Written by Cordial's maintainers, in August 2026. It says where the alternatives are better than Cordial, because a comparison that does not is worth nothing to the person reading it and everybody can tell.
If you just want to play today: Sober or mocktail. Both install in one command and neither asks you to supply anything.
If you want a client you can read, audit and extend: Cordial or mocktail. Sober is not source-available.
If you want plugins, or two accounts open at once: Cordial. Nothing else has either.
If you need voice chat or a controller: mocktail. Cordial has neither yet.
Sober is the incumbent, from VinegarHQ, and the reason most people can play Roblox on Linux at all. It loads Roblox's official Android build natively. It is free to use and it is not source-available, so you cannot read it, audit it, or fix it yourself.
mocktail is Apache-2.0 and open source, and does the same trick in C++. It is on Flathub, in the AUR, and in DNF and APT repositories. It has shipped voice chat, controller input, audio device selection, and an update system that launches a new Roblox build twice in isolation before trusting it.
Cordial is GPL-3.0, Rust over a C++ runtime, and the same native approach. It is the only one with a plugin system, and the only one that runs two accounts side by side in separate profiles.
Waydroid is not a Roblox client. It is a full Android container, and Roblox is one app you can run inside it. Heavier, more moving parts, and the general-purpose answer rather than the specific one.
Installing it is harder. Sober and mocktail are one command from Flathub. Cordial needs a Flatpak remote that is not signed, and you have to supply Roblox's Android build yourself — usually by installing Sober and letting Cordial read the APK Sober downloaded.
No voice chat, and no controller support. mocktail has both.
A startup freeze on roughly a third of launches, measured over eighty runs rather than estimated. The client reaches the home page, presents a frame or two and stops; relaunching is the only remedy today. It is the top open bug and it is written up in full.
Fewer people. mocktail has had nine contributors this month and a public issue tracker with real users in it. Cordial is mostly one person.
Typing in Roblox text boxes works. The engine deliberately
stops drawing a focused text box's contents and expects the platform to draw
them — that is what Android's own EditText does. Cordial places a
real GTK text field on the box, and covers it with a thirty-six assertion
end-to-end test that drives real keystrokes. mocktail's equivalent is open as
issue #68, and Sober's has been open since 2025.
Plugins, with capability grants per profile. A plugin is given effects rather than channels — it can ask Cordial to set your Discord presence; it never gets the socket.
Two accounts at once, in separate profiles with separate storage, settings and plugin permissions.
It does not lie to the engine. When Cordial cannot answer something Roblox asks for, it reports failure rather than a plausible-looking success, and prints a per-run list of everything that went unanswered. A stub that returns success sends the engine off to fail somewhere unrelated.
It writes down what it got wrong. The handover document keeps its retractions instead of editing them away — including measurements that looked conclusive and did not replicate.
These projects are ahead of each other on different axes. mocktail is ahead on everything a user touches — installing it, feature breadth, the number of people working on it. Cordial is ahead on everything a maintainer touches — the fidelity of the platform layer, the refusal to fake an answer, the instrumentation, and the written record of what was believed and then disproved.
If you are choosing what to run this evening, that probably favours mocktail or Sober. If you are choosing something to build on, read both and pick the one whose code you would rather be inside.
Corrections welcome — if something here is out of date or unfair to another project, open an issue and it will be fixed. That includes the projects being compared.