Open-source ActiveCampaign alternatives
ActiveCampaign prices on contacts and caps sending at a multiple of them. Self-hosting removes both — no per-contact charge at any size and no send multiplier — in exchange for a server, a cron job and owning deliverability.
Eleven projects below, with the licence, what each one asks of you, and an honest account of what the saving really is.
What each one asks of you
Only one of these has automation depth in ActiveCampaign's league, and it's also the heaviest to run.
| Provider | Licence and cost | What it asks of you | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mautic | Open source | PHP, MySQL and reliable cron. Upgrades have a reputation. You bring the sending provider | Self-hosted |
| listmonk | AGPL-3.0 | One Go binary plus Postgres — the easiest here to run. No automation builder | Self-hosted |
| Keila | AGPL-3.0 | Elixir and Postgres, or a European hosted plan from €8/mo. No lifecycle automation | Self-hosted |
| Ghost | Open source (MIT) | Node and a database. Publishing and memberships rather than marketing automation | Self-hosted |
| Plunk | AGPL-3.0 | Postgres, Redis and a container, or $0.001 an email on Plunk Cloud | Self-hosted |
| useSend (formerly Unsend) | AGPL-3.0 | Postgres, Redis, your own AWS account — and it's still described as beta | Self-hosted |
| Notifuse | AGPL-3.0 | Postgres and a Go binary, plus a sending provider underneath. Cloud from $16/mo | Self-hosted |
| FluentCRM | $90/year, one site | Lives inside WordPress. Site down means marketing down; large sends strain WP cron | Self-hosted |
| Sendy | $69 one-time | PHP and MySQL on your own hosting, sending through your own Amazon SES account | Self-hosted |
| Mailcoach | Separate self-host licence | Hosted is $9.99/mo plus per-email; the self-hosted licence isn't published | Self-hosted |
| Postal | MIT | A full mail server — you own the IPs, the warm-up and the blocklist relationships | Self-hosted |
| Email Bump | Proprietary | Not open source and not self-hostable. The trade is that nobody pages you about a blocklist | Permanent |
From each project's own README, documentation and pricing page. Licences change; check before you build on one.
Before the licence, the operational reality
Cron is the failure mode. Mautic's campaign processing depends on cron firing reliably, and misconfigured cron is the single most common reason people discover their automations stopped a month ago. That risk doesn't exist on a hosted platform and it's the main thing you're taking on.
You still pay to send. Mautic hands off to Amazon SES or an SMTP provider, so the free licence covers the software and not the email. What it does remove entirely is ActiveCampaign's send multiplier and its per-contact price.
Upgrades have a reputation. Major-version Mautic upgrades are involved enough that the community warns about them. Budget for that properly rather than assuming a package manager handles it.
Only Mautic is really in the same category
Most open-source email tools send campaigns to lists. ActiveCampaign customers want branching journeys triggered by behaviour, and Mautic is the only project here that seriously attempts that — campaign builder, segmentation, landing pages and lead scoring, with over 10,000 GitHub stars behind it.
The cost is the stack. PHP, MySQL and a correctly configured cron job, because Mautic's campaign processing depends on cron firing reliably — misconfigured cron is the most common reason people find their campaigns quietly stopped a month ago. Major upgrades have a reputation, and the community will tell you so.
Everything else on this page is a step down in automation. listmonk has no builder at all. Keila does campaigns and segments. Plunk has triggers and conditions but a simpler model. If branching depth is why you're on ActiveCampaign, Mautic or a commercial platform are the two honest answers.
ActiveCampaign alternatives, asked and answered
Is there an open-source ActiveCampaign alternative?
Mautic is the closest — the largest open-source marketing automation project, with a campaign builder, segmentation, landing pages and lead scoring. No per-contact pricing at any list size.
Plunk has automation in a much lighter AGPL codebase. listmonk and Keila are campaign tools without a journey builder.
Is Mautic as good as ActiveCampaign?
On feature coverage it's closer than anything else free. On polish, reliability and the experience of using it daily, it isn't — and you'd be administering PHP, MySQL and cron to get there.
It's the right answer if data ownership or per-contact cost is the driver. It's the wrong one if you wanted the same product for less money.
Do these still cost money to run?
Yes. The software is free; the server, the sending provider and your time aren't. Mautic hands off to Amazon SES or an SMTP provider, so you'd pay roughly $0.16 per 1,000 emails plus hosting.
The larger cost is deliverability, which becomes entirely yours the moment you self-host.
No multiplier, no cron job
Contact-priced with sending uncapped under fair use, flows on every plan, and Amazon SES with reputation management underneath. Not open source — that's the trade.