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Comparison

The best listmonk alternatives

listmonk is one Go binary, a Postgres database, and millions of newsletters through whatever SMTP you point it at. Over 22,000 GitHub stars and years of production use. People leave when they need automation, a transactional API, or someone else to own deliverability.

Alternatives below, with what each costs, what its free tier really gets you, and what it is bad at. We make one of them. It's marked, and it isn't open source.

13 options Prices checked 2 August 2026 No affiliate links
The short answer

Pick by the reason you're leaving

Nobody replaces a platform in the abstract. Something specific stopped working. Start from that, not from a feature matrix.

Open source with automationMautic

Campaign builder and lead scoring, on a much heavier PHP stack.

Open source with a hosted optionKeila

AGPL, European hosting from €8/mo, unlimited contacts on every tier.

Cheapest hosted escapeEmailOctopus

$9/mo billed yearly, with 2,500 free subscribers and nothing to run.

One-time licence insteadSendy

$69 once, same bring-your-own-SES model, with a more dated interface.

Best when deliverability should be someone else's jobEmail Bump

Campaigns, flows and a transactional API, with SES and reputation handled. That's us.

Context

What actually goes wrong with listmonk

listmonk is excellent at exactly what it does, which is send campaigns to lists. Everything else is out of scope by design.

There's no automation builder. Lists, subscribers, campaigns and templates. No behavioural triggers, no multi-step sequences, no branching on what someone did. If your programme needs an onboarding flow, that's a different tool.

It isn't a transactional email product. It has transactional templates, and it's not built to be the API your application calls for receipts and password resets at scale. Most people pair it with SES or a provider for that.

Bring your own SMTP, and your own deliverability. listmonk sends through whatever you configure. Blocklist removals, IP warm-up and Gmail deferral patterns are entirely yours, with a GitHub discussion board instead of an abuse desk.

The admin UI is functional rather than beautiful. Fast, dense and clearly built by engineers. If a marketer is going to live in it every week, that's worth a look before committing.

The baseline

What listmonk costs

Everything below is compared against these numbers, read on 2 August 2026.

Free software, paid sending

The model

$0
AGPL-3.0Licence — One Go binary plus PostgreSQL — no Redis, no queue broker
Your SMTP rates
Any providerSending — Amazon SES at $0.16 per 1,000 is the usual choice
Worth knowing

The fine print

  • Over 22,000 GitHub stars and years of production use — the most established project here.
  • Handles very large lists on modest hardware.
  • A live demo is available before you install anything.
  • No per-contact cost at any list size, ever.
  • AGPL-3.0, with the network clause that implies.
Side by side

