Self-hosted newsletter tools for a list you control

Keila’s software costs nothing to run. The open-source page says you can run your own instance for any purpose, from the official Docker image, under the AGPL, with no proprietary components. The install page adds one requirement: PostgreSQL 14 or newer, plus the container engine.

The cloud is a different product. The cheapest plan, Keila XS, is €8 a month including tax, which is €96 a year, for 2,000 emails, unlimited contacts, and unlimited projects. The top published plan is €256 a month, €3,072 a year, for 250,000 emails. There is no free cloud plan. The pricing page says a free plan would mean a marketing budget or selling the data, and that Keila will not sell the data.

A visitor can sign up through the form builder, with extra fields, a captcha, and double opt-in. Segments have a visual editor and a segment language. A welcome email and transactional email are listed under Completed. Email automations, issue 132, are listed under Planned. We’d recommend Keila if the list is small, the welcome email is the automation you need, and €96 a year is an acceptable way to stop running the server. We’d recommend listmonk if the automation you need is a SQL segment and you will keep running it yourself.

listmonk is the cheap self-hosted path with the least machinery: one binary and PostgreSQL 12 or newer. Binaries are listed for Darwin, FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows, and there is a Docker image. The homepage says it is free and open source. The license on the repository is AGPL-3.0. You still pay for the computer and for whatever sends the mail.

A list can be single or double opt-in. The homepage says you manage millions of subscribers and segment them with SQL expressions. The same page shows one production instance sending 7+ million emails, with peak RAM of 57 MB. That is the project’s example, not a test we ran. Subscription pages are public HTML routes.

A campaign is an email sent to one or more lists. The pages we checked do not describe a sequence of messages. Hosting is a list of third parties, with a line that listmonk has no affiliation with them, so there is no official yearly price to compare with Keila’s €96 or phpList’s $12. We’d recommend listmonk if you will run the binary and you want SQL. We’d recommend phpList if a dollar a month, or 300 free messages, is the point. They come out level because one saves the host fee and the other sells the host.

phpList splits the same way as Keila, at a much smaller hosted price. The software is installed on your server and used in a browser. The about page says the core application uses the AGPLv3 license. Requirements are PHP 8.1 or later and MySQL or MariaDB. Apache is named, with a note that environment variables are optional.

The hosted trial sends 300 messages a month and the features page says that is free forever. Basic accounts start at US$1 a month, $12 a year. A million messages a month starts at US$8, $96 a year, the same yearly figure as Keila’s smallest cloud plan, for a very different volume. Keila’s €96 buys 2,000 emails a month. phpList’s $96 buys a million messages a month. Those are the pages’ prices, in the pages’ currencies.

Subscribe pages can combine attributes, lists, and languages, and the manual says the number of pages is unlimited. Double opt-in is on the features page, and so is unlimited list segmentation. You can schedule a campaign. Cron is how the queue and the bounces stop being jobs you click through in the browser. We’d recommend phpList if the hosted bill has to stay at $12 a year, or at zero for 300 messages. We’d recommend Mautic if the thing you are buying is a campaign made of steps, and you accept what that costs to have hosted.

Mautic is free software with an expensive official host. The license file on the 7.x branch is GPL-3.0 or any later version. Running it yourself has no license fee. It does have a stack: for Mautic 8.0 the requirements table says PHP 8.4 or 8.5, and for Mautic 7 and later MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 10.11. Web servers listed are Apache, Nginx, and IIS. The cron page says you must add the required cron jobs, and that some of them are mandatory, including the one that keeps segments current.

The 8.0 install page still says the project supports PHP 7.4 as the minimum and tells you to review the requirements. Use the table. The requirements page also says Mautic should not be installed on shared hosting.

The features page describes a drag-and-drop campaign builder and a form builder. Double opt-in is not in the pages we read. Someone else running it is Dropsolid, called the official hosting partner. Essential starts at €247.50 a month when billed annually, which is €2,970 a year, or €275 a month when billed quarterly, which is €3,300 a year, for up to 50,000 emails and 50,000 contacts. That is about thirty times Keila’s €96 year. We’d recommend Mautic if the campaign has to be a series of steps and you can run cron on a server that is not shared hosting. We’d recommend Keila if a welcome email and €96 a year cover the job.