A real competitor, not a strawman
Cryptomator is worth taking seriously. It's open source, it's audited, and its entire design is built around a specific promise: encrypt a folder on your device, sync the ciphertext to whatever cloud provider you already use, and never let that provider see your files. That promise holds up. It also reaches Linux, which we don't, and connects to more cloud providers than we do.
So this comparison isn't about who encrypts better. It's about what each app is actually protecting you from.
Encrypting a folder vs. protecting a person
Cryptomator's unit of work is the vault-as-folder: create a vault inside a Dropbox or Google Drive folder, mount it, and everything you drop in gets encrypted before it syncs. That's exactly the right design for "I don't trust my cloud provider with plaintext."
It's a different design from "someone is asking me to unlock my phone right now." Cryptomator has no separate code that opens a decoy vault or wipes anything — the closest it gets is that you can make as many vaults as you like, but none of them are built to be shown under pressure or destroyed on command.
Vaultine's Decoy Vault opens on a second code and shows a vault you stocked in advance with harmless files. The Duress Vault opens on a third code, shows an empty vault, and wipes your real vaults as it does. Once it has, that vault becomes your main vault, so there is no empty shell left sitting there to explain. Both are deliberate, prepared-in-advance features, not an emergent property of "you can make more than one vault."
What its own reviewers report
Cryptomator's most common recent complaint, by a wide margin, is the vault failing to open — sync errors, authentication loops with the Files app, blank screens after an update. That tracks with the app's design: it leans on the OS's file-provider integration to make an encrypted vault behave like a normal folder, and that integration layer is exactly what broke for a third of recent negative reviewers.
A smaller but sharper theme: file thumbnails staying visible in the Files app for a moment after the vault was supposedly locked. That's the specific risk of routing decrypted content through a general-purpose file browser rather than a dedicated viewer.
Vaultine's answer to both is structural. There's no file-provider layer to break, because the vault opens inside the app. And the built-in viewer means photos, videos and PDFs are never handed to Finder, the Files app, or their thumbnail caches — they open and stay inside Vaultine.
Where Cryptomator is genuinely ahead
Two things worth saying plainly. It supports more cloud providers than we currently do — Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud Drive, S3 and WebDAV against our Dropbox-only sync. And its desktop app runs on Linux, which Vaultine doesn't touch.
If the job is "encrypt a shared drive across the widest possible set of platforms and cloud providers," that breadth is real and we don't match it yet.
