The original creation of Gpg4win was initiated and funded by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in 2005,[2][3] resulting in the release of Gpg4win 1.0.0 on 6 April 2006;[4] however Gpg4win and all included tools are free and open source software, and it is typically the non-proprietary option for privacy recommended[5][6] to Windows users.

As Gpg4win v1 was a much overhauled derivate of GnuPP,[7] both were using GnuPG v1 for cryptographic operations and thus only supported OpenPGP as cryptography standard.

Hence in 2007 the development of a fundamentally enhanced version was started, also with support from the German BSI (Federal Office for Information Security); this effort culminated in the release of Gpg4win 2.0.0 on 7 August 2009 after a protracted beta testing phase,[8] which was based on GnuPG 2.0, included S/MIME support, Kleopatra as a new certificate manager, the Explorer plug-in GpgEX for cryptography operations on files, basic support of smart cards, a full set of German dialogue texts in addition to the English ones, new manuals in English and German, plus many other enhancements.

[11] It is also distributed as GnuPG VS-Desktop with commercial support and approval for handling NATO RESTRICTED, RESTREINT UE/EU RESTRICTED and German VS-NfD documents, which in turn has become the major source of revenue for maintaining and further developing the GnuPG framework and Gpg4win.

[12] Gpg4win 4.0.0, released on 21 December 2021,[13] switched to using GnuPG 2.3 (from 2.2) and continued to refine and enhance the feature set of Gpg4win v3.