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Mailcowvsvanilla-cookbook

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

Mailcowvanilla-cookbook
Score77/10046/100
Rank in category#2 of 106 in Email#13 of 18 in Recipe Management
GitHub stars13 715158
Stars, last 30 days+205+0
Stable releases, 12 months1613
Latest release2026-10 · 21 Oct 2026v1.6.1 · 28 Oct 2026
SetupAdvancedEasy
Official Docker imageNoYes
LicenseGPL-3.0GPL-3.0
Main languageJavaScriptJavaScript

Which one should you pick?

Mailcow scores 77/100 against 46/100 for vanilla-cookbook, so it is the safer default.

Mailcow ships more often: 16 stable releases in the past year, against 13 for vanilla-cookbook.

If you want the quickest setup, vanilla-cookbook is easier to run; Mailcow needs more configuration.

Mailcow is growing faster right now (+205 stars in 30 days).

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