12 open-source free self-hosted email marketing solutions
If you are responsible for the marketing for your business nowadays, it is usually quite demanding; the budget is always stretched and it is really important to get a decent return on the money that you are investing in marketing.
Marketing can be carried out in many ways, with a host of activities, each claiming to offer the best return for your budget. With such a wide choice, it can be challenging to decide between traditional methods, like newspaper ads, flyers, trade publications, printed mail-outs, and trade shows, and modern mediums like social media and email marketing.
So, what should you do? Try all of them? Some of them? Or none? It's worth trying all methods at various times to see what works best for your business. However, one method stands out from the rest - email marketing. So, what is email marketing?
Hamza Musa
Email marketing is known for delivering a great return on investment now in this article we are going to look at.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is an electronic message to lots of people at the same time typically is done with online software, using email marketing software to do this makes the whole process easy.
nowadays you do not need to be an experienced digital marketing person or an expert with databases or a web coder to do decent email marketing. Good software will take the heavy lifting out of this for you now if you have a list.
Email marketing is a tool that lets us do two things:
- Provide value to users in the form of content.
- Direct users through each step of the customer journey or the sales funnel
Why do you need email marketing?
Not everyone is on Facebook, not everyone is on Snapchat. But everyone has an email address, and that's why this is so important.
Your email list as a marketer, or you as an entrepreneur, or as a business owner, as you grow your email list, that email list can go with you. It is a portable asset.
So there are many digital marketing channels out there that change very dramatically or they die.
Google and Facebook can change their rules all the time, different social networks can expand and contrast all the time. But email often does not change. It is not a social channel, it is a web protocol; when you are doing email marketing, you're using the SMTP protocol.
You're not using Facebook's terms of service or Goggle's terms of service; this is a really important distinction, and that's why your email list is effectively.
If you are interested in email marketing, whether as a part of your job, then you would be glad to know that there are many open-source free self-hosted email marketing solutions to use.
In this article, we’ll see 12 of them.
Open-source email marketing solutions
1- Dada Mail
Dada Mail is self-hosted, it is installs with minimal dependencies on email marketing. It is licensed under the GPL license and works on all three major operating systems (Windows, macOS, and Linux). Dada Mail written in Perl.
Among Dada mail features we can manage an email mailing list, which would save a lot of time and work, it supports archiving, viewing, searching, resending, Amazon SES, SMTP, and many other features. It comes with a web-based installer and supports click through tracking, mass mail scheduling. It also supports multiple SQL backend flavors. Dada Mail bundles all of its CPAN Perl module dependencies.
Dada Mail provides a lot of documents about how to use the software on their official website.
You can download it from the official website, or access the source code on GitHub.
2- Piler (Linux)
“Piler” is an email archiver as Docker image and initialized in 2012 as proprietary software, this program became open source in 2017 and licensed under the MIT License.
You’ll find all the basic features in any email software available in Piler as well; support archiving and retention rules, digital fingerprinting and verification, deduplication, Office 365 and has a nice GUI. It is written in pure PHP.
However, what makes Piler special is supporting several authentication methods (AD/LDAP, SSO, Google OAuth, 2 FA, IMAP, POP3). finally, there’s a demo which allows you easily to try.
Unfortunately, one of the cons of Piler is that it does not provide binaries for Windows and macOS, but just for Linux distributions.
Head for the downloads section to download it or view the source code.
3- GroupServer (Linux)
GroupServer is an open-source web-based mailing list manager, but with some additional features and differences. It supports multiple groups on a site, shares uploaded files, skinnable and customizable, and more.
Also, not all the features in the main GroupServer do appear in the other email marketing solutions. But in general, all of them do have the same basic features and user interface.
Additionally, the GroupServer provides an excellent integrated web interface, builds for most of the major Linux distributions.
You can download the program or browse the source code from the GitHub page.
groupserver4- Mailman
Mailman doesn’t focus on being a professional managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists, but instead, it’s targeting list owners to administer their lists.
Mailman making it easy for users to manage their accounts. Its user interface is quite simple, and the program itself is powered by python. It supports single user account to manage all subscription addresses, supports virtual hosting, REST-based API for the core system, support for integration with your site, and more.
The program is released under the GNU General Public License and can be downloaded along with its source code from GitLab. It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
5- phpList
Another powerful open-source self-hosted email marketing is phpList. This one is trusted by 75,000 organizations in 35 countries. essentially to just email marketing, so it’s specialized software. phpList offers a fully open-source version that you can use.