All 13, on the things that decide it

ProviderStarts atFree tierMarketing emailLicenceData region
Email BumpHosted$19/mo at 10,000 contacts5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails a monthIncluded — campaigns, flows, segments and the API share one billProprietaryUnited States (Amazon SES, us-east-1)
PlunkSelf-hostableSelf-host free, or $0.001 per email on Plunk CloudSelf-hosted — the software is freeIncluded: campaigns plus a trigger-and-condition automation builderAGPL-3.0Wherever you deploy it
useSend (formerly Unsend)Self-hostableFree to run; you pay Amazon SES for the sendingSelf-hosted — the software is freeIncluded: contacts, campaigns and transactional in one appAGPL-3.0Wherever you deploy it
NotifuseSelf-hostableSelf-host free, or Notifuse Cloud from $16/moSelf-hosted — the software is freeIncluded: visual builder, scheduling, A/B tests, segmentationAGPL-3.0Wherever you deploy it
PostalSelf-hostableFree to run; you pay for servers and IPsSelf-hosted — the software is freeNone; it's infrastructureMITWherever you deploy it
Amazon SESHosted$0.16 per 1,000 emails (Essentials, first 10M/mo)Up to $200 in AWS free-tier credits for new accounts, over the first 6 monthsNone. SES is a sending pipe.ProprietaryYour choice of AWS region, including several in the EU
ResendHosted$20/mo for 50,000 emails (Pro); marketing contacts are a second plan from $40/mo3,000 emails a month capped at 100 a day, 1 domain — plus a separate 1,000-contact marketing free planBroadcasts, on a separate contact-priced plan. No journey builder.ProprietaryUnited States
PostmarkHosted$15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic)100 emails a monthBroadcast streams only — 15 on Basic, 30 on Pro, unlimited on Platform. No visual automation builder.ProprietaryUnited States
MailgunHosted$15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic)100 emails a day, with 1-day log retentionSold separately as Mailgun Optimize / Mailjet rather than bundledProprietaryUnited States or European Union, per account
SMTP2GOHostedStarter $10/mo for 10,000 emails ($100/year)1,000 emails a month, capped at 200 a day and 25 an hour until your domain is verifiedNone — it's a relayProprietaryServers worldwide, with location-specific options
Elastic EmailHostedStarter $19/mo for up to 50,000 emails1,000 contacts and 3,000 emails a monthAn email designer and contact management; not a full automation platformProprietaryUnited States and European Union
UniOneHostedStandard from $6/mo for 50,000 emails4 months free at 6,000 emails a month, plus 100 address validationsBulk sending alongside transactional; no campaign builder or segmentsProprietaryMultiple
LoopsHostedPaid plans are priced by subscribed contacts via a slider, not published as a fixed table1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends a month, with a Loops footer on your emailIncluded — that's the core of the productProprietaryUnited States

Read off each vendor's own pricing or documentation page on 2 August 2026. Where a vendor renders prices from a slider and publishes no static table, the cell says so instead of repeating a number from someone's affiliate post.

In detail

Every option, and what it's bad at

01Hosted service

Email Bump

Best for: Teams paying twice — once for the transactional API, again for the newsletter

Marketing and transactional email in one product, billed on contacts rather than sends. The transactional API takes the same field names most developer email APIs use, so the migration is a base URL and a key. Also the only one on this list with a first-class CLI and MCP server, so an agent can run the whole account without a browser.

Starts at
$19/mo at 10,000 contacts
Free tier
5,000 contacts and 5,000 emails a month
Marketing
Included — campaigns, flows, segments and the API share one bill
Data region
United States (Amazon SES, us-east-1)
What it does well
  • One price covers campaigns, automated flows, segments and the transactional API.
  • Sending is uncapped on paid plans under fair use — a viral week doesn't produce an overage bill.
  • Unsubscribed and bounced contacts stop counting, so the bill tracks your real audience.
  • Unlimited team seats and unlimited sending domains on every plan, including free.
  • CLI, MCP server and agent skills cover the same surface as the API, including creating the account itself.
  • Inbound email, SMTP on the same key, and webhooks are part of the plan, not upsells.
What to watch for
  • Sending is US-only today — there is no EU data region.
  • Not open source, and there's no self-hosted build.
  • The free plan puts a 'Powered by Email Bump' badge on marketing footers. Transactional sends never carry it.
  • Younger than Postmark or SendGrid, without their decade-plus of public deliverability history.
02AGPL-3.0

Plunk

Best for: Open-source teams who want campaigns and automation, not just an API

Transactional sending, newsletters and a workflow automation builder in one AGPL codebase, with a hosted pay-as-you-go option if you'd rather not run it.

Starts at
Self-host free, or $0.001 per email on Plunk Cloud
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
Included: campaigns plus a trigger-and-condition automation builder
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • Automation flows out of the box, which most open-source options lack.
  • $0.001/email hosted pricing is genuinely pay-as-you-go — no monthly floor.
  • SMTP relay, so existing tooling keeps working.
What to watch for
  • Smaller ecosystem than the commercial APIs; fewer integrations.
  • AGPL-3.0 again — read it before embedding.
  • Self-hosting means owning deliverability, which is the hard part.
03AGPL-3.0

useSend (formerly Unsend)

Best for: Self-hosters who want a modern dashboard on top of their own SES account

The best-known open-source answer to this search. It wraps Amazon SES with a dashboard, contacts, campaigns and webhooks, so you pay AWS rates and keep the UI.

