Cyrus IMAP vs Dovecot
Both are self-hosted communication - email - mail delivery agents projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.
| Cyrus IMAP | Dovecot | |
|---|---|---|
| Health score | 81/100 | 83/100 |
| Commits (11 mo) | 2036 | 1653 |
| Commits (last 3 mo) | 854 | 518 |
| Stars | 649 | 1.3k |
| Latest release | 9 Sept 2026 | 28 Aug 2026 |
| Licence | BSD-3-Clause-Attribution | MIT, LGPL-2.1 |
| Built with | C | C, deb |
| Typical RAM | 1 GB | 1 GB |
Cyrus IMAP
Email (IMAP/POP3), contacts and calendar server.
Actively maintained with regular releases.
Commit activity more than 89% of tracked projects; popularity more than 28%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
Dovecot
IMAP and POP3 server written primarily with security in mind.
High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.
Commit activity more than 87% of tracked projects; popularity more than 39%. How this is calculated.
Commits, last 11 months
How to read this
Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.
What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.
See every option in this category: self-hosted communication - email - mail delivery agents.