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MailcowvsDeta Surf

Two self-hosted projects, compared on the numbers selfhost.directory tracks live: score, popularity, release cadence and setup effort.

MailcowDeta Surf
Score77/10059/100
Rank in category#2 of 106 in Email#21 of 81 in Notes & Editors
GitHub stars13 7143 613
Stars, last 30 days+204+0
Stable releases, 12 months160
Latest release2026-10 · 21 Oct 2026—
SetupAdvancedEasy
Official Docker imageNoNo
LicenseGPL-3.0Apache-2.0
Main languageJavaScriptTypescript

Which one should you pick?

Mailcow scores 77/100 against 59/100 for Deta Surf, so it is the safer default.

Mailcow ships more often: 16 stable releases in the past year, against 0 for Deta Surf.

If you want the quickest setup, Deta Surf is easier to run; Mailcow needs more configuration.

Mailcow is growing faster right now (+204 stars in 30 days).

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