head to head · open source
Listmonk vs Billion Mail
Listmonk has 23,471 GitHub stars, 2,604 forks, 111 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. Billion Mail has 15,611 stars, 1,702 forks, 236 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Listmonk leads on adoption by 50% (23,471 vs 15,611 stars). Listmonk is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; Billion Mail is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Listmonk has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, Billion Mail 11%. Listmonk was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 3 topic tags (email-marketing, newsletter, smtp), 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
| Listmonk | Billion Mail | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 16K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-13 | 2026-06-11 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Listmonk if
- You weight community size — 23K 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 Billion Mail if
- You want the Billion Mail feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and Billion Mail fits your workflow better
About Listmonk
Listmonk is a standalone, self hosted newsletter and mailing list manager in the open source business software and marketing customer engagement ecosystem. It packages campaign management, subscriber management, and email delivery controls into a single binary application with a modern dashboard, and it uses PostgreSQL as its data store.
read the full Listmonk overview →
About Billion Mail
BillionMail is an open source mail server and email marketing platform written in Go and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. It lives in the self hosted email ecosystem and is described as a solution for newsletters, promotional emails, and transactional messages. The project combines mail server topics such as Postfix, Dovecot, Rspamd, and SMTP with campaign features such as customer management, analytics, templates, and sending control.
read the full Billion Mail overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Listmonk or Billion Mail more popular?
Listmonk has 23,471 GitHub stars and Billion Mail has 15,611. Listmonk has the larger community by that measure.
Are Listmonk and Billion Mail free?
Both are open source. Listmonk is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Billion Mail under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Listmonk and Billion Mail?
Listmonk is written in Go and Billion Mail in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Listmonk or Billion Mail?
Choose Listmonk if you want the larger community (23,471 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose Billion Mail if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.