Email Marketing

Listmonk23.8k★

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.

BillionMail15.9k★

BillionMail runs your own mail server and your own newsletter platform in a single box. Not a Mailchimp style client that hands delivery off to Amazon SES, the actual SMTP server, plus Roundcube webmail, a campaign builder, contact lists and tags, and open and click analytics. The installer claims eight minutes to a working system. Docker Compose or a bash script brings it up, and it provisions free SSL certificates automatically. What it cannot do for you is DNS. You are adding SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records by hand, and you are warming up an IP address that no mail provider on earth has ever seen before. Free under AGPLv3, all of it, permanently. That is the appeal and it is real. No per contact pricing, no monthly send ceiling, and no plan that suddenly costs $319 a month the week your list crosses fifty thousand people. The catch is deliverability, and it is not a small one. Running your own SMTP means Gmail and Outlook decide whether your mail is legitimate based on an IP with no reputation and a domain they have not seen sending before. Most people should send through an established provider and put Notifuse/notifuse or knadh/listmonk on top of it. Take this on only if owning the entire pipe is worth learning inbox reputation the hard way.

Mailtrain5.8k★

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.

dittofeed3.0k★

Dittofeed is marketing automation rather than a newsletter tool, and that distinction decides whether you should run it. It builds customer journeys across email, SMS, mobile push, WhatsApp, and Slack, with user segmentation and a visual journey builder, aimed at messages that fire off user behavior instead of a Tuesday send to a list. The infrastructure is heavier than its neighbors. Postgres, ClickHouse, and Kafka appear in the architecture, which is what event driven journeys at volume genuinely require and is also a lot of moving parts to babysit for an audience of two thousand people. Docker Compose deployment is documented, and it integrates with SendGrid and Amazon SES for actual delivery. The core is MIT and free to self-host with no time limit. Cloud Pro is $75 a month for 10,000 unique users, then fractions of a cent per additional user above that. Multi-tenancy, white labeling, and embedded components live in a separate closed source enterprise license, which is a clean open core line: the single tenant product is complete, reselling it to your own customers is not. The catch is picking this when what you needed was a newsletter. knadh/listmonk and Notifuse/notifuse do that job with a fraction of the operational surface. Dittofeed earns its complexity only once messages are triggered by behavior.

notifuse2.2k★

Notifuse is a newsletter and transactional email platform that deliberately does not send email. It connects to Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark, Mailjet, SparkPost, SendGrid, or plain SMTP, and owns everything above that layer: a visual MJML template builder, contact lists with custom fields, segmentation, A/B tests, automation flows with delays and branching, a transactional API, and open and click analytics. Go and Postgres, deployed with Docker Compose. Because delivery is delegated, you skip the entire mail server problem that makes self-hosted email miserable, and you inherit whatever sending reputation your provider has already built. Self-hosting is free under AGPL with every feature included, which the project states plainly rather than burying. Cloud starts at $19 a month, or $16 billed annually, for 2,500 active contacts, and climbs through $49, $129, and $319 a month at fifty thousand contacts. Self-host against Amazon SES at roughly ten cents per thousand emails and that same fifty thousand contact list costs a few dollars a month rather than a few hundred. The catch is that you now operate two things: this, and an account with a sending provider that can still suspend you over a bad list. Notifuse hands you the marketing layer, not permission to email people who never asked for it.

phplist3877★

phpList was sending newsletters before most marketing SaaS existed, and it still does it at a scale that surprises people. Millions of recipients from a PHP application on an ordinary server, with subscribe pages, list segmentation, bounce processing, and campaign statistics. PHP and MySQL, plus a cron job to process the send queue. That cron detail catches more first time installers than anything else in the stack, because campaigns will sit there looking perfectly scheduled and never actually move. Shared hosting works fine, which is unusual in this category and is a real advantage if you are not running containers. Self-hosting is free under AGPLv3. The hosted service at phpList.com prices along two odd axes but prices cheaply: $8 a month for 500 subscribers with a million messages, a $1 plan covering 9,000 messages to 3,000 subscribers, and a free tier of 300 messages against an unlimited subscriber count. Pick whichever axis matches how you actually send. The catch is the interface. It is dated in a way no amount of theming repairs, and the documentation assumes you are comfortable editing a config file. For a modern UI doing the same job, look at knadh/listmonk. For twenty years of proven behavior against every mail provider that matters, stay here.