Keila vs Mailchimp
Keila and Mailchimp are both email marketing software. Keila is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 2.3k GitHub stars. Mailchimp is a commercial product from Intuit.
Which to pick
- Pick Keila when
- You want a simple self-hosted or EU-hosted alternative to Mailchimp for newsletters.
- Pick Mailchimp when
- A small business or nonprofit wants a familiar email newsletter tool with lots of templates.
Side by side
A newsletter tool for managing contacts, signup forms and campaigns, sending through SMTP, SES, Sendgrid or Mailgun.
Email marketing with templates, audience segmentation, automations, landing pages and basic e-commerce integration, owned by Intuit.
Pre-1.0, with a small team and fewer automation features than commercial tools.
Prices have risen and the free plan has shrunk, while competitors offer more automation per dollar.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service and mobile app
Elixir, Phoenix and PostgreSQL
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Intuit
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
2.3k GitHub stars
1k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 5 years ago, latest release 0.40.1.
Not known
Other comparisons
More email marketing and newsletter software
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.