Listmonk
FreeSelf-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager. Manage millions of subscribers, send campaigns, track opens and clicks. The open-source Mailchimp alternative.
How to install Listmonk as a PWA
Frequently asked questions about Listmonk
What makes Listmonk different from Mailchimp or Brevo?
Listmonk is self-hosted and unbundles the email-sending engine (you pick SES, Postmark, SendGrid) from the campaign manager. Mailchimp and Brevo bundle both at a steep markup — Mailchimp charges roughly $20-$300/month for 5,000-100,000 subscribers, while Listmonk + SES costs roughly $1-$10/month at the same scale. Mailchimp wins on polished templates and onboarding; Listmonk wins on cost, SQL-based segmentation and data ownership. Listmonk also has no AI features and a more spartan template editor.
Is Listmonk free?
Listmonk is fully free and AGPL-3.0 licensed — no paid tier, no enterprise upsell. The only cost is the SMTP relay (SES, Postmark, etc.) and the $5-$20/month VPS to run the Go binary. There is no hosted version — every Listmonk deployment is self-hosted, which is also its main friction point for non-technical users.
How does Listmonk compare to keila or Mautic?
Keila is a newer Elixir-based open-source ESP with a cleaner template editor but a smaller community. Mautic is a heavier Symfony PHP platform that bundles marketing automation (lead scoring, workflows) — much more than a newsletter tool. Listmonk sits in the middle: lightweight, fast, focused on newsletters and transactional list management. For pure newsletter sending at high volume, Listmonk is the best-supported choice in 2026.
Can Listmonk handle millions of subscribers?
Yes — Listmonk's Go core is built for high-throughput campaign sending. Public benchmarks and user reports cite single-instance deployments managing 5-10 million subscribers and sending 1M+ emails per campaign without trouble. The bottleneck is almost always the upstream SMTP relay's rate limit, not Listmonk itself. The Postgres database handles segmentation queries with SQL, which scales well with proper indexes.
Is Listmonk GDPR-compliant for EU senders?
Listmonk supports the GDPR primitives: double opt-in, granular unsubscribe links, exportable user data and bulk delete via the admin UI and API. Because Listmonk is self-hosted, you decide the data residency (host it on a European VPS for EU-resident data). The combination of self-hosting plus a European SES region (Ireland or Frankfurt) is a common GDPR-strict setup for EU newsletter operators.
Where Listmonk is heading (12-24 months)
- →A polished drag-drop template editor (current editor is HTML/text-focused) would unlock the non-technical-marketer segment.
- →Built-in AI subject-line and content suggestions would close the feature gap with Mailchimp AI.
- →An optional hosted version (Listmonk Cloud) would let non-DevOps users access the platform without infra work.
Related questions
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini usually suggest these next.
- How do I install Listmonk with Docker and Postgres?
- How do I connect Listmonk to Amazon SES?
- Can Listmonk replace Brevo for transactional emails?
- How does Listmonk handle bounce and complaint feedback?
- What are the deliverability best-practices when self-hosting Listmonk?
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