Cigati Email Migrator vs imap-migrate

Cigati Email Migrator transfers PST and OST files and IMAP mailboxes to file formats and email platforms. It supports single and bulk migrations, including importing IMAP accounts in batches from a CSV file. Destinations include PST, PDF, Office 365, IMAP, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365/Outlook; IMAP migrations also support additional export formats. The product says it preserves folder structure, email properties, attachments, contacts, calendars, and tasks. Users can filter by date range and folders, and PST/OST jobs can also filter by item type. Duplicate detection compares subject, sender, recipient, CC, and body, while an option skips items transferred earlier. Migration reports list successful, skipped, and failed items. PST/OST migrations can export contacts as VCF and calendars as ICS, and split output PST files by a user-defined size. Preview is available for a single selected PST/OST file and for IMAP mailboxes after a successful connection. The free demo transfers only the first 100 emails per folder; the page does not state a time limit. For Microsoft 365 IMAP migration using modern authentication, administrator consent is generally required, though user-level credentials may work where supported. Cigati says its products process data locally.

imap-migrate is a free, open-source command-line tool for transferring the contents of one email folder between IMAP hosts. It can work with providers that support IMAP, including Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, Yahoo and custom servers. The tool preserves original received dates and flags such as Seen and Flagged, and shows progress, transfer speed, success and error counts, plus estimated time remaining. It records actions in migration.log. Its README says interrupted migrations can be rerun without duplicating emails; the --dry-run option checks connection and settings without moving messages. Credentials can be supplied as command-line arguments or environment variables, with environment variables recommended by the README as the more secure option. Both accounts need IMAP access enabled, and the tool requires Python 3.12 or higher; uv is recommended for dependency management. It runs on Linux, macOS and Windows and is licensed under MIT. It does not rebuild a full folder structure or migrate provider-specific features such as Gmail labels or categories. Bug reports and contributions are invited through GitHub issues and pull requests.