Listmonk vs Postal
Listmonk and Postal are both marketing automation software. Listmonk is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 24k GitHub stars. Postal is open source under MIT, with 17k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Listmonk when
- You send newsletters to large lists and want to pay only for SMTP or SES instead of per-subscriber pricing.
- Pick Postal when
- You send large volumes of transactional email and want your own Sendgrid-style platform on your own IPs.
Side by side
A self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager in a single Go binary with PostgreSQL, handling lists, campaigns, templates, analytics and transactional mail.
A self-hosted mail delivery platform for sending and receiving email from apps over SMTP and HTTP API, with click and open tracking and webhooks.
You handle deliverability, bounces and sending reputation yourself; the newest line is in beta.
Deliverability, IP reputation and abuse handling become your job.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server (both)
Go, Vue and PostgreSQL
Ruby, Rails and MariaDB
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
24k GitHub stars
17k GitHub stars
Established: started 7 years ago, latest release v7.0.0-beta.1.
Established: started 9 years ago, latest release 3.3.7.
Other comparisons
More marketing automation platforms
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.