily Thunderbird user and I use Gmail as well for an account, which is tied to Thunderbird as well with IMAP. I've also had Office Pro 03 installed for years, and most recently 07. All of your points are right on and I agree 100% with you.
Outlook has tighter integration but overall I end up never using it. The RAM hit is about 60-80k, where Tbird comes in at around 20-25K.
I have 7 emails forwarding into 1 IMAP account, which filter into designated folders and 3 other IMAP accounts (one is a Gmail). Outlook is terrible for this. Everytime I click Send/Receive Outlook takes about 30-60 seconds until it's done. Tbird gets mail in about 2 seconds. Outlook 07 looks great and works nice too, but I keep getting draw back to Tbird, it just works so much better for my needs.
The only thing Outlook has is integration, especially at an enterprise level. And hopefully in the coming years Open Source will prevail and slowly eliminate proprietary formats and bloated software. Even Google is onboard is open formats. Go Open Office, Thunderbird and Firefox!
Dave, I have used Outlook for as long as it has been in existence, I have used Lotus Notes as well. I do have a Gmail account and will admit the I am not very familiar with it's "prowess". I wish some of the people that comment here will take the time to either understand the English language or maybe just read!
I will try Thunderbird. I love open source and the possibilities that they bring to the table. I can do without the integration of applications in office as long as I do not have to cripple my CPU every time I click a button.
To everyone, carefully read before you comment. There is no problem in disagreeing with the author. Just be intelligent in your response.
I completely do NOT understand the point system. The way you award points seems rather biased to me…
Care to explain?
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The post was really useful. I am a regular firefox user. I was not using any email client till now. And shall now try thunderbird. Outlook is out for me. And the comments to this post are as relevant as the post itself!
I use thunderbird. It is good.
Dave dont review things anymore unless you do it for third graders!
Haha, silly! What use would a third grader have for an email app review?
Thanks for the feedback, though, and I’d be interested to hear what you have to say about my writing… but just slinging juvenile insults doesn’t really show me where you take issue ;)
I love Thunderbird but I think to a certain extend, your showdown seems biased towards Thunderbird.
I don’t know if you have used thunmderbird in an environment where outlook and thunderbird are both used. It’s true that thunderbird has lightning for calendar purpose, but it is not as good as the outlook’s calendar.
Let’s use an example. There are times when someone wants to create and dispatch “events” or “tasks” through emails to his colleagues. Lightning doesn’t support many formats of these events/tasks but yet outlook’s support is so much better. In simple words, lightning is not a very mature calendar.
There are other things as well. No matter how much I love TB over outlook, I’d have to admit that outlook is so much more ergonomic than TB.
Outlook also integrates into the OS(windows) better than TB. TB is more like an independent software for emails.
As someone currently trying to research an alternative to Outlook 2003 (tried 2007- urgh)your article popped up in google.
Unfortunatly I have not found it helpfull in the least. It is far too shallow, containing precious little detail on either app, certainly not enough for you to glorify it with the title “showdown”.
A showdown being a final battle should see both opponents compaired on all possible features, in a detailed manner.
This is not a showdown, its a very brief review, and a biased one at that.
I’m coming from a position where I wish to change from Outlook, so one might think I would be predisposed to an article favourable to an alternative, however an article which is so clearly biased, as opposed to favourable to, is simply unhelpfull, to me or onyone else.
I have not read any further articles of yours (the bias and quality or lack thereof in this article has assured that) but can only ask that if they are all of comparible quality that you cease immediatly, you’re not making a worthwhile contribution.
I have now read to the bottom of these comments and I’m surprised. There is an absence of objectivity from most of the replies. I find it hard to understand the venom a fairly simple, light-hearted and I thought amusing review has generated. Comments like don’t do this again and you are biased imply so much emotion from the respondents that I can only assume they are having a hard time in life. Perhaps, from a relatively ignorant technical standpoint I would simply like to say thank you Dave I enjoyed it, I wasn’t hoping to read a bible on the best of the best analysis and it served my purpose very well. I will try and experiment for myself with the Mozilla product and look nto the add-ons.
I use Thunderbird for my home email (due to cost considerations). However, I use Outlook 2007 at the office. My opinion, Outlook 2007 is a more comprehensive software package. Outlook 2007 does require more computer resources however.
You are obviously a man child, you don’t find Thunderbird in business. Sure it may be just fine for a home user. But in terms of ease of use, consistency through out the application, overall robustness Outlook is simply in a far superior league.
Perhaps you are simply overwhelmed with what Outlook offers?
Or maybe you just don’t have a thorough enough understanding, you lack adequate experience to accurately write on a comparison between Outlook and Thunderbird.
I suppose if you are sitting in your comfy and warm jammies waiting for mommy to bring you your cocoa you may have a slightly different perspective than I do.
I’ve used outlook for 10+ years and just switched to Thunderbird. There’s an unbeat advantage with TB, it’s cross platform between Mac and Windows. I can easily transfer all my email backups from my Windows 7 computer to my Mac. This just can’t be done with Outlook. The PST file outlook uses is incompatible with Entourage (Mac version of Outlook).
Love this post!!! I’m downloading TB now!!
I have used MS Outlook 2007 for the past couple of years and outlook express before that. I moved on to Thunderbird mid 2009 due to reasons I am stating below.
OUTLOOK
1) MS Outlook is sluggish with any mailbox larger than 10000 mails and believe me that’s not a huge number of mails!
2) MS Outlook doesn’t handle IMAP well. It take hours downloading messages and wont be stable until a couple of days. After which in the best circumstances it will begin to hang up once every few hours and worse might begin to hang up every few minutes.
3) Same is true with POP access for which take around twice the time to settle down.
THUNDERBIRD
1) Works great with IMAP and was synchronized in a couple of minutes and have never hung up till date.
