Listmonk vs Substack
Listmonk and Substack are both marketing automation software. Listmonk is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 24k GitHub stars. Substack is a commercial product from Substack Inc.
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 Substack when
- A writer wants to start a free or paid newsletter at no upfront cost and benefit from Substack's discovery network.
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.
Newsletter and blog platform with paid subscriptions, podcasts, video and a reader network and app.
You handle deliverability, bounces and sending reputation yourself; the newest line is in beta.
It takes 10 percent of paid subscription revenue, and branding and design control are limited.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service and mobile app
Go, Vue and PostgreSQL
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Substack Inc.
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.
24k GitHub stars
25k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 7 years ago, latest release v7.0.0-beta.1.
Not known
Other comparisons
More marketing automation platforms
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.