Open-source beehiiv alternatives

Ghost is a publishing platform for independent writers and media businesses. It handles blogging, newsletters, memberships and subscriptions in one product, so a creator can publish articles, email them to subscribers and charge for access without stitching several tools together.

The project is written in JavaScript and TypeScript on Node.js. The official way to get a production site running is the Ghost(Pro) managed service, which launches a site with a worldwide CDN, backups, security and maintenance handled for you, and the maintainers state that all revenue from it funds the nonprofit Ghost Foundation. If you prefer to run your own instance, a CLI tool installs Ghost locally in about a minute or on a server with automatic SSL through Let's Encrypt.

Ghost is MIT licensed and comes with official documentation, a forum and an active contributor community. It suits journalists, bloggers and publishers who want a focused publishing and membership tool rather than a general-purpose CMS.

listmonk is a self-hosted application for managing newsletters and mailing lists. It is distributed as a single binary, backed by a PostgreSQL database, and gives you a modern web dashboard for managing subscribers, lists and email campaigns. A live demo and documentation on listmonk.app let you look around before installing.

Topics show the scope: email marketing, newsletter management, campaign management, SMTP delivery, transactional emails and SMS gateway use. Installation is straightforward. With Docker you use the published image and a sample compose file and then visit port 9000. With the binary you generate a config file, run the install step to set up the database, or run an idempotent upgrade, and start the server.

Its server side is Go, while the interface is built with Vue and the Buefy component library. The project is free software under the AGPL-3.0 license, and a developer setup guide helps contributors. It suits creators, organizations and developers who want to send newsletters through their own SMTP provider without per-subscriber fees from a hosted email service.

Markdown Ninja is a Markdown-first content management system for bloggers, minimalists and startups. It lets you publish websites, blogs, documentation sites and newsletters from Markdown content, and it positions itself as the simple alternative to hacking together a static site generator, a theme, a CI/CD pipeline and a cloud platform. The project names Medium, Mailchimp and Substack as the services it replaces.

According to the README, publishing a site takes one command and getting started takes about two minutes. Topics include headless CMS, JAMstack and email. Usage documentation is at docs.markdown.ninja, while a dev folder in the repository covers development. There is also a hosted service at markdown.ninja, and the README invites you to try it for free.

The code is written in Go and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with documentation and assets under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. The copyright holder is Arcane Services, which offers other licensing terms on request. Security issues should be reported through the contact page on the project site.