When comparing Mozilla Thunderbird vs Roundcube, the Slant community recommends Mozilla Thunderbird for most people. In the question“What are the best native e-mail clients for Linux?” Mozilla Thunderbird is ranked 2nd while Roundcube is ranked 11th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Free (as in freedom and beer)
Pro Available on Linux, OS X and Windows
Pro Very reliable
Version after version, Mozilla Thunderbird works as expected.
Pro Good filtering system
Mozilla Thunderbird offers a flexible filtering system with the ability to set flags and read/unread, as well as sort/assign to new mail directories. There are also numerous plugins available to assist in the filtering.
Pro Large assortment of plugins available
Mozilla Thunderbird offers a huge amount of extensions to expand the usability and options of the client.
Pro Great flexibility
More options and extended settings than most power users could dream of. Get it working how YOU want.
Pro Tabs for navigation
Pro Lightning Calendar and Address Book integration
Pro Consistent and involving a moderate learning curve
The app design of Mozilla Thunderbird has not changed significantly since its beginning, making its learning curve almost non-existent.
Pro Send large files easy
Install pCloud plugin for Thunderbird and your files (upto 20 GB free storage included) will be received as download links
Pro Free and open source
Licensed under GPL v3 with code available on GitHub.
Pro Actively maintained
As of 2022 it is still maintained.
Pro Plug-in support
Roundcube allows third-party plugins and has a temporary plugin repository (until the official plugin repository comes out of beta) with over a hundred plugins available, covering authentication, improved security and settings among many others categories.
Pro Sophisticated address book
Each contact can have their e-mail address, phone number, location, photos and associated URLs added to them. You can then group contacts and address your mails to the group instead of having to enter each person separately. Additionally, you can import vCards and CSV files as contact information. And, it has LDAP connectors.
Pro Access control support
Roundcube has built-in support for access control lists (ACL).
Pro Multiple identities
You receive mail from multiple sources in one account.
Pro Drag & drop support
Roundcube supports attaching files simply by dragging and dropping them in.
Pro Multilingual
Roundcube is available in over 70 languages.
Pro Auto-refresh
Has auto-refresh functionality for email boxes.
Pro Good documentation
You have access to the documentation for APIs as well plugins development.
Pro Built-in caching
Roundcube caches messages to allow quicker access to your mailbox and to alleviate the strain put on the server. You can turn off caching (change 'enable_caching' property in your config/main.inc.php file) if you need messages to appear instantly.
Pro Reactive UI for mobile
With elastic skin, Roundcube has an excellent UI also on mobile devices since version 1.4.
Pro CardDAV addressbook integration
CardDAV integration available via rcmcarddav plugin.
Pro Spell checking
You can enable/disable spellcheck by changing "enable_spellcheck" in main.inc.php file.
Cons
Con Development slowed to only focus on stability and security
Mozilla Thunderbird has slowed down its development of features to only focus resources on security and stability.
Con Outdated interface
Thunderbird's interface is very outdated and unpleasant. It feels more like a Windows XP application than like a modern MacOS one.
Con Terrible integration with macOS
Simple things - drag/dropping pictures doesn't work, for instance.
Con Subject lines can (temporarily) disappear from the list
This is sporadic behavior.
Con Serious bugs
Clicking on a subject line can bring up the wrong email.
Con Klu
Unfortunately, all interfaces of roundcube look very old. I hope there will be a progress soon, Google Mail and Outlook Webmail should be the role models here. But also Yahoo mail offers an intuitive design.
If this open source software should survive, it must be completely renewed and bring up to new standards.
Con Themes
Not easy to create your own themes.
Con Mobile use
Does not translate to mobile use very well
Con For search there is no reverse index
This means it is very slow.
Con Extremely clunky unintuitive interface
For example the mouse cursor may start getting stuck and lag.
Con Search option are limited
You can only search for one item at a time instead of multiple search terms, which makes it difficult to go through large amounts of emails.
Con You can't make multiple accounts
It is not possible to make more then one account.