Ethical Newsletter Options

Earlier this year I managed to finally move my email subscribers away from Mailchimp to a self-hosted solution.

Having moved a lot of things away from big tech in recent years I’ve had moving the newsletters nagging on me for some while.

I have two email lists. One is my generic list (to which I very rarely send anything out) and the other is the 26 step challenge where subscribers can sign up to receive one of my steps to a better world every fortnight for a year.

With the way this is set up I knew I’d need to find the right solution. I couldn’t just try one thing and then switch to another one if it wasn’t satisfactory, so a fair bit of research was required.

I found a number of open source alternatives to Mailchimp which looked like they could do the job for me (plus another which was suggested by one of my subscribers – Thanks Carlos!) and in the end I opted for phplist. For anybody else looking to do similar here is the shortlist I worked from:

– phplist
Self Hosted (free) / Paid (free if you are an open source project yourself)
An open source, UK registered, self-funded and owner-managed company, with 20 years of history and a large community of contributors.

– Ecosend
Paid
They call themselves the planet’s favourite email marketing platform and offer migration from Mailchimp in seconds.

– Keila
Self Hosted (free) / Paid
Followable in The Fediverse: @keila offer easy, reliable email newsletters powered by open source, made in Germany and hosted in the EU.

– Listmonk
Self Hosted (free)
High performance one-way mailing list and newsletter manager.

– Mailtrain
Self Hosted (free)
Newsletter App Built on Top of Nodemailer.

– Mautic
Self Hosted (free) / Paid
Followable in The Fediverse: @mautic say they are the world’s largest open source marketing automation product.

– Paperboy
Self Hosted (free)
Fast, modern email campaign delivery via standard email protocol. Use any SMTP server or service.

– Sendportal
Self Hosted (free)
Open source email marketing.