2) With POP after the initial download both can be said to run at almost the same speed but with IMAP thunderbird is far far ahead of outlook
3) All mail operation work transparently and there is not much lagging of the interface. With outlook if you star a mail or drag a mail to another folder it will be unresponsive for a second or two each time.
The interface of outlook is a GEM and Thunderbird is far behind but that is the only good thing about OUTLOOK. If you don’t use the calender and other extra functionality in outlook and use it just to handle your mails next second is the best moment to switch to Thunderbird or you can suffer with outlook until another email client catches up with all those extra buts of functionality
Having said all this I also want to say the author of the post doesn’t seem to have tried out both the clients well as he is pretty vague in his descriptions and doesn’t make points or distinctions well (Seems he is just going along the route hundereds of others in the internet is talking about these clients without any hands-on experience).
PS : I am sitting here frustrated trying to get OUTLOOK sync with GMAIL in a friends machine (he is not willing to switch despite numerous advices) which forced me to write this!
Outlook is the bomb! Oops, I mean A bomb. Outlook is a bomb. Destruction waiting to happen. Stores all of its mail and attachments in one gigantic .PST file. If just one e-mail message gets corrupted, ALL OF YOUR MAIL GETS CORRUPTED.
Thunderbird doesn’t do that. Furthermore, all of your mail is stored in plain text format.
Thunderbird is loads faster. LOADS. DOUBLE LOADS.
Thunderbird lets you search in the preview pane.
Thunderbird’s function/macro keys operate like other apps in the O/S it’s compiled for. Outlook doesn’t even follow Microsoft’s other products’ user interface guidelines. Go ahead, try to do a CTRL-F to search in Outlook. Then try to figure out what it actually did.
Outlook connects to Exchange. Point for outlook. However, Exchange sucks. Point for Thunderbird.
Outlook, of all the calendaring products I’ve ever used (6 or 8), has the worst multi-user-view calendar display ever developed. Apple’s iCal is the best at this feature.
Here’s 67 reasons why outlook sucks:
http://wanderingstan.com/2008-02-01/67_reasons_that_outlook_sucks
Nobody ever wrote “67 reasons why Thunderbird sucks”.
Thunderbird works faster and its free, i don’t care for extra features in outlook. and if i really cared for security i would not touch microsoft product with a 10 foot pole.
For someone who is about to use an email client, this is really helpful. I have dealth with email clients at work, from Outlook to Thunderbird to Eudora, to Incredi Mail, I have troubleshooted them for people who needs help with these softwares. It is only now though that I am going to try either Outlook or Thunderbird personally. So after all the hula baloos of figuring out whether I would go for Thunderbird or Outlook, I say I will have to go for Thunderbird, hands down.
Back at work, I had more problems with Outlook comparing it with Thunderbird. I encountered less people who had issues with Thunderbird. Well… Perhaps people can reason that very few uses Thunderbird. Then again, those that I had fixed due to configuration issues, hardly contacted me for either corrupted mailbox, spam getting into their emails, etc. The kind that bothers so many people using Outlook. Once Thunderbird was set up, it works fine as I have noticed before with many of its users.
And lastly, this is the biggest reason why I chose Thunderbird: updates. Spending 100-150 dollars on the next version of Outlook is totally ridiculous. In these days where email is important alongside security, it is very important that the emailer we use should also be frequently updated at no cost. The problem with Outlook, once the version you bought is retired, hardly do you get updates for it already. That won’t happen with Thunderbird. And if a new version comes out, you don’t have to spend so much to get it. Oh yeah, you will spend something… That is probably the time for you to let Thunderbird download its update via your connection. And if it is a fast connection, you will just spend a few seconds to a few minutes.
Nice post. Although not so technical, the comparison is straight forward and easily digestible to anyone looking for a comparison between the two.
This is great!! Boy oh boy is there some hostility here. I really never understood that… Here’s a guy that is trying his best to give his honest opinion in comparing two products and people just go and read into it way too much… As if someone who was smart and really knew how to comparison shop would take the advice from only one source written by someone they didn’t even know… I give two thumbs up to Dave for this article… I am an avid outlook user… I’ve used outlook and outlook express since it’s been around (I’m also embarrassed to say that I’ve used every version of windows since 3.1; of course I’ve used dos even way before that when I had my first tandy and 386x pc, but that’s another story). Having said that, I love outlook, I think it’s great… but there’s definitely problems with it and I always wonder about other apps… Thunderbird sounds like a viable second option that I think I’m going to try along side my outlook until I decide FOR MYSELF what is the best option for me. It’s like firefox vs IE… I love Firefox… to me, it’s way better than IE hands down… the problem is, that it doesn’t always work on certain websites, so I’ve had to keep IE around for times that I need it… at this point, it wouldn’t be fair to say that firefox is a standalone browser that can totally replace IE, although it comes damn close (but I blame that fact on microsoft anyway because I’m sure they’ve made it extremely difficult for mozilla to replace IE, hence the constant law suits). Anyway, I just wanted to back Dave up here and say: you did a fantastic job with this comparison and I’m glad I found it… I like to see you’re still positive even in the face of cynical bastards. Good work!
I read the comment about 3rd graders, and in response to that, although the review is rather simple and not in depth, as you said, we cant go over every detail. The review was very helpful for me. I have fallen in love with thunderbird, but will look into further using the potential of my gmail account.
The only reason major reason I can find to use outlook is that I can sync it easily to my iphone, does anyone have any advice on how I can easily sync my lightning calendar with my iphone?
I’m looking for something that is free or pretty cheap and will hopefully update the other calendar automatically. If i cant find away to update lightning via my iphone and visa versa, then at least just away to directly import/export the callendar to and from my phone.
I’m voting for Thunderbird! ;-)