It’s very easy and quick to install, as it provides packages for all the modern operating systems.
phpList offers a very clean user interface, along with many features such as creating, sending, integrating, and analyzing email campaigns and newsletters, and much more. It’s the best solution on this list.
phpList is written in PHP and is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 license. The software is well-supported and continuously updated, and there are a lot of plugins that are provided by the parent company itself as a free and open-source tool.
You can view phpList repositories on GitHub, or learn more about them from their official website.
6- MoonMail
MoonMail is another software that comes to mind when talking about open-source email marketing solutions. MoonMail is licensed under the MIT License. The company is based in hungary and provides a GraphQL API, Client API, JavaScript SDK open-source email marketing software that is written in Javascript.
It’s also Messaging Platform that collects (Email, SMS, Voice, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Amazon (ADM), Apple (APNs), Baidu & Firebase (FCM)) all in one app. It provides to create and store recipients in lists, along with creating, edit and delete campaigns, schedule campaigns to be sent in the future feature, and has a public API to interact with the SAAS version.
MoonMail is capable of Updating the recipient status with any of the following: Unsubscribed, Bounced, Complaint-Spam, Suppression-list.
For download instructions and more information, visit MoonMail's official homepage.
7- Listmonk
Listmonk was built in the first place to be a self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager. The latest version is v1.0.0 released on 16 May 2021. Listmonk provides a very beautiful web-based user interface that you can run from inside your browser.
Listmonk is written in the Go programming language for the backend and the frontend is Vue with Buffy for UI, and It uses a PostgreSQL database as its data store. it licensed under the AGPL v3 license.
Features
Its main features are:
- Mailing lists
- Messengers
- Templating
- Performance
- Privacy
- Media manager
Listmonk is a very good option if you want to monitor the mailing list. The latest image is available on Docker Hub.
You can download it from its official GitHub repository, or learn more about it from its website.
8- Sympa
Sympa is an open-source mailing list manager software written in Perl and is released under the GPL-2.0 License.
Sympa works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Sympa's main feature over some email marketing software is that it is used to automate list management functions such as subscription, moderation, and management of archives.
Sympa also supports many languages such as Japanese, Russian, Spanish, US, and more. Sympa offers excellent documentation on its website.
You may proceed to download Sympa from its official website or Github page.
9- OpenEMM
Another email marketing solution OpenEMM is a web-based open source enterprise application for email automation and it works with professional users and is written in Java. The source code is released under the AGPL-3.0 license.
OpenEMM features a very beautifully designed web interface for interacting with the system. Through it, you can get more features than some commercial solutions such as campaign Manager, GDPR compliant, extensive search functions and filter options, unlimited user profiles, and recipients.
It also supports MySQL/ MariaDB, 2, maximum integration through direct access to the database or control via a web service interface.
OpenEMM also provides some browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox, which makes it very easy to use on daily basis. OpenEMM can be operated under Windows and Linux.
You can read more about OpenEMM or download it from its official website. The source code is available on their Github instance.
10- mautic
If you are talking about features, and you want a full-tank power email manager, then you are searching for mautic.
mautic Open source marketing automation software; marketing automation is a platform for saving time, eliminating errors, and improving efficiency for a wide range of marketing tasks across multiple channels as mautic defines. The source code is written in PHP and is released under the GNU General Public License.
Mautic enables brands to integrate all their digital properties. It also enables marketers to deliver higher-performing campaigns and content.
You can go ahead in downloading mautic for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Or learn more about it from its official website.
11- SendPortal
SendPortal is an open-source self-hosted email marketing, built on Laravel. The source code is written in PHP and is released under the MIT License.
SendPortal provides list management, campaign management, message tracking, subscriber.
SendPortal also provides some email services like Mailgun, SES, SendGrid, and Postmark. It allows you to manage your newsletters at a fraction of the cost.
To run SendPortal, your environment must meet a few minimum requirements such as PHP≥7.3, Git, Composer, MySQL (≥ 5.7), or PostgreSQL (≥ 9.4).
SendPortal provides a lot of documents about how to use the software on their official website.
12- Direct Mail for Mac
Our final software in this list is Direct Mail for Mac. It is a fully open-source email marketing app for the mac.
Direct Mail is started in 2002. It can monitor anything that comes to your mind: Email Personalization, Built-in Image Editing, Instant Preview, Drag & Drop Images, Infinitely Customizable, and more.
To learn more about Direct Mail, visit its official website.
Conclusion
As you have seen in this post so far, there are many email marketing solutions to use. But in general. If you have any other suggestions about software to add to this list, we’ll be happy to check it out.
Hamza Musa
