Maestral, an open source Dropbox client for macOS and Linux, is no longer under active maintenance as of June 2026, according to the Maestral project. The existing release is expected to keep working until its certificates expire.
That gives current users a practical problem rather than a theoretical one: the client has not stopped overnight, but its useful life now depends on credentials with an end date the project has not specified. Anyone using Maestral as part of a desktop sync setup should treat it as software in wind-down, not as a client that will keep receiving routine fixes.
Maestral positioned itself as a lightweight alternative to Dropbox’s official desktop client. It ran on macOS and Linux, offered native Cocoa interface support on macOS and a Qt-based interface on Linux, and exposed much of its value through a command-line interface.
The command-line tools were the sharp end of the project. Maestral says users could check sync status, view live sync activity, restore earlier versions of files, and create or revoke shared links from the terminal. The project’s examples show commands for checking account usage and sync errors, starting the client, linking a Dropbox account, choosing a local Dropbox folder, and selecting whether to sync all folders.
What Maestral did differently
Maestral also supported multiple Dropbox accounts through separate CLI configurations. The project said the CLI allowed an unlimited number of Dropbox accounts by passing a new configuration name when linking another account.
For selective sync, Maestral offered controls through both the graphical interface and the command line. Users could exclude individual files and folders from syncing rather than relying only on broader folder-level choices.
It also supported a file named .mignore in the Dropbox root directory. Maestral said users could place patterns in that file to keep matching local items out of sync. That feature will sound familiar to anyone who has used gitignore-style rules, and the project described it as a way to exclude local files from Dropbox syncing.
One of Maestral’s more pointed differences came from its relationship with Dropbox itself. The project said Maestral was not an official Dropbox app. Because of that, it did not count toward the three-device limit on Dropbox Basic accounts, according to Maestral.
The retirement does not erase those features, but it changes the risk calculation. A sync client sits between local files and a cloud account. Once maintenance stops, bugs, platform changes, authentication changes, and expired certificates become the user’s problem. Maestral’s own notice is brief: the current version will continue to work until certificates expire.
This story draws on original reporting from Maestral.
