# GPG

23 Hacker News commenters recommended GPG and 29 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free, long-standing tool for encrypting and signing files, email and commits, and for SSH keys via gpg-agent. Critics call its user experience poor and say it lacks forward secrecy.

## Why people recommend it

- Works with SSH via gpg-agent (4 comments): "I use GPG with SSH (or SSH with GPG) all the time, and I need gpg-agent for that." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45914953)) "gpg-agent was valuable to me because it let me use `pass` in scripts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916135)) "Finally, use GPG for SSH." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46032641))
- Strong encryption, hard to break (2 comments): "And Snowden used gpg and I haven't heard of a single message of his having been decrypted." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253086)) "the most advanced intelligence in the world can't break it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46488148))
- Open source with no corporate control (2 comments): "you're not trusting any corporation to do what they say they are doing, or not changing it out from under you" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48027724)) "gpg has the advantage that there is no money in it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46472792))

## What people warn about

- Poor UX and high barrier to entry (3 comments): "GPG would be great for this concept, but it's probably not as accessible as to get people to paste a JSON somewhere" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47301616)) "Web of trust has been a miserable failure because of the GPG's horrible UX and high entry barrier." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48370128)) "GPG is a mess which could lead to things not working properly" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46489745))
- Key management and migration problems (2 comments): "Depending on them is extra tedious on top of the tediousness of any PGP keyrings" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46408478)) "I've also had inexplicable issues migrating GPG keys cross-platform" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47148225))
- Lacks forward secrecy, weak for untrusted senders (2 comments): "GPG specifically is much too insecure when you need to receive messages from untrusted senders" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46414321)) "GPG doesn't support forward secrecy, which is table stakes for encrypted messaging these days." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026055))
- Criticized as outdated, little real impact (2 comments): "GPG has ever really achieved anything other than allowing crypto nerds to proclaim that things were encrypted or signed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46405347)) "gpg is an awful dead and outdated tool you'd never enforce on your worst enemy" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46033383))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [age encryption tool](https://hackerapproved.com/p/age.md): 49 recommend
- [GnuPG](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnupg.md): 40 recommend
- [PGP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pgp.md): 38 recommend
- [Cryptomator](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cryptomator.md): 18 recommend
- [Sequoia PGP](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sequoia-pgp.md): 12 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "GPG", https://hackerapproved.com/p/gpg/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).