Maestral: An alternative app for syncing files with Dropbox

May 9th, 2025, 8h00

Remember when Dropbox was a small, snap app only used to sync and store files in the cloud? Good times… Today, it’s a heavy monster packed with corporate features. Perhaps it was necessary, for business reasons, to transform it into this… thing, but that doesn’t comfort those who just want to sync files and keep them in the cloud.

Maestral is an alternative client for Dropbox, open-source, written in Python, and that promises to be lightweight. According to the official website, “it provides powerful command line tools, supports gitignore patterns to exclude local files from syncing and allows syncing multiple Dropbox accounts.” Sounds promising!

For those in the know, in addition to the command line, Maestral offers apps with native GUI (Cocoa on macOS, Qt on Linux). This allowed its developers to create an app that is about 90% smaller than the official one and demands, on average, 80% less device memory. (However, this last figure can vary significantly depending on the size of your Dropbox folder.)

Two important warnings for anyone considering giving Maestral a try:

Advanced Dropbox features — namely: Paper, team management, and shared folder/directory settings — are not supported.
Maestral uses the public Dropbox API, which does not support partial file transfers (“binary diff”). This results in a more intensive data usage.

And, of course, keep in mind that it’s an unofficial app.

macOS users can download an app bundle that includes the Maestral graphical user interface (GUI). For Linux, there are two less user-friendly options: via PyPI (GUI optional) and Docker image (command line only). All the information can be found on this page.