Chanty
Chanty's feed is an HR statistics content mill, not a product changelog
Comparison · Comms
Maddy vs Openfire
A side-by-side editorial comparison of Maddy and Openfire — release velocity, themes, recent moves, and the top alternatives to consider.
Shared themes:self-hosted
Maddy vs Openfire: at a glance
What is Maddy?
A one-binary mail server learning to behave like production infrastructure.
maddy is an all-in-one SMTP and IMAP server written in Go, aimed at people who want a working mail host without assembling Postfix, Dovecot and a policy daemon themselves. The 0.9 line moved quickly — 0.9.0 through 0.9.5 between late March and late May — with the sequence following a recognisable shape: a feature release, an immediate patch for a broken integration, a security release, then cleanup. Configuration is directive-based, and much of the changelog concerns the behaviour of individual modules like auth.ldap, check.rspamd and check.dnsbl.
What is Openfire?
Openfire keeps its XMPP server current without changing what it is.
Openfire ships a maintenance release every one to two months, each a mix of dependency upgrades, MUC and pubsub correctness fixes, and occasional security hardening. 5.1.2 follows that shape exactly: Jetty, log4j2, and the PostgreSQL driver moved forward, three inapplicable Tomcat CVEs suppressed, and a set of MUC self-ping errors corrected to return the right XMPP error types. The last release with real feature content was 5.1.0 in June, which added channel binding and an admin console for failed server-to-server connections.
Maddy vs Openfire: editorial side-by-side
Maddy
0.0COMMS
A one-binary mail server learning to behave like production infrastructure.
◆ Current state
maddy is an all-in-one SMTP and IMAP server written in Go, aimed at people who want a working mail host without assembling Postfix, Dovecot and a policy daemon themselves. The 0.9 line moved quickly — 0.9.0 through 0.9.5 between late March and late May — with the sequence following a recognisable shape: a feature release, an immediate patch for a broken integration, a security release, then cleanup. Configuration is directive-based, and much of the changelog concerns the behaviour of individual modules like auth.ldap, check.rspamd and check.dnsbl.
◆ Where it's heading
The project is systematically removing the compromises that made early versions convenient. Obsolete SASL LOGIN was disabled by default, the STARTTLS plaintext fallback was dropped, the maddyctl symlink behaviour and the implicit run command were deleted after four years of deprecation warnings, and libdns providers that have not kept up with 1.x are being cut. Running the other way is operational maturity: no-downtime config reload, queue-length metrics, OpenMetrics fixes, systemd readiness reporting, and SLSA build attestations on release artifacts. This is a project moving from hobbyist-friendly to operator-friendly, and accepting breakage to get there.
◆ Prediction
0.10.0 is already scoped by the deprecations announced in 0.9.1 — expect the flagged libdns providers to be removed and gandi to require Bearer tokens. Given the 0.9.x pattern, a feature release followed quickly by an integration fix is the likely shape.
Openfire
2.5COMMS
Openfire keeps its XMPP server current without changing what it is.
◆ Current state
Openfire ships a maintenance release every one to two months, each a mix of dependency upgrades, MUC and pubsub correctness fixes, and occasional security hardening. 5.1.2 follows that shape exactly: Jetty, log4j2, and the PostgreSQL driver moved forward, three inapplicable Tomcat CVEs suppressed, and a set of MUC self-ping errors corrected to return the right XMPP error types. The last release with real feature content was 5.1.0 in June, which added channel binding and an admin console for failed server-to-server connections.
◆ Where it's heading
The project's direction is protocol conformance and operational currency rather than new capability. Recent cycles have gone into XEP compliance details - self-ping error semantics, XEP-0398 presence handling, base64 whitespace tolerance - and into keeping the dependency tree clean enough to pass a scanner. That is a reasonable posture for infrastructure a decade into deployment, and nothing in the last six releases suggests a change of scope.
◆ Prediction
Expect the same cadence: another patch in four to eight weeks carrying library bumps and MUC or pubsub conformance fixes, with anything larger held for a 5.2 line.
Alternatives to Maddy and Openfire
Other Comms products tracked by Sparkpulse, ranked by recent ship velocity. Each card links to a full editorial trajectory and lets you pivot into a head-to-head comparison with either Maddy or Openfire.
Proton Bridge
Proton Bridge spends its first release in ten weeks on crashes, memory bounds and dead code
Stalwart
Stalwart is chasing mail RFCs and its own storage layer at the same time
Mux
Every manual control Mux ships now arrives with a Robots workflow that does it for you
Netcore Cloud
Netcore's feed remains a demand-generation channel; ten entries, zero product releases.
mailcow
mailcow's release notes are almost entirely upstream security currency.
See all Maddy alternatives → · See all Openfire alternatives →
Recent activity from Maddy and Openfire
Latest ship moves from both products, interleaved chronologically. ⚡ = editorial spark.
- 1d agoOpenfireOpenfire 5.1.2: MUC self-ping errors and library upgrades
- 1mo agoOpenfireOpenfire 5.1.1: MUC and pubsub subscription fixes
- 2mo agoOpenfireChannel binding support and S2S connection diagnostics
- 2mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.5 fixes nested pipeline logging and systemd reload reporting
- 3mo agoOpenfireOpenfire 5.0.5: dependency currency and logging fixes
- 3mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.4 removes the maddyctl symlink and implicit run command
- 4mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.3 patches an LDAP injection flaw in auth.ldap
- 4mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.2 fixes an rspamd panic on unspecified tls_client
- 4mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.1 flags libdns providers for removal in 0.10.0
- 4mo agoMaddymaddy 0.9.0 adds no-downtime configuration reloading ⚡
- 5mo agoOpenfireFixes high CPU from exception-based control flow
- 8mo agoOpenfireOpenfire 5.0.3: driver upgrades and MUC fixes
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Maddy and Openfire?
Both compete on the same themes — self-hosted — within Comms. Openfire is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. See the at-a-glance table above for a side-by-side breakdown of velocity, recent sparks, and editorial themes.
Is Maddy better than Openfire?
Sparkpulse doesn't pick a winner — we score release velocity, not feature parity. Openfire is currently shipping more aggressively (velocity 2.5 vs 0.0), with 0 editorial sparks in the last 30 days against 0. For your specific use case, the alternatives sections above list other Comms products to evaluate alongside.
What are the best alternatives to Maddy?
Top Maddy alternatives in Comms are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Maddy alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/maddy for the full list with editorial commentary on each.
What are the best alternatives to Openfire?
Top Openfire alternatives in Comms are ranked by recent ship velocity. Browse the "Openfire alternatives" section above for the current picks, or visit /alternatives/openfire for the full list with editorial commentary on each.