Email Marketing

Listmonk19.4k★

If you want to send newsletters without paying per subscriber, Listmonk is the self-hosted answer. It's a single Go binary backed by Postgres that handles subscriber management, campaign creation, analytics, and sending — all through a clean web UI. Connect it to any SMTP service (Amazon SES, Postmark, your own server) and you're running your own Mailchimp for the cost of a VPS. What makes Listmonk stand out: performance. It can handle hundreds of thousands of subscribers without breaking a sweat. The templating system is flexible, transactional emails work alongside campaigns, and the API is well-documented for programmatic access. Subscriber segmentation, A/B testing, bounce handling — it's all there. Deployment is dead simple compared to alternatives. Docker Compose up, point it at a Postgres database, configure SMTP, done. The whole thing runs on a $10/mo VPS comfortably for 50K+ subscribers. The catch: no drag-and-drop email builder. You write HTML templates or use the built-in markdown editor. If your marketing team expects a visual builder like Mailchimp's, they'll be disappointed. There's no built-in landing page builder or signup form designer either — you build those yourself or use the embed code. And the community, while growing, is smaller than commercial ESPs — you're on your own for advanced deliverability tuning.

Mailtrain5.7k★

If you want to send newsletters without paying Mailchimp or ConvertKit, Mailtrain is a self-hosted email campaign manager. 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.