Self-Hosted Email Marketing: 11 Tools Compared, and How to Choose

I have been building email marketing software since 1999, and the question I get most often from people leaving a SaaS platform is some version of "which self-hosted tool should I use?" The honest answer depends on what you send, who you send it for, and how much server work you are willing to own.

This guide compares 11 self-hosted email marketing tools as of October 2026, including Octeth, the one I build. I checked every license, price and release date against the vendor's own pages and GitHub on 2026-10-03. Where Octeth is the wrong choice, I say so.

Short answer

If you need	Look at
A free, fast newsletter sender on Amazon SES or SMTP	listmonk, Sendy ($69), Keila
Full marketing automation (journeys, triggers, branching)	Mautic, Octeth
Many client accounts under your own brand, with billing	Octeth, MailWizz, Acelle Mail
High-volume sending across several delivery servers or your own IPs	Octeth, MailWizz, Acelle Mail
Email marketing inside your own Laravel app	Mailcoach, SendPortal
A mail server and bulk sender in one Docker stack	BillionMail
A plain, long-running open-source list manager	phpList

What is self-hosted email marketing?

Self-hosted email marketing software is an email marketing application you install and run on a server you control, instead of renting it as SaaS. You own the subscriber database, the sending configuration and the upgrade schedule. The software queues and personalizes your campaigns, then hands each message to a delivery server: a relay such as Amazon SES or Mailgun, or a mail transfer agent (MTA) on your own IPs.

Two things follow from that picture. First, "self-hosted" describes where the application runs, not where the email leaves from. Most self-hosted setups still relay through SES, Mailgun or SendGrid. Second, open source and self-hosted are different questions. listmonk and Mautic are both. Sendy, MailWizz and Octeth are self-hosted under a commercial license.

Self-hosted vs SaaS email marketing

Who should not self-host

If you send one newsletter to a few thousand people and nobody on your team is comfortable on a Linux server, a SaaS plan is the better deal. Self-hosting pays off at volume, when you manage email for many clients, when you need control over data location, or when a SaaS platform keeps flagging a legitimate sending program.

What self-hosting really costs

The license is usually the smallest number. A realistic monthly budget for 100,000 contacts receiving four campaigns a month (400,000 emails):

That is roughly $100 to $130 a month in infrastructure. A SaaS plan at that size usually costs several hundred dollars a month or more, as our bulk email software comparison shows. Our cost comparison shows the numbers for common platforms. The real trade is money for operating responsibility.

The 11 tools compared

Facts checked on 2026-10-03 against each vendor's site, pricing page and GitHub releases.

For agencies and resellers: client accounts and white-label

Octeth. This is the platform I build, so weigh my description accordingly. Octeth is a multi-tenant platform: one installation runs many client accounts, each with its own branding, lists, delivery servers and limits. It includes a journey builder with decision nodes, segmentation, transactional email, SMS steps inside journeys, a full API and webhooks. Sending goes through as many delivery servers as you configure (Amazon SES, Mailgun, SendGrid, PowerMTA or any SMTP server), assigned per client group and per channel: marketing, transactional and autoresponder. It runs in Docker on a clean Ubuntu server. The free Community License covers one account and up to 10,000 subscribers without white-label. Paid licenses start at $5,500 one-time, priced by the number of accounts, and we offer installation and onboarding. It is not the right tool for a single newsletter. A full multi-client setup takes two to four weeks.

MailWizz. The best-known low-cost reseller platform. The Extended license ($275 lifetime) unlocks customer accounts with price plans, billing and payment gateways, and customers can add their own delivery servers and domains. It supports unlimited delivery servers used together, plus A/B tests, autoresponders and landing pages. Each license includes one month of support. After that, support packs are sold separately. For other platforms in this class, see our MailWizz alternatives.

Acelle Mail. A Laravel application sold on CodeCanyon ($80 Regular, $220 Extended) with a visual automation designer, A/B testing and a built-in SaaS layer: plans, billing through Stripe, PayPal and others, and sending credits. It can load-balance across several sending servers, including local Postfix or Exim. It comes with six months of support.

For the three ways to sell email under your own brand and 11 options with prices, see our guide to white-label email marketing.

For newsletters: simple and low-cost

listmonk. A single Go binary with PostgreSQL that is very fast and light: the project reports a 7 million email campaign on a fraction of one CPU core. Segmentation uses SQL expressions, and it has a transactional API, roles and SSO. It has no automation journeys. With 23,000+ GitHub stars and commits this week, it is the default recommendation in most self-hosting communities, and for a developer sending a newsletter it is hard to beat.

Sendy. $69 once, per domain, built around Amazon SES so each email costs SES rates. It supports white-labeled client "brands" with their own limits, autoresponders, segmentation and an API. It runs on ordinary PHP hosting. Updates are free until the next major version. If you have outgrown it, see our Sendy alternatives.

Keila. An open-source Mailchimp alternative from Germany written in Elixir. It has a clean block editor, a visual segment editor, forms with double opt-in, bounce handling and an API. It sends through SMTP, SES, SendGrid, Mailgun or Postmark. Sub-accounts for clients are only in the hosted Keila Cloud.

phpList. One of the oldest open-source list managers, still released regularly (v3.6.17 in August 2026). It has solid bounce processing, throttling per domain, RSS-to-email and built-in Amazon SES support. The interface shows its age, and it has no automation journeys.

For marketing automation

Mautic. The open-source answer to HubSpot-style automation: a campaign builder with conditions and decisions, lead scoring, landing pages, forms, web tracking and A/B testing. It is the most capable free option and also the heaviest to run. The project recommends against shared hosting and sends one email per API request with standard transports, so plan the server and the queue.

