Crest Browser vs Postfach
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Crest Browser
Organize your online life with distinct browsing contexts for work, personal use, and private browsing. Each context has its own tabs, history, and data, ensuring a clean separation of your digital activities.
- Isolated browsing contexts (Spaces)
- Separate tabs, history, and cookies per Space
- Customizable Space identity
- Focused sidebar for tabs and history
- Peek for temporary link previews
- Optional iCloud sync
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Work, personal life, and everything between deserve their own Space. Crest is a native browser for iPhone and iPad that keeps your accounts separate, your tabs organized, and your browsing distinctly yours. KEEP YOUR ACCOUNTS SEPARATE Each Space has its own tabs, cookies, website data, history, passwords, and site permissions. Stay signed in to different accounts on the same website. Switch from work to personal browsing without carrying the wrong session with you. GIVE EVERY TAB A PLACE Pin the sites you use every day. Save pages in folders. Keep today's tabs close and completed work in the archive. Select and move tabs, folders, and Split View groups together. On iPhone, bring in the sidebar with a gesture; on iPad, keep it beside your page. MAKE IT YOUR OWN Start with a Winter, Lion, or other crest template in Crest Studio, then change the colors, artwork, and background. Choose a crest, emoji, monogram, or symbol. Look and Feel lets you adjust the sidebar's edge, tab appearance, borders, icon colors, and default page zoom, with a live preview. KEEP RELATED PAGES TOGETHER Group two to four pages in Split View. On iPad, browse them side by side and resize the columns. On iPhone, swipe across the compact toolbar to move between pages in the group. Peek lets you check supported links without losing your place, then keep the page as a tab when you need it. TOOLS FOR EVERYDAY BROWSING Translate webpages on device with Apple's Translation framework. Read supported articles in Reader, find text on a page, adjust zoom, share links, and export pages. Content blocking and site permissions give you control over each Space. Language availability varies, and translation may require a language download. PRIVATE WHEN YOU NEED IT Private Browsing uses temporary website storage. Private tabs stay out of saved history, restoration, archive, and sync. Crest does not run an advertising SDK, collect browsing analytics, or require a Crest account. PICK UP ON ANOTHER DEVICE Optional iCloud sync keeps supported Space and tab organization available across your Apple devices through your private iCloud database. Crest is also available for Mac. Crest is free and open source, built with Apple's WebKit. Requires iOS 26.1 or iPadOS 26.1 or later. Some website features and integrations vary by device.
Postfach
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We run no servers, so there is nothing of yours on one. A call from our hosting provider started it. They asked whether one of our important addresses had anything to do with a big cloud company — it didn't. It turned out the mail app we were using was routing through that company to deliver push notifications. We had tried nearly every mail app by then and were never quite happy, so we built our own. Here is why that call mattered. To push a notification for an ordinary IMAP account, an app has to keep your password — or a token that opens the same door — on its own server, and watch your mailbox from there. Postfach never does this. Your password stays in your Keychain, and new mail is announced by your own device once it has fetched it: on the Mac within seconds while the app is running, on the iPhone whenever iOS grants a check in the background. Instant push is the one thing we gave up, and that is why. WHAT IT DOES - Any IMAP account: Zimbra, Gmail, and the rest. Zimbra servers are found from the address alone. - Write, reply, forward, and send, with attachments. - All Inboxes: one list over every account, newest first, with each message acting on its own account. - Conversations, with replies from every folder gathered under the message you are looking at. - Every message kept on your device in full, so reading works offline and search finds words anywhere in years of mail in a fraction of a second. - Templates with placeholders for the replies you write again and again. - Folders: create, rename, move, and delete them, on the server. - Swipe to delete, flag, mark as junk, or archive. - New-mail notifications from your own device, once it has fetched, per account, and the unread count on the icon. - HTML mail rendered with scripts off and remote images blocked until you ask for them. - Light and dark appearance. English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifier, nothing measured and sent anywhere. No AI: no summaries, no smart replies, no sorted inbox, and no model of ours or anyone else's sees a word of your mail. No account with us, because there is nothing to have an account for. That is why the privacy label reads "Data Not Collected", and why there is no setting to turn any of it off: none of it is there. PRICING Every feature is free for 60 days. After that, sending and receiving mail need a single purchase, Postfach Pro — one price for your Mac, iPhone, and iPad, no subscription. Mail already on your device stays readable and searchable whether you buy or not.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Crest Browser at none against Postfach's 1. Postfach's advantage is update cadence (daily vs every 2 weeks) and iOS requirement (18.0 vs 26.1). On price, ads 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. Postfach sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Crest Browser asks for nothing beyond the download.
Crest Browser ships an update every 2 weeks, Postfach daily. The most recent releases landed on October 12, 2026 and October 13, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Crest Browser | Postfach |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.3 (3 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 0.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 3 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 2 weeks | Daily — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Free | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 26.1 | 18.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 57 MB | 19 MB |
| Age rating | 17+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Paul Davis | esense GmbH |
In-app purchases
Crest Browser
No in-app purchases
Postfach
- Postfach Pro$22.99









