When comparing Roundcube vs Evolution, the Slant community recommends Evolution for most people. In the question“What are the best native e-mail clients for Linux?” Evolution is ranked 5th while Roundcube is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Evolution is:
Evolution is one of the few Linux desktop e-mail clients that's supports exchange servers.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Supports exchange servers
Evolution is one of the few Linux desktop e-mail clients that's supports exchange servers.
Pro Great integration with Gnome environment
Pro Manages contacts, tasks, calendar and memos as well
Pro Excellent GPG support
The integration with GPG is excellent. You can sign, encrypt, decrypt, authenticate and verify GPG signatures and GPG signed/encrypted email messages. All of that is just a setting away.
Pro Good support for Google's services
Pro Clean interface with 2 layout variants
Going to View > Preview has the option of switching between "Classical View" and "Vertical View".
Pro HTML rendering is great
Of the many email clients available on GNU/Linux, Evolution has the best HTML renderer. It renders HTML and the entire email content exactly like it would appear on a full blown web browser. Not many email clients are capable of doing that.
Cons
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.
Con Can't choose different settings for each mail account
Settings have to applied to all mail accounts.
Con Limited configuration options
Cannot format date as preferred.
Con RAM heavy
Very heavy on RAM usage.
Con Poor integration in any non-GNOME desktop
It is written with GNOME in mind.
Con No configuration messages
Although base functions like bullets, numbered, or pre-formatted text are possible, you can't select or set the font for your messages. Not even serif or sans serif. Which is a bit spartan TBH.
Con Can be wobbly with EWS
Don't be surprised if you have to reboot it a couple of times during a working day, because error messages are piling up (e.g. connection lost, can't sync, can't store appointment, read only). Then again, is this Evolution, or what it connects to? And since such an occasional reboot is dwarfed by the fact that MS365 seems to make full IMAP/ SMTP access (close to) impossible (nice meeting invite, THX, but when is it?), just reboot and get some work done...
Con Only available on Linux
If you have to switch to another platform for whatever reason, you will need to search for a different email client.