Plunk vs Postal
Plunk and Postal are both email sending and templating software. Plunk is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 5.6k GitHub stars. Postal is open source under MIT, with 17k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Plunk when
- You want one open-source tool for both product emails and newsletters on AWS SES.
- Pick Postal when
- You send large volumes of transactional email and want your own Sendgrid-style platform on your own IPs.
Side by side
An email platform for transactional email, marketing campaigns and event-triggered automations, sending through Amazon SES.
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.
Still pre-1.0, AGPL licensed, and tied to AWS SES.
Deliverability, IP reputation and abuse handling become your job.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Self-hosted server
TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis and Amazon SES
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.
5.6k GitHub stars
17k GitHub stars
Established: started 2 years ago, latest release v0.18.0.
Established: started 9 years ago, latest release 3.3.7.
Other comparisons
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Every email sending and templating product and project, ranked
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.