Maestral

Maestral is an open-source Dropbox client written in Python. The project’s main goal is to provide a client for platforms and file systems that are no longer directly supported by Dropbox. This was motivated by Dropbox temporarily dropping support for many Linux file systems but extends to systems that no longer meet Dropbox’s minimum requirement of glibc >= 2.19, such as CentOS 6 and 7.

Limitations

Currently, Maestral does not support Dropbox Paper, the management of Dropbox teams and the management of shared folder settings. If you need any of this functionality, please use the Dropbox website or the official client.

Maestral uses the public Dropbox API which, unlike the official client, does not support transferring only those parts of a file which changed (“binary diff”). Maestral may therefore use more bandwidth that the official client. However, it will avoid uploading or downloading a file if it already exists with the same content locally or in the cloud.

Features

The focus on “simple” file syncing does come with advantages:

Smaller App bundle than the official macOS Dropbox app (40 MB vs 420 MB).
Universal binary which runs natively on Apple Silicon.
Less memory usage: 100 MB for a medium sized Dropbox on macOS vs 500 MB). The memory usage will depend on the size of your synced Dropbox folder and can be further reduced when running the daemon without a GUI.
Supports syncing multiple Dropbox accounts by running multiple instances in parallel.
Does not count towards the three devices limit for basic Dropbox accounts.
Maestral does not collect any user data, anonymous or otherwise. It only communicates with Dropbox servers and the Dropbox privacy policy of course applies. This website collects only anonymous usage statistics without recording IP addresses or locations.