Yahoo Mail vs. Gmail: Which should you use? [2025]

Gmail and Yahoo Mail (a.k.a. Yahoo! Mail a.k.a. Ymail) are two of the biggest email providers. While the stats are hard to verify and seldom updated, Google’s Gmail is reportedly responsible for over a third of opened emails and has 1.8 billion active users, while the partially Verizon-owned Yahoo Mail—despite launching in 1997—apparently has around 225 million active users per month. Whatever way you slice it, they both serve huge numbers of people. But what about you? If you’re setting up a new email account in 2025, which one should you choose?

I’ve been writing about email and other technology for almost two decades. I have more email accounts than I can count and have to regularly test and try out all the different services to keep on top of things professionally. I even set up a new Yahoo Mail account for this article to see how the initial setup had changed, since I’d mostly used my old @ymail.com account for Flickr (which used to be run by Yahoo).

After spending time comparing apples to apples, here’s how the Yahoo versus Gmail showdown looks.

Ymail vs. Yahoo Mail

Before diving in, let’s clear one thing up: Yahoo Mail isn’t called Ymail. Some older email addresses used @ymail.com, and ymail.com still opens Yahoo Mail, but the company has moved away from the branding. Now, it’s all about Yahoo Mail, and if you set up a new email account with Yahoo, you’ll get an @yahoo.com email address.

To clear two things up: it really is just Gmail, not Google Mail.

Gmail vs. Yahoo at a glance

Whether you go for Gmail or Yahoo, you’ll get some pros and cons. Check out the table below for a quick comparison, or read on to get into the details.

	Gmail	Yahoo Mail
Overall email experience	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The gold standard since it launched in 2004	⭐⭐ A passable email service let down by intrusive ads, a lack of some modern features, and slow updates
Free storage	⭐⭐ 15 GB across Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Photos just isn’t a lot	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 1 TB is, frankly, total overkill for a basic email service
App ecosystem	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ You get a lot of world-class apps with a Gmail account, including Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Drive	⭐⭐ Yahoo’s apps aren’t unusable; they just aren’t very good

One last note before diving in: any conversation about email gets complicated because there are two sides of it:

Email services do the sending and receiving of email behind the scenes.
Email clients are the apps you use to send and read your email.

Both Gmail and Yahoo Mail are email services that also have email clients. But you can use any other email app you want—Outlook, Apple Mail, you name it—to check your Yahoo Mail or Gmail email.

If you really want, you could even use the Gmail client to check your Yahoo Mail account or the Yahoo Mail client to check your Gmail account (don’t do that). For the purposes of this comparison, I’m assuming that you’ll use both the relevant email service and its client app (or at least a third-party app that you love). It’s the simplest way to get the best email experience where everything works smoothly, rather than battling your way through.

Both Gmail and Yahoo handle the basics of sending emails

For better or worse, most email apps are pretty similar. They allow you to send and receive emails, do their best to filter out spam, and generally fade into the background. When things are working well, you really shouldn’t notice whether you’re using Gmail or Yahoo Mail—you should just be sending and checking your email.

Both Gmail and Yahoo Mail nail the basics. Despite being 20 and 27 years old, respectively, they’ve kept with the times and still feel like modern email clients. The web apps are fast and easy to use, the mobile apps work well on both iOS and Android, and they each have some neat extra features—like automatically sorting your emails into categories or making it easy to unsubscribe from marketing emails.

Gmail wins on the feature-front with things like scheduled sending, confidential messages, and smart replies—though if you only want a basic email app, you can easily ignore them all. Certainly, if you’re one of the 200-odd million people who rely on Yahoo Mail every month, you aren’t going to get a radically different email experience by switching to Gmail, but you will probably find some of the extra features useful.

Both apps have fairly obvious ads. Gmail’s ads are no longer as simple and minimalist as they once were, but they’ve only ever appeared in my Social and Promotions inboxes, not my Primary one.

In the past, Yahoo Mail’s ads were objectively obnoxious. There was a banner ad and a full sidebar ad in the inbox, and a sidebar ad when reading an email. This time, at least on the web, there were just the banner ads, but the sidebar now sits empty unless you select contacts or calendar.