Zirbe vs Thought Meadow
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Zirbe
This email client reimagines your inbox as a familiar chat interface, organizing threads by subject and messages as bubbles. It offers full email functionality, including attachments, drafts, and organization, while prioritizing privacy and offline access. The app connects directly to your IMAP/SMTP servers without any Zirbe servers.
- Chat-style email interface
- Organized threads by subject
- Offline access and instant inbox
- Attachment support (photos, files, voice)
- Full email client functionality
- Privacy-focused, no Zirbe servers
- Open-source code
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Zirbe is an email app that looks and feels like a texting app while keeping real email underneath. A conversation in Zirbe is a mail thread, not a person: the subject is the title, the people on it are the members, and every message is a bubble in time order. The same person writing you about five different things becomes five conversations, which is how email actually works. Starting a new conversation means naming it, and that name is the subject. Underneath the chat is a full email client. Read and reply with bubbles, attach photos, files, or a recorded voice message, and open what you receive in a full preview to save or share it. Reach every folder, not just the inbox: archive, move, and organize, save and resume drafts, and send blind copies that stay blind. React to a message with a tapback that rides your own mail as a real reply, so another Zirbe user sees the badge and every other mail app sees a readable line. Search within a conversation, pin the threads that matter to the top, and block a sender to sweep their mail to Junk and keep it there. New mail arrives with a local notification and a badge, and a reply that fails to send waits as a tap-to-retry bubble instead of vanishing. Sender photos come from your own contacts, and typing a recipient suggests people from your address book. A meeting invitation shows up as a meeting: a card with the time, the title, who's organizing, and where, with a Join button when there's a Teams, Meet, Zoom, or Webex link, and Add to Calendar puts it in your calendar with Apple's own event editor. The invitation, its updates, a cancellation, and everyone's replies land in one conversation. Zirbe is private by construction, not by promise. It connects only to your own IMAP and SMTP servers over an encrypted connection. There is no Zirbe server, no account to create with us, no analytics, no telemetry, and no third-party SDK. Your mail is cached on your device so the inbox opens instantly and works offline; your password lives in the device Keychain and is never synced off the device. Remote images in HTML mail are blocked until you choose to load them, so opening a message never phones home. Because the whole app is open source, every one of these claims is something you can check for yourself. Zirbe works with any email provider that supports standard IMAP and SMTP with an app-specific password. Sign in with your address and an app password, and if your provider is a common one the server settings fill in for you. Zirbe is free and MIT-licensed. It is an independent app and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Apple. iMessage and Messages are trademarks of Apple Inc.
Thought Meadow
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Some ideas just need a quiet place. Thought Meadow is a simple, native notes app for iPhone, in English and Arabic. Capture a thought, plan your day, and keep what matters. Open the app and start writing, with no account or internet connection. A little room to think: • Write notes with automatic local saving. • Organize with folders, tags and pinned notes. • Search titles, content and tags. • Use Markdown preview and interactive checklists. • Archive notes or move them to Trash and restore them later. • Export a note as Markdown or back up your full notebook. • Import text, Markdown and notebook backups through Files. Your thoughts, yours alone: • No account, ads, analytics or tracking in the app. • Notes stay on your device and are not sent to the developer's server. • Add optional password encryption for your notebook and full backups. • Your password is not stored and cannot be recovered if lost. Thought Meadow is free and open source under the MIT license. This release has no subscriptions or in-app purchases. Multi-device sync and shared lists are not available yet. Notes are excluded from automatic iPhone backups. Export copies regularly through Files and keep them outside the device: deleting the app may delete local notes. This first release has not yet had an independent security audit.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: Thought Meadow at every 2 days against Zirbe's every 6 weeks. Thought Meadow also leads on iOS requirement (17.0 vs 26.0). On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Zirbe ships an update every 6 weeks, Thought Meadow every 2 days. Both last shipped on October 31, 2026.
| Parameter | Zirbe | Thought Meadow |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 1 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 6 weeks | Every 2 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 26.0 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 17 MB | 1 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Excelano LLC | Alawy Alshakhouri |
In-app purchases
Zirbe
No in-app purchases
Thought Meadow
No in-app purchases









