Open-source Kit (ConvertKit) 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.

BillionMail is an open-source platform that combines a mail server with newsletter and email marketing tools. It is meant for businesses and individuals who want to send newsletters, promotional email, or transactional messages themselves instead of paying monthly fees to a marketing service. It is written in Go and released under the AGPL-3.0 license.

Under the hood it relies on established components, with topics naming Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, and SMTP. The product adds campaign creation and sending, advanced analytics, and customer management on top, and the README promotes a quick three-step setup. Documentation is available in several languages and there is a Discord community.

Running your own mail infrastructure involves deliverability work such as DNS records and sender reputation, which the README does not detail. It suits developers, small businesses, and communities that want control over their email lists and sending, and that are willing to host and maintain the server.

Notifuse is a modern, self-hosted emailing platform for sending newsletters and transactional email at a fraction of the cost of hosted services. It is built with Go and React and presented as an open-source alternative to Mailchimp, Brevo, Mailjet, Listmonk, MailerLite, and Klaviyo. The input lists its license only as other.

Email marketing features include a drag-and-drop visual builder with MJML components and live preview, campaign scheduling, A/B testing of subject lines, content, and send times, list segmentation, and contact profiles with custom fields. Automations use a visual canvas with nodes for delays, emails, branches, filters, list changes, A/B tests, and webhooks, and Liquid templating personalizes messages. Messages are sent through seven providers, with topics naming Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark, and SendGrid.

For people who prefer not to run it themselves, Notifuse Cloud offers managed hosting, which the README says starts at 16 dollars per month, and a live demo is available. It suits marketers and developers who want lower costs and control over subscriber data.

Mailtrain is a newsletter application that you host on your own server. It manages subscriber lists and sends email campaigns to them, so you keep control of your audience data instead of relying on a third-party sending service. Version 2 is a complete rewrite of the original release.

Core features include subscriber list management with segmentation and custom fields, email templates including MJML-based ones, and custom reports. Automation covers triggered campaigns and RSS campaigns. Several users can work in the same installation with granular permissions and flexible sharing, and hierarchical namespaces help in larger organizations. A built-in Zone-MTA mail transfer agent reduces the setup needed for delivery.

Mailtrain is licensed under GPL-3.0 and runs on Node.js with MySQL or MariaDB. It exposes separate trusted, sandbox and public URL endpoints, which the project recommends mapping to three DNS names on one server, to reduce cross-site scripting risk in multi-user setups. Version 2 needs a fresh installation, though the database can be upgraded. The project suggests at least 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM.

phpList is an email marketing manager for creating, sending and analyzing email campaigns and newsletters. Organizations use it to manage subscriber lists, personalize messages and track results from a web or command-line interface, rather than relying on a third-party newsletter platform.

Capabilities include real-time analytics on message responses and subscriber behavior, segmentation, content personalization based on subscriber attributes, message-queue management with throttling across accounts and campaigns, and automated bounce processing with policy and regex rules. You can schedule, pause, resume, repeat and requeue campaigns, import and export subscribers by CSV or Excel, attach files, and send web pages or RSS feed contents. Amazon SES is supported, and the plugin architecture and APIs allow integration.

phpList is written in PHP and licensed under AGPL-3.0. You can deploy it on your own server, or sign up for a hosted account at phplist.com, which the README describes as free to start with. A demo and a community are linked from the repository.

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.