Email Marketing

Listmonk23.2k★

Listmonk is the self-hosted answer to Mailchimp: a single Go binary and a Postgres database that handle subscribers, campaigns, templates, analytics, and sending. Point it at any SMTP provider (Amazon SES, Postmark, your own relay) and you own the list. AGPL-3.0, every feature included, no paid tier and no hosted version from the maintainer. Deployment is a Docker Compose file and a database URL, and it moves serious volume on modest hardware. The parts most vendors charge for are simply there: OIDC single sign-on (logging in with your company account), role-based permissions, a transactional mail API, multi-SMTP queues, and a visual drag-and-drop email builder alongside the WYSIWYG, Markdown, and raw HTML editors. Subscriber segmentation runs on raw SQL, which is either a gift or a wall depending on your comfort level. Solo operators and small teams should stop shopping. Mautic (mautic/mautic) is the move only if you need full marketing automation and can carry the operational weight. Postal (postalserver/postal) solves a different problem, since it is a mail server rather than a campaign tool. The catch: deliverability becomes your job. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warming a sending domain, and watching bounce rates are all on you, and one careless campaign can burn a sender reputation you cannot buy back. Kit is free up to 10,000 subscribers, so below that line the savings argument is thin and you are really buying control.

Mailtrain5.7k★

Mailtrain is a self-hosted newsletter platform that handles subscriber management, campaign creation, automation, and analytics without per-subscriber fees. You install it on your own server, connect it to an SMTP service (Amazon SES, Postmark, your own mail server), and manage subscribers, campaigns, and automations from a web UI. It handles list management, segmentation, A/B testing, templates, and basic automation triggers. The UI is functional, not beautiful, but it gets the job done. Import/export subscribers via CSV, track opens and clicks, manage bounces. Version 2 added a drag-and-drop template editor and better automation workflows. It uses MySQL/MariaDB for storage and can handle large lists (100K+ subscribers) with proper infrastructure. The catch: development has slowed significantly; commits are sporadic and the community is small. The setup isn't trivial: you need Node.js, MySQL, Redis, and an SMTP relay, plus DNS records for DKIM/SPF. If something breaks, you're debugging it yourself. And the UI feels dated compared to modern alternatives. Listmonk has largely overtaken Mailtrain as the go-to self-hosted newsletter tool. It's faster, simpler to deploy (single binary + Postgres), and more actively maintained.