History: Roundcube vs Cypht
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Roundcube started in 2005 and has the largest market share of Open Source webmails (de facto quasi standard on hosting platforms)
Why did Tiki pick Cypht as a webmail solution instead of Roundcube?
Cypht is the pluggable webmail of the PHP ecosystem.
Roundcube vs Cypht
- Availability on Packagist
- JMAP support
- Support for multiple accounts + aggregate all emails in a single view (and move/copy from one account to another)
Cypht started its life as Hastymail in 2008 and version 3 was a major revamp (rewrite?) and thus, it was renamed to Cypht in 2014. In recent years, the two projects have a similar activity level:
https://openhub.net/p/_compare?project_0=Cypht+Webmail&project_1=Roundcube+Webmail
About licensing: Cypht changed the license to be the same as Tiki, and thus easier to share code between Tiki and Cypht: https://github.com/cypht-org/cypht/issues/333
LGPL 2.1 (vs GPL) also makes Cypht more pluggable.
The collaboration between Cypht and Tiki has similarities with Roundcube and Kolab (but started a decade later!). In recent years, much of the innovation in Roundcube is driven by Kolab. Similarly, as of 2023, the Tiki project is the main driver of innovation in Cypht.
When Tiki started with Cypht in 2019, some desired features were missing, but we added them. Ex.: Sieve filters, Blocking senders, Archive folders, Snooze emails, IMAP folder subscriptions, Delete attachments (but keep email), IMAP draft emails (instead of draft emails in browser sessions), etc.
We also did on and off work on AutoCrypt.
As of 2023, what are the advantages of Roundcube?
- Easier to install
- More popular (pre-installed on many shared hosting providers)
- Fewer bugs: This is subjective of course, and it depends what you use, but I (Marc Laporte) consider Cypht to be good, and Roundcube is very very stable. Roundcube has had many more years to shake out issues and a larger user base (All those hosting companies had an incentive to reduce support requests)
- Uses Bootstrap: This is subjective of course but I (Marc Laporte) consider this as a definite advantage.
- Roundcube offers to search in all folders (which is easier because it's just one account). This will be added to Cypht before Tiki27.
What about Roundcube weaknesses? There are many features that have been requested by many people for many years. Some of these features seem to be difficult to do with the current code base. There was an attempt to revamp the code base, but this unfortunately didn't succeed.
Here are the top Cypht issues
See also: