Stalwart vs Rocket.Chat
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Stalwart races to implement the newest email standards across its all-in-one server
Stalwart is an open-source, all-in-one mail and collaboration server (SMTP/IMAP/JMAP/CalDAV) shipping a fast 0.16.x point-release train. Recent releases are dominated by standards implementation and protocol-conformance work, layered over steady security hardening and a long tail of targeted bug fixes.
The product is doubling down on being the most standards-complete self-hosted mail server: early DKIM2 and DMARCbis authentication, IDN support, encryption-at-rest for S/MIME, and a sustained push to pass the JMAP test suite. Security hardening runs alongside — DANE downgrade-attack defenses, auto-ban fixes, binary attestation on every build.
Expect continued rapid 0.16.x releases advancing draft email-authentication standards and JMAP conformance; a larger 0.17 or 1.0 milestone becomes likely once the JMAP suite fully passes and the DKIM2/DMARCbis drafts stabilize.
Rocket.Chat's 8.6 RC line adds self-hostable translation and a unified presence engine
This feed tracks Rocket.Chat GitHub release-candidate tags, and the top of the window is dominated by empty 8.6.0-rc.x and 8.5.0-rc.x 'Bump meteor version' cuts with the real content concentrated in the 8.6.0-rc.0 minor release. Note: this appears to be a duplicate product row of the other Rocket.Chat entry in the catalog (same RocketChat/Rocket.Chat repo, same releases, different slug/UUID); it is being classified independently off its own entries. Because these are RCs, capabilities are staged into a pre-release train rather than GA.
The 8.6 cycle leans into self-hosted and privacy-controlled deployments: LibreTranslate for fully on-premise message auto-translation, Virtru as an external ABAC attribute store, and a unified presence engine with priority-based claims. In parallel there is a broad, deliberate migration of legacy DDP methods to REST endpoints (settings, spotlight, im.blockUser, e2e key requests, rooms.join), signaling an API-surface modernization ahead of a 9.0.0 removal.
The rc.x cadence points to an 8.6.0 GA cut once the release candidates settle. Expect the DDP-to-REST migration to continue toward the flagged 9.0.0 removal.
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