Open source alternatives to Mailchimp

What Mailchimp does

Mailchimp is a hosted email and marketing automation platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Contacts are stored in audiences and organized with tags, groups and segments. Campaigns are built from templates, can be A/B tested and scheduled, and automation flows send series of messages automatically. Around email it adds landing pages, signup forms, an SMS add-on, reporting and more than 300 integrations, including Shopify, WooCommerce and Stripe. The company was founded in 2001 and has been part of Intuit since 2021.

Why people look for an alternative

• Pricing based on stored contacts. Plans are priced by the number of contacts in the account, with a monthly send limit tied to that number. Unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts count toward the total as well as subscribed ones; only archived, cleaned and deleted contacts do not. Keeping costs down means pruning the list regularly.
• Automatic overage charges. If the contact total goes over the plan’s limit during a billing cycle, Mailchimp adds an extra charge instead of stopping the service. On the Free plan, sending is put on hold until you upgrade or reduce the list.
• Features tied to plan level. The Free plan has one audience and one seat. Longer automation flows, advanced segmentation, custom-coded templates and multivariate testing are reserved for higher plans.
• Data in the United States. European customers’ data is transferred to Mailchimp in the US under Intuit’s certification to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, with Standard Contractual Clauses as a fallback. Some organizations prefer to keep their subscriber list on their own infrastructure or with an EU provider.
• Portability. Contacts can be exported to CSV, but exports exclude email report data, which has to be downloaded separately, and automations have to be rebuilt in any other tool.

What to compare in an alternative

1. The Mailchimp features you actually use. Plain newsletters to a list, segmentation, automation flows, landing pages, or ecommerce integrations.
2. Signup and consent. Hosted signup forms, double opt-in, unsubscribe and preference pages, and one-click unsubscribe headers for Gmail and Yahoo.
3. Sending. An open source tool needs a sending provider or SMTP relay. Check which ones it supports and how it processes bounces and complaints.
4. Cost model. Self-hosted tools have no per-contact pricing; you pay for the server and per email to your provider. Hosted open source services price in different ways.
5. Moving your list. All of the tools below import CSV files, so export subscribed and unsubscribed contacts separately and keep unsubscribes suppressed after the move.

Which one to choose

For newsletters and campaigns to a list, listmonk is the lightest to run: a single binary with PostgreSQL, SQL-based segmentation and controls to anonymize or disable tracking. Keila is the most similar in spirit to Mailchimp’s simple newsletter workflow, with a signup form builder, visual segments and an EU-hosted service from its developers, although automations are still planned. phpList has run on ordinary PHP hosting for many years and offers detailed throttling and bounce rules plus a hosted edition. SendPortal is a basic, MIT-licensed Laravel option with workspaces for several brands. If you rely on Mailchimp’s automation flows, forms and landing pages, Mautic is the closest open source equivalent, at the cost of a heavier installation with PHP, MySQL and several cron jobs.