Self-Hosted Email Marketing Software Compared

If you want to stop paying a per-subscriber tax to Mailchimp or MailerLite, the realistic shortlist of self-hosted email marketing software is Listmonk, Mautic, Mailtrain, Sendy, and Keila. For pure newsletters, Listmonk is the best default in 2026: one Go binary, PostgreSQL, and sending costs near zero through Amazon SES. For real marketing automation with drip campaigns and lead scoring, Mautic is the only serious open-source option, and it demands more server and more care.

This guide compares the five tools on what they do, what they cost to run, how hard they are to operate, and where each one breaks. It assumes you can run a VPS or are willing to pay someone to run one for you.

The contenders at a glance

• Listmonk — free, AGPLv3, newsletter and mailing list manager. Single Go binary plus PostgreSQL. More than 24,000 GitHub stars. Built originally at Zerodha, an Indian stockbroker, to send at scale.
• Mautic — free, open-source marketing automation platform. PHP/Symfony. Nearly 11,000 GitHub stars, in development since 2013. Campaigns, forms, landing pages, lead scoring, multi-channel.
• Mailtrain — free, open-source newsletter tool in Node.js. Older project, v2, three separate services. Functional but quiet.
• Sendy — commercial self-hosted app, $69 one-time license, built around Amazon SES with native SendGrid, Mailjet, and Elastic Email support added in recent versions. PHP and MySQL. Very cheap to run, deliberately minimal.
• Keila — free, open-source newsletter tool made in Germany. Newer, privacy-first, excellent editors, smaller community.

All five let you own your subscriber data. None of them includes sending infrastructure: you still need an SMTP relay or an API mailer such as Amazon SES, and you still own deliverability either way.

What self-hosting actually costs

The software is free or nearly free. The bill has three parts: the server, the sending, and your time.

A worked example: 30,000 subscribers, 4 campaigns a month (120,000 emails).

• Sending via Amazon SES. SES is the default choice for self-hosted senders because it is cheap and has good deliverability when configured properly. The SES pricing page now offers both plans and classic à la carte pricing. À la carte sending is $0.10 per 1,000 emails, so 120,000 emails cost about $12. The catch: new SES accounts, and accounts with no metered SES activity since June 2025, now start on the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 emails for the first 10 million a month, so the same volume costs about $19.20 there. You can switch to à la carte pricing at any time. Watch the extras on that same page: attachments are billed per GB, and EC2 data transfer, S3 storage, SNS notifications, and CloudWatch dashboards each carry their own small charges. New AWS accounts now get up to $200 in Free Tier credits instead of the old per-service allowances.
• The VPS. Listmonk or Sendy runs comfortably on a $6 to $12 per month VPS (1 to 2 GB RAM) for this volume. Mautic wants 4 GB and some breathing room, so $24 to $48 per month is realistic.
• Your time. Budget two to four hours a month for updates, backups, bounce handling, and the occasional deliverability investigation. This is the cost people forget, and it is the reason managed hosting exists.

Total: roughly $25 to $31 a month all-in for Listmonk, $43 to $67 for Mautic, assuming the default Essentials plan; a few dollars less if you switch SES to à la carte pricing. The equivalent Mailchimp bill at 30,000 contacts is several hundred dollars a month; we worked through that math in Listmonk vs Mailchimp: Real Email Cost at 25,000 Subscribers. The savings are real, but you are trading money for operational responsibility.

Listmonk: the newsletter default

Listmonk describes itself as a self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager with "performance and features packed into a single binary," and that is accurate. The install docs boil down to: generate a config, run --install to set up PostgreSQL, start the binary, open port 9000. There is a sample docker-compose file if you prefer containers. There is a live demo at demo.listmonk.app if you want to click around first.

What you get:

• Subscriber management with custom attributes stored as JSON, segments, and bulk import.
• Template system built on Go templates with over 100 functions, usable in subject lines and content. Editors for every taste: drag-and-drop builder, WYSIWYG, Markdown, raw HTML, plain text.
• Campaign analytics with opens and clicks, plus individual subscriber activity views.
• API and webhooks for everything, OIDC SSO, granular API tokens, and an S3-compatible media library.

