Keila

What Keila does

Keila is a focused newsletter tool. It manages contacts, builds signup forms, segments the audience and sends campaigns, and its developers present it as an open source alternative to Mailchimp and Brevo. It does not try to be a full marketing automation suite.

Campaigns can be written in several ways: a visual block editor with multi-column layouts, Markdown with or without a WYSIWYG editor, plain text, or custom MJML layouts for people who want full control over the HTML. Contacts can hold arbitrary JSON data that is used for personalization through Liquid templates and for segments. Segments are built in a visual editor or with a segment language, using contact fields and tags.

Signup forms have custom fields, double opt-in, and protection against bots with hCaptcha or Friendly Captcha. Bounces and complaints are processed automatically.

Privacy

Open and click tracking can be disabled completely, which matters for senders who do not want tracking pixels in their newsletters. Keila Cloud runs on infrastructure in Germany and France, and the company says it will never sell data; it gives that as the reason it does not offer a free plan.

Self-hosting Keila

Keila is written in Elixir with the Phoenix framework and is published as a Docker image. A self-hosted installation needs a container engine and a PostgreSQL database. If it sits behind a reverse proxy, WebSockets must be forwarded: Caddy and Traefik do this by default, while nginx needs extra configuration. The application also needs an SMTP account for its own system emails, and campaigns go out through SMTP, Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark or SendGrid; for small lists you can even send through a personal mailbox.

The sample Docker Compose file in the repository is marked as being for local testing and not ready for production, so you should plan your own deployment. The developers offer paid help with setting up self-hosted instances.

Hosted version

Keila Cloud is the managed service run by the developers, on European infrastructure. There is no free plan. You can send through Keila’s managed sending or connect your own email server or provider. According to the website, the hosted version has no proprietary premium features; the only code not under the open source license is the extra/ directory used to operate Keila Cloud.

Limitations

Marketing automations and A/B tests are listed on the website as planned rather than available, so Keila cannot run welcome sequences or multi-step journeys yet. It has no paid subscriptions or publishing website. The project is smaller than listmonk or Mautic, and the hosted service has no free plan.

Who it suits

Keila suits small businesses, associations and independent senders who want a straightforward replacement for the newsletter side of Mailchimp, with signup forms and segments, without running a large application. It is a good fit for people who want an EU-hosted service from the developers with the option to move to their own server later. If you need automation now, Mautic covers it.