What to Use Instead of PGP
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2min
I read Soatok’s What To Use Instead of PGP and it is still the clearest “stop using PGP” guide I have seen. The Latacora piece from 2019 covers the why; this one is the what—a practical swap list for the jobs people keep trying to force onto OpenPGP.
The short version: for almost every common use case, there is a purpose-built tool that does not make cryptographers leave the room.
| If you wanted PGP for… | Use this instead |
|---|---|
| Signing packages / releases | Sigstore (or minisign / SSH signatures until your ecosystem catches up) |
| Signing Git tags and commits | SSH signatures with Ed25519 |
| Sending files between computers | Magic Wormhole (or SSH + rsync) |
| Encrypted backups | Tarsnap, Borg, Kopia, and friends |
| Encrypting application data | Tink or libsodium |
| Encrypting files | age (or rage in Rust) |
| Private messaging | Signal |
| Encrypted email | Don’t. Prefer Signal—or if the medium must be email, encrypt the payload with age and attach it |
A few notes that stuck with me:
- Sigstore is aimed at supply-chain safety with ephemeral certs, not long-lived keys and Web-of-Trust theater. Python already gets this via PEP 740 / Trusted Publishers.
- age is what file encryption looks like when you design for AEAD, memory-hard password KDFs, and versioned protocols instead of decades of cipher agility and CAST5 baggage.
- Encrypted email is mostly security theater: default-plaintext, forward-insecure, metadata in the clear, and one well-meaning CC can blow the whole thing up. Signal has no plaintext mode; that is the bar.
- If a regulation forces PGP on you, you are stuck with lawyers, not cryptography—and that is a different problem.
Soatok is blunt on purpose. Softspokenness has not worked for a decade-plus. Experts are not divided here.
Worth a read if you still reach for GnuPG by habit. The better tools are already here.