What you do not get is visual automation. There are no drag-and-drop drip campaigns, no lead scoring, no branching "if opened then wait 3 days" flows in the UI. You can approximate drip sequences through the API and an external scheduler, and we covered exactly where the line sits in Listmonk Automation: Drip Campaigns, Transactional Email, Limits. Listmonk also sends newsletters, not full transactional email; you will still want a separate transactional sender for password resets and receipts.

Pick Listmonk if your email program is "send a great newsletter to a growing list, cheaply, forever." If you want to try before you install, we wrote a full walkthrough in How to Self-Host a Newsletter With Listmonk and Amazon SES.

Mautic: real marketing automation, real ops weight

Mautic is a different category of tool. Where Listmonk sends newsletters, Mautic runs marketing automation: multi-step drip campaigns with branching logic, forms, landing pages, lead scoring, contact tagging, website tracking, and channels beyond email. The project calls itself the world's largest open-source marketing automation product and promises unlimited segmentation and automation with no vendor lock-in. It has been in development since 2013 and has a genuinely large community.

That breadth costs you in three ways.

• Server weight. Mautic is a PHP/Symfony application with a MySQL or MariaDB database, background cron jobs for campaigns and segments, and queue workers at scale. It wants 4 GB of RAM to feel comfortable, and it rewards someone who has run PHP apps in production before.
• Complexity. The campaign builder is powerful, and power means configuration. Segments, campaigns, forms, and tracking pixels all interact. Plan days, not hours, for the first proper setup.
• Documentation gaps. The official docs are split across four sites and carry an "under active development" notice. Expect to lean on community forums and the knowledgebase for edge cases.

Pick Mautic if you would otherwise be paying for HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, or Marketo and you actually use the automation features: nurture sequences, lead scoring, gated-content funnels. If you only send a monthly newsletter, Mautic is a truck driven to the shops.

Mailtrain: the aging option

Mailtrain is a Node.js newsletter application that predates Listmonk. Version 2 splits into three services running on separate ports, and the repository ships docker-compose files and install scripts that still reference Ubuntu 18.04 and CentOS 7, which tells you something about the maintenance tempo.

Mailtrain still works: it has list management, templates, segmentation, RSS campaigns, and automation triggers. But the project is quiet compared to Listmonk and Mautic, the UI feels dated, and the three-process architecture is more moving parts than a newsletter tool justifies in 2026. If you already run Mailtrain and it serves you, there is no emergency. If you are starting fresh, choose Listmonk for newsletters or Mautic for automation; both have more active communities around them.

Sendy: cheap, commercial, and minimal

Sendy is the odd one out: closed-source and commercial, with a $69 one-time license valid for one domain. It is a PHP and MySQL app you drop on almost any cheap host, and the current version 7 adds a drag-and-drop editor, live campaign reports, rules and webhooks, and an optional AI assistant for template and subject-line generation. Sending historically meant Amazon SES only, but Sendy now also works natively with SendGrid, Mailjet, and Elastic Email. Its multi-brand model, with separate client accounts and per-brand sending limits, makes it popular with agencies sending on behalf of clients.

The trade-offs: the feature set still stops at newsletters, list segmentation, and drip autoresponders; there is no open codebase to patch when something annoys you; and updates are free only until the next major version. Support is the vendor plus a community of long-time users. Sendy is the right answer for exactly one profile: you want the absolute lowest running cost, you are comfortable on a LAMP stack, and your needs will not grow past "newsletter plus welcome sequence."

Keila: the privacy-first newcomer

Keila is a younger open-source newsletter tool built in Germany, with an EU-hosted cloud option if you do not want to self-host at all. It is the most thoughtfully designed of the five for a specific reader: the privacy-conscious European organization.

What stands out:

• Editing options for everyone: a block editor, Markdown with WYSIWYG, MJML for full design control, or plain text.
• Privacy-respecting analytics that can be switched off entirely, plus captcha and double opt-in on forms to keep bot signups off your list.
• Liquid templating with per-contact JSON custom data, so personalization is a first-class feature rather than an afterthought.
• A visual segment editor with a query language for complex targeting, and a comprehensive API.

The caution is ecosystem size. Keila's community and integration list are smaller than Listmonk's, and the project is younger. If GDPR posture and EU data residency are top of your checklist, Keila deserves a serious look. If you want the largest pool of tutorials and answered questions, Listmonk wins.

