DragonFly vs Haraka

Both are self-hosted communication - email - mail transfer agents projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Haraka scores 57 against DragonFly's 20, putting it clearly ahead on the strength of a higher commit volume and more recent releases. That measures project health, not feature fit — DragonFly may still be the right choice if it does what you need.

	DragonFly	Haraka
Health score	20/100	57/100
Commits (11 mo)	14	79
Commits (last 3 mo)	1	23
Stars	265	5.6k
Latest release	none tagged	5 Sept 2026
Licence	BSD-3-Clause	MIT
Built with	C	Nodejs
Typical RAM	1 GB	1 GB

DragonFly

A small MTA for home and office use. Works on Linux and FreeBSD.

20/100

At risk

Little to no recent activity. Treat as unmaintained until proven otherwise.

Maintenance 3/40

Releases 13/25

Community 3/20

Momentum 1/15

Commit activity more than 7% of tracked projects; popularity more than 14%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

Haraka

Fast, highly extensible, and event driven SMTP server.

57/100

Steady

Maintained, but at a slower pace than the leaders in its category.

Maintenance 10/40

Releases 25/25

Community 14/20

Momentum 8/15

Commit activity more than 25% of tracked projects; popularity more than 69%. 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 transfer agents.