head to head · open source
BillionMail vs mailcheap
BillionMail has 15,912 GitHub stars, 1,751 forks, 239 open issues and last shipped 4 months ago. mailcheap has 933 stars, 233 forks, 8 open issues and last shipped today. BillionMail leads on adoption by 1,605% (15,912 vs 933 stars). BillionMail is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; mailcheap is written in JavaScript under AGPL-3.0. BillionMail has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, mailcheap 25%. mailcheap was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (email, newsletter), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| BillionMail | mailcheap | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 933 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-06-11 | 2026-10-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.8K | ⑂ 233 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick BillionMail if
- You weight community size — 16K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick mailcheap if
- You want the mailcheap feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and mailcheap fits your workflow better
About BillionMail
BillionMail is an open source mail server, newsletter, and email marketing platform that runs entirely on infrastructure the operator controls. It is written in Go and released under the AGPL 3.0 license, and it lives in the self hosted email and marketing ecosystem alongside the mail transfer and delivery components it bundles, including Postfix, Dovecot, and Rspamd. The project ships as a complete stack rather than a single binary, combining a sending server, a campaign manager, and a webmail client so that one deployment covers transactional mail, promotional campaigns, and newsletters.
read the full BillionMail overview →
About mailcheap
MailCheap is an open source newsletter application in JavaScript — dashboard, public archive, REST API and MCP server in one Next.js app — for writers, teams and agent builders who want to keep their subscriber list in their own database and pay a sending provider per email instead of paying a platform per subscriber.
read the full mailcheap overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is BillionMail or mailcheap more popular?
BillionMail has 15,912 GitHub stars and mailcheap has 933. BillionMail has the larger community by that measure.
Are BillionMail and mailcheap free?
Both are open source. BillionMail is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and mailcheap under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between BillionMail and mailcheap?
BillionMail is written in Go and mailcheap in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, BillionMail or mailcheap?
Choose BillionMail if you want the larger community (15,912 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose mailcheap if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.