Open source alternatives to Kit

What Kit does

Kit, known as ConvertKit until its rebrand, is a hosted email marketing platform built for creators: writers, podcasters, coaches, course creators and musicians. All plans include landing pages, signup forms, broadcasts to the list, and tagging and segmentation of subscribers. Paid plans add email sequences and Visual Automations, which react to actions such as a purchase, a link click or a form signup, as well as RSS campaigns and subject line tests. Kit Commerce sells digital products and paid newsletter subscriptions, and the Recommendations network lets creators promote each other’s newsletters to grow their lists.

Why people look for an alternative

• Pricing by subscriber count. The Free, Creator and Pro plans are priced according to the number of subscribers, so cost rises as the list grows.
• Automations on paid plans. Sequences and Visual Automations are not part of the Free plan.
• Transaction fees. Sales through Kit Commerce, including paid newsletter subscriptions, carry a transaction fee from Kit in addition to payment processing.
• Data location. Kit’s GDPR page says it may transfer personal data to the United States under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or Standard Contractual Clauses.
• Moving paid subscribers. Kit’s own export produces a CSV with names, email addresses, status, tags, location, attribution data and custom fields. Ghost’s migration guide for Kit notes that there is no direct way to move paid subscriptions, so plan that part of a move carefully.

What to compare in an alternative

1. What you earn from. Free newsletter only, paid subscriptions, or sales of products. Open source tools rarely do all three, so pick the one that matches your main income.
2. Payments. Whether subscriptions are charged through your own Stripe account and whether the platform takes a fee.
3. Automation. Kit’s sequences and visual automations need a tool with workflows; publishing platforms usually stop at welcome emails.
4. Signup and landing pages. Hosted forms, landing pages or a full website with a post archive.
5. Sending and hosting effort. Which email provider the tool requires and whether a hosted version exists if you do not want to run a server.

Which one to choose

If your Kit account mainly runs a newsletter, free or paid, Ghost is the closest open source match. It gives you a website with a post archive, signup forms, several newsletters and paid tiers billed through your own Stripe account, without a fee from Ghost on subscriptions. It can be self-hosted or used on Ghost(Pro), but newsletter sending requires Mailgun and there are no multi-step automations. If you depend on Kit’s sequences, tags, forms and landing pages to sell courses or services, Mautic covers automations, lead scoring, forms and landing pages on your own server, though it has no paid subscriptions and takes more effort to run. For a simple list with signup forms and newsletters, Keila and listmonk are lighter options, without Kit’s automation features.