A quick post on comparing the two, but not categorizing my experiences into cons or pros -- everyone has their own needs. TL;DR at the bottom.

Fastmail.

  1. Fastmail makes it easy to opt in to their workflow. It's opinionated software. That can be good or bad. Depends on if their idea of email matches up with what you can accept.
    • They try to set things up for you as much as they can. For example, they'll ask you if you want to set up sending from a Google or another IMAP account you're importing from.
    • It automatically tries to set the correct "Send as" entry for you based on what/whom you are replying to.
  2. Vacation response/auto-responder cannot be customized per address or domain.
    • I have opened a support request -- hopefully they'll get this sorted out.
  3. Sticking to a big-3 (Apple, Microsoft, Google) email provider still makes the most sense, as all third-party integrations for calendars are first-class. Something to know if you're a huge calendar user.
    • As much as I wish, CalDAV isn't huge among "popular" tech tools.
    • I tried to use a calendar booking solution similar to Calendly and as one might expect -- this just didn't work out.
    • Using something like Zaiper is fine, but that's just one more tool to take care of and maintain. I also opened a support request for this, and they said they'd be interested in working on this, but no ETA.
  4. The user interface both looks "on brand" and modern. Maybe not quite as modern as some other apps, but I'll take a mediocre combination of identity and somewhat-modern UI over a generic UI like any other website.
  5. The user interface is snappy!
  6. I couldn't make an account and after a while, it stopped accepting my domain on the sign-up page. After contact support, they made an account for me.
    • I asked them to use a friend's referral link, and they instead applied a 20% discount for me. I mean, I'm very happy for the extra discount, but yeah.

Migadu.

  1. You can duplicate the workflow that Fastmail makes easy to opt into. It takes more work, but you can.
  2. It's cheaper. Costs $19/year to get started, as against $50/year on Fastmail. Huge difference. You can't put a price on this! (well... you can, see?)
  3. Importing is not first class. Grab exports from your other accounts, and use a third party email client w/ IMAP to "import" them.
  4. No calendar support.
  5. One-way CardDAV sync. Point to a server and get your contacts imported, ready to use.
    • I had emailed them months ago, and they said a "real" sync was in the works.
  6. Dated theme and UI for the webmail. They've been working on it, but haven't heard from them in some time. It was expected to go live September 2020 and here we are in August 2021.
    • I get that the pandemic is hard, and they're a small team, but write some communication on your blog please?

TL;DR: Stick with Migadu if you can make the tinkering work and use another calendar solution, move to Fastmail if you like default experiences.

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