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Roundcube vs Stalwart

A side-by-side editorial comparison of Roundcube and Stalwart — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.

Roundcube vs Stalwart: at a glance

FeatureRoundcubeStalwart
SectorCommsComms
Velocity score5.05.0
Sparks · 30d00
Top themessecurity-patching, webmail, dual-branch-releases, xss-sanitizationmail-server, jmap, imap, rfc-compliance
Last editorial update10d ago1d ago
WebsiteVisit →Visit →

What is Roundcube?

Roundcube is shipping matched security pairs across 1.7 and 1.6 LTS, roughly monthly.

Every release in this window is a security update, and they arrive in matched pairs — the same fix set landed on the 1.7 stable branch and backported to the 1.6 LTS branch minutes apart. The August pair closes eleven reported issues, including remote code execution through the markasjunk plugin's cmd_learn driver, IMAP command injection via LITERAL+ byte-count desynchronization, LDAP filter injection through unescaped substitution in search_filter, arbitrary Sieve script injection past managesieve_disabled_actions, multiple SSRF filter bypasses, and stored XSS. The June and July pairs follow the same structure with different findings.

Read the full Roundcube trajectory →

What is Stalwart?

Stalwart is chasing mail RFCs and its own storage layer at the same time

Stalwart ships roughly weekly, and the releases divide cleanly between standards implementation and correctness work. v0.16.18 turns toward resource control — bounds on decompressed inbound DMARC and TLS report size, a cap on RocksDB block-cache memory, column families tuned per access pattern, and a queue scheduler that stops rescanning from the earliest pending event. The preceding releases added IMAP UIDONLY, UIDBATCHES and MESSAGELIMIT, plus JMAP email push and VAPID.

Read the full Stalwart trajectory →

Roundcube vs Stalwart: editorial side-by-side

R5.0

Roundcube is shipping matched security pairs across 1.7 and 1.6 LTS, roughly monthly.

◆ Current state

Every release in this window is a security update, and they arrive in matched pairs — the same fix set landed on the 1.7 stable branch and backported to the 1.6 LTS branch minutes apart. The August pair closes eleven reported issues, including remote code execution through the markasjunk plugin's cmd_learn driver, IMAP command injection via LITERAL+ byte-count desynchronization, LDAP filter injection through unescaped substitution in search_filter, arbitrary Sieve script injection past managesieve_disabled_actions, multiple SSRF filter bypasses, and stored XSS. The June and July pairs follow the same structure with different findings.

◆ Where it's heading

Roundcube is absorbing sustained external security-research attention and has settled into a repeatable response cadence: fix, pair the branches, ship. The recurring categories are telling — HTML and CSS sanitizer bypasses via SVG attributes, SSRF filters defeated by address-space and hostname tricks, and injection through plugin drivers — which means the same attack surfaces keep yielding new variants rather than being closed once. The 1.5 branch received its last pair in March; since 1.7.0 arrived in May, maintenance has narrowed to two branches instead of three.

◆ Prediction

Expect the next release to be another 1.7/1.6 security pair rather than a feature drop, and to include further sanitizer or URL-fetch bypass fixes, since those two categories have recurred in every pair in this window.

S5.0

Stalwart is chasing mail RFCs and its own storage layer at the same time

◆ Current state

Stalwart ships roughly weekly, and the releases divide cleanly between standards implementation and correctness work. v0.16.18 turns toward resource control — bounds on decompressed inbound DMARC and TLS report size, a cap on RocksDB block-cache memory, column families tuned per access pattern, and a queue scheduler that stops rescanning from the earliest pending event. The preceding releases added IMAP UIDONLY, UIDBATCHES and MESSAGELIMIT, plus JMAP email push and VAPID.

◆ Where it's heading

Two threads run through every release. One is RFC coverage across IMAP, JMAP, CalDAV and WebDAV, implemented close to the specification including drafts. The other is a long tail of protocol-conformance fixes, many of them cases where JMAP and IMAP disagreed about the same state. The newest release adds a third: memory and scheduling limits, which is what a server codebase starts doing when deployments get large enough for defaults to hurt.

◆ Prediction

Expect continued RFC additions across the JMAP and IMAP surfaces, with more of the storage-tuning work that v0.16.18 started as RocksDB deployments scale.

Alternatives to Roundcube and Stalwart

Other Comms products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Roundcube or Stalwart.

See all Roundcube alternatives → · See all Stalwart alternatives →

Recent activity from Roundcube and Stalwart

Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.

  1. 2d agoStalwartResource limits arrive for inbound reports and RocksDB caches
  2. 9d agoStalwartIMAP gains UIDONLY, UIDBATCHES and message-limit extensions
  3. 10d agoRoundcube1.7.3 fixes 11 issues including plugin RCE and IMAP injection
  4. 10d agoRoundcube1.6.18 backports the same 11 security fixes to the LTS branch
  5. 17d agoStalwartJMAP delivery push arrives; strict relays stop rejecting calendar mail
  6. 23d agoStalwartFix-only release: JMAP semantics and a credential escalation
  7. 1mo agoStalwartVAPID lands for JMAP Web Push
  8. 1mo agoStalwartFreeBSD support, plus OAuth scopes for IMAP, SMTP and Sieve
  9. 1mo agoRoundcube1.6.17 fixes CVE-2026-54432/54433 and a TNEF decoder loop
  10. 1mo agoRoundcube1.7.2 ships July's security set to the stable branch
  11. 2mo agoRoundcube1.6.16 fixes pre-auth SQL injection and arbitrary file delete
  12. 2mo agoRoundcube1.7.1 pairs June's fixes with Enigma HKP key lookup

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Roundcube and Stalwart?

They serve adjacent needs but don't currently overlap on shipped themes. Roundcube and Stalwart are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 5.0 vs 5.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.

Is Roundcube better than Stalwart?

Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Roundcube and Stalwart are shipping at a similar cadence (velocity 5.0 vs 5.0, both within Sparkpulse's "active" band). For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Comms products to evaluate alongside.

What are the best alternatives to Roundcube?

Top Roundcube alternatives in Comms are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Roundcube alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/roundcube for the full list with editorial commentary on each.

What are the best alternatives to Stalwart?

Top Stalwart alternatives in Comms are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Stalwart alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/stalwart for the full list with editorial commentary on each.