Starts at
Free to run; you pay Amazon SES for the sending
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
Included: contacts, campaigns and transactional in one app
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • SES pricing with a real interface on top.
  • Transactional and marketing, REST API and SMTP, webhooks and inbound.
  • Docker images and a one-click Railway deploy.
What to watch for
  • Still described as beta by its own maintainers.
  • Bring your own AWS account, DNS, Postgres and Redis — and your own on-call.
  • AGPL-3.0 has real obligations if you build a product on top of it.
04AGPL-3.0

Notifuse

Best for: Self-hosters who want a visual builder and to keep their existing sending provider

Go and React, AGPL, and provider-agnostic: it drives SES, Mailgun, Postmark, Mailjet, SparkPost or plain SMTP rather than replacing them. Campaigns, A/B tests and segmentation on top.

Starts at
Self-host free, or Notifuse Cloud from $16/mo
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
Included: visual builder, scheduling, A/B tests, segmentation
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • Bring your own delivery provider — switching costs you a config change, not a migration.
  • Liquid templating, REST API and webhooks for the developer side.
  • A hosted tier exists if self-hosting stops being fun.
What to watch for
  • You still need a sending provider underneath; this is the layer above it.
  • Younger and smaller than listmonk.
  • AGPL-3.0.
05MIT

Postal

Best for: Running your own mail server on purpose

Not an SES wrapper — a complete MTA that sends and receives. If you want to own the IPs, the queues and the reputation, this is the mature option.

Starts at
Free to run; you pay for servers and IPs
Free tier
Self-hosted — the software is free
Marketing
None; it's infrastructure
Data region
Wherever you deploy it
What it does well
  • MIT licensed, ~16,700 stars, years of production use.
  • Sends and receives — a full mail platform, not a relay.
  • Total control over IPs and routing.
What to watch for
  • You now own IP warm-up, blocklist removals and abuse handling. This is a job, not a weekend.
  • Needs a database, a message queue and correctly configured DNS.
  • Nobody to call at 3am when Gmail starts deferring you.
06Hosted service

Amazon SES

Best for: High volume where you already have engineers to own the plumbing

The wholesale layer most of this list resells. Nothing is cheaper per email, and nothing asks more of you: no dashboard worth the name, no templates, no contact model, no suppression UI beyond the basics.

Starts at
$0.16 per 1,000 emails (Essentials, first 10M/mo)
Free tier
Up to $200 in AWS free-tier credits for new accounts, over the first 6 months
Marketing
None. SES is a sending pipe.
Data region
Your choice of AWS region, including several in the EU
What it does well
  • $0.16 per 1,000 is roughly a fortieth of Resend's Pro rate at the same volume.
  • Regions everywhere, so data residency is a config value.
  • Scales past anything a SaaS plan will sell you.
What to watch for
  • You build the dashboard, the templates, the retries, the suppression list and the reporting.
  • New accounts start in a sandbox; production access and quota increases are reviewed.
  • Attachments are billed separately at $0.12/GB, and deliverability tooling costs extra.
07Hosted service

Resend

Best for: Developer experience, and an official SDK in whatever you write in

The current default recommendation for developer email. Thirteen official SDKs, a CLI, a clean dashboard, and react-email — the open-source library that made writing email in React tolerable. Transactional volume and marketing contacts are billed as two separate plans.