Octeth. Octeth's journey builder covers the automation most email programs need without a separate tool. Journeys start from triggers such as list subscription and unsubscription, a tag added or removed, an email open, a link click, a custom field change, a schedule, or the API. Steps include email, SMS, waits with delivery windows, true and false decision branches, tag and field updates, moving subscribers between lists and journeys, and webhooks to external systems. Website event tracking feeds subscriber activity back in. Each client account gets its own journeys, so an agency can run automation for every client from one installation. Octeth does not do lead scoring or landing pages. If those are central to your plan, Mautic is the better fit.

For developers: embed it in your app

Mailcoach. Built by Spatie for Laravel. Install it as an app or as a package inside your own application. It covers automation workflows, segmentation, A/B tests and transactional email. The $999 license allows building it into a SaaS product. Licenses include one year of updates.

SendPortal. An MIT-licensed Laravel base with workspaces, segments and campaign reports, sending through SES, Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun or Mailjet. The last release was in April 2024, so treat it as a starting point to fork rather than a maintained product.

All-in-one: mail server plus bulk sender

BillionMail. A Docker stack bundling Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd and webmail with a campaign sender, so you can send from your own IPs without a relay. Each domain can bind one relay if you want one. It has 15,000+ GitHub stars. The last commit was in June 2026. Sending from your own IPs means the deliverability work in the next section is entirely yours.

Which self-hosted tool should you choose?

Five questions settle most decisions:

1. Do you send for other businesses? You need client accounts, per-client limits and white-label. That narrows it to Octeth, MailWizz, Acelle Mail and, for simpler cases, Sendy.
2. Do you need automation beyond autoresponders? Octeth, Mautic, Acelle Mail and Mailcoach have real journey builders. Octeth and Acelle Mail also give each client account its own.
3. Who runs the server? If nobody on your team will patch PHP, rotate backups and read bounce logs, pick a vendor that installs and supports it, or stay on SaaS.
4. How will you send? A relay like SES is the safe default. Your own IPs make sense at high volume and need warm-up and reputation management.
5. Is the project alive? Check the last release date in the table. A tool without updates will fall behind Gmail and Yahoo sender rules.

Deliverability when you self-host

Deliverability is the part self-hosting guides skip, and it is where most self-hosted programs fail. A common warning on r/selfhosted is that plain SMTP from a fresh server gets throttled and blocked within the first few thousand messages. That is accurate. What works:

1. Authenticate every sending domain. Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Gmail and Yahoo have required all three for bulk senders since February 2024, and Microsoft has required them for Outlook.com since May 2025. Our free SPF record generator, DKIM generator and DMARC generator produce the records, and the SPF and DKIM checker verifies them.
2. Use a relay unless you have a reason not to. Amazon SES, Mailgun or SendGrid give a new installation an established reputation. Every tool in this guide can send through one.
3. Warm up new IPs. A dedicated IP starts with no reputation. Ramp volume over four to six weeks, starting with your most engaged subscribers. The IP warm-up planner builds a day-by-day schedule.
4. Process bounces and complaints automatically. Suppress hard bounces and spam complaints immediately. Gmail asks bulk senders to keep the spam complaint rate below 0.3%.
5. Add one-click unsubscribe. Bulk senders must support the List-Unsubscribe header with one-click (RFC 8058).
6. Watch the reputation signals. Google Postmaster Tools and blocklist checks tell you something is wrong before your open rates do.

In Octeth, most of this is built in. Each sender domain gets its DNS records generated for you. Delivery servers are assigned per client group and per channel, so marketing, transactional and autoresponder email do not share a reputation unless you want them to. Google Postmaster data shows up inside the platform. If you would rather not run the sending side at all, we operate delivery for customers on dedicated IPs, with managed warm-up, bounce and feedback-loop processing, and blocklist monitoring.

What setting up a self-hosted platform involves

1. A clean Linux server sized for your list. Plan on 4 vCPU and 8 GB RAM for about 100,000 subscribers. Our guide to choosing a VPS for email marketing compares 14 providers by port 25 policy and price.
2. The application install, a database, a queue worker and scheduled jobs.
3. DNS for sending, tracking and bounce domains.
4. A delivery server: relay credentials, or an MTA with warmed-up IPs.
5. Bounce and complaint processing wired back into the application.
6. Backups, monitoring and a plan for applying updates.

A developer can get listmonk or Sendy running in an afternoon. A multi-client platform with custom domains, several delivery servers and migrated lists is a project of a few weeks, which is why we do the installation with our customers.

Where Octeth fits

Octeth is built for two groups: digital agencies running email for many clients under their own brand, and high-volume senders who have outgrown SaaS pricing or policies. You get one perpetual license priced by the number of user accounts and installations (from $790), white-label down to the domain, and delivery through whatever infrastructure you choose. What that includes:

1. Multi-client accounts with their own branding, lists, limits and delivery servers.
2. Journeys with email and SMS steps, decision branches, waits and webhooks.
3. Delivery routing across Amazon SES, Mailgun, SendGrid, PowerMTA or any SMTP server, per client and per channel.
4. A full API and webhooks, plus an MCP server that connects an installation to Claude.
5. Installation, onboarding and support from the team that builds it.

It has been in production since 1999, with 20,000+ installations in 138 countries. We also offer an Octeth-operated delivery service with dedicated IPs if you do not want to run the sending side.

If you are one person sending your own newsletter, listmonk or Sendy will serve you better for less money. If you want to try Octeth on your own server first, the Community License is free.

Frequently asked questions