Open-source alternatives to Mailchimp

At a glance

Open-source alternatives to Mailchimp compared
Tool	Licence	Self-hosting difficulty	Who it suits	Strengths
Listmonk	AGPL-3.0	Easy: one small program or Docker, with PostgreSQL, plus an email sending service	Businesses that send newsletters and announcements to a list, large or small	Fast and light, double opt-in, drag-and-drop or Markdown emails, campaign analytics, several sending services at once, API
Mautic	GPL-3.0-or-later	Harder: PHP 8.2 or later, MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 10.11, scheduled jobs, and not suited to shared hosting	Marketing teams who want automated campaigns, not only newsletters	Drag-and-drop campaign builder, segments, lead scoring, landing page and email builder, central contact view

Listmonk: AGPL-3.0. Licence checked 31 October 2026.
Mautic: GPL-3.0-or-later. Licence checked 31 October 2026.

Mailchimp is easy to use and most people's first email marketing tool. The trouble comes later, because you pay by the size of your list. Do well, grow your list, and your bill goes up, even if you only send one newsletter a month.

The Standard plan on Mailchimp's UK page was £15.04 a month at 500 contacts on 31 October 2026, and it allows up to 12 times your contact limit in emails each month. The free plan is capped at 250 contacts and 500 emails a month. Past that, you're paying, and the next tier is never far away.

The two open-source options below don't charge by contact at all. You still pay to send the email, though, and you take on a job Mailchimp was quietly doing for you.

Listmonk

Listmonk is a newsletter and mailing list manager. It does one job and it's built to do it quickly. The whole thing is one small program plus a PostgreSQL database.

Very light. Listmonk quotes a production campaign of over 7 million emails peaking at 57 MB of memory. That's the project's own figure, but even if you halve your expectations it'll happily sit on a small server.
Lists with single or double opt-in. You can also build segments, although they're written as SQL expressions, which is a bit technical.
Several ways to write an email: a drag-and-drop builder, a visual editor, Markdown, raw HTML or plain text.
Campaign analytics covering performance, bounces and top links.
Several sending services at once, with rate limits so you don't flood them.
Subscribers can export or delete their own data, which is handy for GDPR requests.
Transactional messages and an API, for sending order or account emails from your own systems.

Setup is the official Docker file, or the program itself, with PostgreSQL 12 or later. Version 7 is in beta at the moment, so stick with the stable release for anything that matters.

What Listmonk doesn't do is marketing automation. There's no visual builder for "if they clicked this, wait three days, then send that".

Mautic

Mautic is the other end of the scale: a full marketing automation platform. If Listmonk replaces Mailchimp's newsletters, Mautic replaces the Mailchimp you'd only need on the bigger plans, and heads towards HubSpot territory.

A drag-and-drop campaign builder, for moving contacts through a series of emails and actions.
Segments that keep themselves up to date through scheduled jobs.
Lead scoring, which gives contacts points so you can see who's worth a call.
A drag-and-drop builder for landing pages and emails.
A central view of your contacts.

It's a much bigger thing to run. Mautic 7 needs PHP 8.2 or later and at least MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 10.11, and Mautic says not to use shared hosting. It also relies on scheduled jobs to update segments and run campaigns. Miss those and campaigns simply stop happening, which is exactly the sort of quiet failure you find out about three weeks later.

It's actively developed too: version 7.2.2 came out on 26 October 2026.

Which one?

My pick for most small businesses is Listmonk. Most firms send a newsletter and the odd announcement, and Listmonk does that on a small server with very little fuss.

Main drawback: deliverability is yours. Listmonk sends the email, but getting it into inboxes rather than spam folders becomes your job. It also has no automated email sequences.
Mautic instead if automated campaigns are the reason you're paying for marketing software, and you have someone who'll look after it.
Stay on Mailchimp if your list is small. At a few hundred contacts, you'd spend more time running your own setup than the fee is worth.

What it costs

Mailchimp charges by the number of contacts on your list, so the bill grows with your list, not your team. Its UK page showed Standard at £15.04 a month for 500 contacts, and the price rises from there, so use its calculator for your own list size. The free plan stops at 250 contacts.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp Standard: Priced by the number of contacts on your list, not by user. Checked 31 October 2026 (source).

Self-hosted, run for you

No per-user fees. Adding people doesn't add licence costs.
Setup: a one-off fee to set it up and move your data across.
Hosting and care: a fixed monthly fee covering every app on your server.
I'll quote once I know what you need.

Paid tool prices exclude VAT unless stated.

The UK angle

Mailchimp being in the US is fine for most small firms. Its servers are in the US, and it's certified under the Data Privacy Framework with the UK Extension, with standard contractual clauses as a fallback. Put it in your privacy notice and carry on.

What matters more is the law on sending marketing email, and that applies whichever tool you use. Under PECR you generally need specific consent to email individuals, with a limited "soft opt-in" for your own previous customers. Bought-in lists don't qualify. The ICO fined two companies a total of £225,000 in January 2026 over unsolicited messages, and "the software let me" won't help you.

Self-hosting keeps your subscriber list on a server you control, which is useful if you handle sensitive lists. Remember that your sending service will still see every address it delivers to, so it goes in your privacy notice too.

Honest drawbacks

Deliverability becomes your job. This is the big one. Mailchimp looks after sending reputation for you. Now you need SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up properly, and working one-click unsubscribes. Google requires all of that from anyone sending over 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses, and expects spam complaints to stay under 0.3%.
You still pay to send. You need a sending service. Amazon SES, for example, lists $0.16 per 1,000 emails on its Essentials plan for new accounts. That's cheap, but it isn't free.
Fewer templates and integrations. Mailchimp has years of ready-made designs and connections that neither tool can match.
Listmonk's segments need SQL, so a non-technical marketer may struggle.
Mautic takes real looking after. Scheduled jobs, upgrades and a proper server are all part of the deal.

Need it connected to your systems?

Both tools can be fed from your shop, CRM or database, and if you'd like help building that link, the team at Dev Partners do this kind of custom work.