Starts at
$20/mo for 50,000 emails (Pro); marketing contacts are a second plan from $40/mo
Free tier
3,000 emails a month capped at 100 a day, 1 domain — plus a separate 1,000-contact marketing free plan
Marketing
Broadcasts, on a separate contact-priced plan. No journey builder.
Data region
United States
What it does well
  • Official SDKs for 13 languages plus a CLI — the widest first-party coverage here.
  • react-email is open source, genuinely good, and portable to any provider.
  • Inbound receiving, SMTP and webhooks are all first-class.
  • $0.90 per extra 1,000 emails is half Postmark's Basic overage rate.
What to watch for
  • Transactional volume and marketing contacts are billed as two separate subscriptions.
  • 30-day data retention on every plan, including Scale.
  • Overage is charged automatically per extra 1,000 emails against the card on file.
  • No EU region, and sending domains are capped by plan: 1 on Free, 10 on Pro.
08Hosted service

Postmark

Best for: Transactional mail where a receipt arriving late is a support ticket

The long-standing deliverability specialist. Separate message streams keep transactional and broadcast reputation apart, retention goes to a year, and support answers with an engineer rather than a bot.

Starts at
$15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic)
Free tier
100 emails a month
Marketing
Broadcast streams only — 15 on Basic, 30 on Pro, unlimited on Platform. No visual automation builder.
Data region
United States
What it does well
  • Deliverability track record is the longest of anything on this list.
  • Retention is customisable up to 365 days on Pro and Platform, against Resend's flat 30 days.
  • Inbound email processing on Pro and above.
  • Support is a genuine differentiator, not a plan checkbox.
What to watch for
  • Overage is $1.80 per 1,000 on Basic — twice Resend's $0.90 — so bursts get expensive.
  • Broadcasts are a stream, not a marketing tool: no segments, no journeys.
  • Dedicated IPs start at $50/mo per IP.
09Hosted service

Mailgun

Best for: Teams that need an EU sending region from a large, established vendor

A veteran developer email API, now part of Sinch. US or EU sending from one account, plus validation and deliverability services sold alongside.

Starts at
$15/mo for 10,000 emails (Basic)
Free tier
100 emails a day, with 1-day log retention
Marketing
Sold separately as Mailgun Optimize / Mailjet rather than bundled
Data region
United States or European Union, per account
What it does well
  • EU region on an established platform with real support contracts.
  • Scale at $90/mo for 100,000 emails includes a dedicated IP.
  • Email validation and deliverability tooling available as add-ons.
What to watch for
  • Log retention is 1 day on Free and Basic, 5 days on Foundation — painful when debugging.
  • $1.80 per 1,000 overage on Basic.
  • Extra dedicated IPs are $59 each per month.
10Hosted service

SMTP2GO

Best for: Reliable SMTP relay with 30 days of logs on every paid plan

Deliberately unglamorous relay infrastructure. Nothing here is fashionable and the thing people actually praise is that the logs go back thirty days on the $10 plan, which several better-known providers don't manage at ten times the price.

Starts at
Starter $10/mo for 10,000 emails ($100/year)
Free tier
1,000 emails a month, capped at 200 a day and 25 an hour until your domain is verified
Marketing
None — it's a relay
Data region
Servers worldwide, with location-specific options
What it does well
  • 30 days of log retention on every paid plan, including the $10 one.
  • $1 per extra 1,000 on Starter, dropping to $0.85 on Professional.
  • Professional at $75/mo includes a dedicated IP and email testing tools.
  • Straightforward SMTP relay that works with anything.
What to watch for
  • The free plan's hourly cap of 25 emails makes testing awkward until you verify a domain.
  • Free keeps only 5 days of logs and limits you to 2 team members.
  • No marketing side at all.
  • Phone and live chat support on free lasts 14 days.
11Hosted service

Elastic Email

Best for: High volume at a low flat rate, if you can live with the reputation risk

One of the cheapest ways to send a lot of email through a hosted product. $19/mo for 50,000 emails is roughly half what most of this list charges, and the trade is a shared sending reputation across a very price-sensitive customer base.