How to choose: a decision checklist

Work down this list and stop at the first match.

1. Do you need drip campaigns, lead scoring, or landing pages? Yes: Mautic. Nothing else on this list does it properly.
2. Is your program newsletters only, and do you want the strongest open-source community? Listmonk.
3. Is EU hosting and privacy-first design a hard requirement? Keila, self-hosted or on their EU cloud.
4. Do you want the cheapest possible running cost and will never need more than newsletters plus a welcome sequence? Sendy.
5. Are you already running Mailtrain? Stay unless something hurts; do not start new projects on it.

Whichever tool you pick, deliverability is a separate workstream. Self-hosting means you own SPF, DKIM, DMARC, IP warm-up, bounce handling, and list hygiene. We documented that whole process in Self-Hosted Email Deliverability: SPF, DKIM, DMARC, Warm-Up, and it applies identically to all five tools.

When self-hosting is the wrong choice

Be honest with yourself before you migrate.

• Nobody owns the server. If updates and backups will fall to "whoever has time," your sending domain will eventually suffer. A managed plan or a hosted tool is cheaper than a blacklisted domain.
• You send under a few thousand emails a month. Mailchimp's free tier covers up to 250 contacts, and paid entry plans start around $20 a month per the Mailchimp pricing page. Below that scale the VPS plus your time costs more than the subscription.
• You need deep native integrations tomorrow. Hosted tools ship hundreds of integrations. Self-hosted tools ship good APIs, and you build the rest. If you are moving from Mailchimp specifically, our migration guide to Listmonk covers the export-import path and the gotchas.
• Your list is bought or scraped. No tool on this list will save you. SES will suspend you, and your domain reputation will follow.

Common mistakes

• Skipping IP warm-up. Moving 50,000 subscribers to a fresh SES account and sending a full campaign on day one is the fastest route to the spam folder. Ramp volume over weeks.
• Running Mautic on an undersized VPS. Cron jobs pile up, segments stop refreshing, and campaigns send late. Give it 4 GB.
• Forgetting transactional email. Your newsletter tool is not your password-reset sender. Split them, ideally on separate subdomains, so marketing bounces never touch transactional reputation.
• No backup of the database. The subscribers and campaign history live in PostgreSQL or MySQL, not in the app. Automate dumps and test a restore once.
• Ignoring bounces and complaints. Every tool here surfaces them; SES requires you to keep complaint rates low. Prune hard bounces immediately.

Frequently asked questions

Is self-hosted email marketing legal under GDPR? Yes, and it can simplify compliance because subscriber data stays on your infrastructure. You still need a lawful basis to email people, working unsubscribe, and records of consent. Keila and Listmonk both support double opt-in.

Can I send transactional email with these tools? Not as their main job. Listmonk has some transactional capability via API, but the robust pattern is a dedicated transactional sender on a separate subdomain so marketing reputation never affects receipts and password resets.

How much technical skill do I need? For Listmonk or Sendy: comfortable SSHing into a VPS, editing a config file, and running docker-compose. For Mautic: that plus experience operating a PHP application with cron jobs and queues.

What does Amazon SES actually cost at scale? On à la carte pricing the rate is $0.10 per 1,000 emails, so one million emails cost about $100 in sending. Accounts on the default Essentials plan pay $0.16 per 1,000 for the first 10 million a month, so budget $160 per million there; per-thousand rates fall once you pass 10 million emails a month on either model. Add small charges for attachments, data transfer, S3, SNS, and CloudWatch as detailed on the SES pricing page. The VPS and your time usually cost more than the sending.

Can I switch tools later without losing my list? Yes. All five import and export subscribers as CSV. Your real lock-in is templates and automation logic, so document those before migrating.

Where to go from here

If you have a list on Mailchimp and the monthly bill keeps climbing, start with the Listmonk demo and our SES setup guide; most newsletter senders can be running in an afternoon. And if you would rather have the whole thing deployed, secured, backed up, and maintained for you, that is exactly what our managed open-source stack service does for Listmonk, Mautic, and the rest of the self-hosted stack, often wired into your CRM and support desk with business automation. Get in touch when you want numbers for your list size.