head to head · open source
excelize vs mailtrain
excelize has 20,918 GitHub stars, 1,949 forks, 131 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. mailtrain has 5,751 stars, 707 forks, 116 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. excelize leads on adoption by 264% (20,918 vs 5,751 stars). excelize is written in Go under BSD-3-Clause; mailtrain is written in JavaScript under GPL-3.0. excelize has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, mailtrain 12%. excelize was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| excelize | mailtrain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 21K | ★ 5.8K |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2025-10-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.9K | ⑂ 707 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick excelize if
- You weight community size — 21K stars and counting
- You want the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick mailtrain if
- You want the mailtrain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and mailtrain fits your workflow better
About excelize
Excelize is a pure Go library for reading and writing XLAM, XLSM, XLSX, XLTM and XLTX spreadsheets, built for Go developers who need to generate or parse Microsoft Excel 2007 and later workbooks directly from their own code.
read the full excelize overview →
About mailtrain
Mailtrain is a self hosted newsletter application built on Node.js (v14 or later) with MySQL (v8 or later) or MariaDB (v10 or later) as the data store. Version 2 is a complete rewrite that mostly implements all features of version 1 while adding more, so it must be installed from scratch; existing v1 databases can be backed up and reused, as Mailtrain v2 is able to upgrade the schema. The project lives in the JavaScript ecosystem and is distributed under the GPL 3.0 license, with roughly 5,752 stars, 708 forks and 116 open issues on its repository, which has been active for about ten years with the last push in O…
read the full mailtrain overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is excelize or mailtrain more popular?
excelize has 20,918 GitHub stars and mailtrain has 5,751. excelize has the larger community by that measure.
Are excelize and mailtrain free?
Both are open source. excelize is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and mailtrain under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between excelize and mailtrain?
excelize is written in Go and mailtrain 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, excelize or mailtrain?
Choose excelize if you want the larger community (20,918 stars) or its BSD-3-Clause licence terms. Choose mailtrain if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.