Starts at
Starter $19/mo for up to 50,000 emails
Free tier
1,000 contacts and 3,000 emails a month
Marketing
An email designer and contact management; not a full automation platform
Data region
United States and European Union
What it does well
  • $19/mo for 50,000 emails undercuts almost every hosted competitor.
  • Pro at $49/mo adds inbound email processing, webhooks, sub-accounts and custom rDNS.
  • Reseller features and sub-accounts make it popular with agencies.
  • Private IPs from $40/mo, cheaper than most.
What to watch for
  • Low prices attract senders whose reputation you share; warm up carefully and watch your own numbers.
  • The free plan is 1,000 contacts and 3,000 emails.
  • Starter and Pro both cap at 50,000 emails — the difference is features, not volume.
  • Support is a paid add-on for prioritised assistance.
12Hosted service

UniOne

Best for: The cheapest way to send serious volume from a hosted provider

$6 a month for 50,000 emails, and a four-month free trial at 6,000 a month before that. Nothing else in this comparison is close on price per email from a hosted service.

Starts at
Standard from $6/mo for 50,000 emails
Free tier
4 months free at 6,000 emails a month, plus 100 address validations
Marketing
Bulk sending alongside transactional; no campaign builder or segments
Data region
Multiple
What it does well
  • $6/mo for 50,000 emails works out at about $0.12 per 1,000 — SES territory, from a hosted product.
  • A four-month free trial is by far the longest here.
  • Web API, SMTP, templates and analytics included on the paid plan.
  • Overage drops to $0.30 per 1,000 at very high volume.
What to watch for
  • Very low prices attract a broad sender base on shared infrastructure; watch your own placement.
  • A dedicated IP is $40/mo plus a $20 setup fee.
  • No campaign builder, segments or automation.
  • Less well known in Western markets, with fewer public deliverability references.
13Hosted service

Loops

Best for: SaaS teams who want lifecycle email without assembling it

Contact-priced like Email Bump, with transactional sending folded in at no extra charge. Opinionated and pleasant; less of an infrastructure product than Postmark or SES.

Starts at
Paid plans are priced by subscribed contacts via a slider, not published as a fixed table
Free tier
1,000 contacts and 4,000 sends a month, with a Loops footer on your email
Marketing
Included — that's the core of the product
Data region
United States
What it does well
  • Transactional sending is included rather than billed as a second subscription.
  • Free plan is generous enough to run a small product on.
  • Genuinely quick to set up.
What to watch for
  • The free plan puts Loops branding in your footer and caps you at 10 emails/second.
  • Paid pricing lives behind a slider, which makes budgeting a guess until you sign up.
  • Thinner on raw email infrastructure — inbound, SMTP nuance, deep log retention.
FAQ

listmonk alternatives, asked and answered

What is the best listmonk alternative?

Staying open source: Mautic if you need real campaign automation, Keila if you want a European hosted option alongside the self-hosted one, Plunk if you want automation plus transactional in one AGPL codebase.

Going hosted: EmailOctopus at $9/mo is the cheapest escape, and we're the option where the transactional API comes on the same plan as the campaigns.

Can listmonk send transactional email?

It has transactional templates, and it isn't designed to be the high-volume API your application calls for receipts and resets.

Most people run listmonk for campaigns and call SES or a transactional provider directly for product email — which is two systems and two suppression lists.

Is listmonk really free?

The software is, at any list size, forever. What you pay for is the server it runs on and the SMTP provider underneath — Amazon SES at $0.16 per 1,000 is the common pairing.

What it costs that doesn't appear on an invoice is deliverability, which becomes entirely your responsibility.

When deliverability stops being fun

Campaigns and a transactional API, on managed SES

Contacts metered once, sending uncapped under fair use, with flows, segments and inbound on the same key — and someone else watching inbox placement. 5,000 contacts free.

Start free Read the API docs

Keep reading

Email Bump vs listmonkThe head-to-head, including where listmonk is the better buy.Every comparisonAll the platforms we've priced and compared, in one index.Email Bump pricingWhat contact-based pricing costs at every list size.