head to head · open source
Listmonk vs bruin
Listmonk has 23,472 GitHub stars, 2,607 forks, 111 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. bruin has 1,709 stars, 90 forks, 60 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Listmonk leads on adoption by 1,273% (23,472 vs 1,709 stars). Listmonk is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; bruin is written in Go under Apache-2.0. Listmonk has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, bruin 5%. bruin 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
| Listmonk | bruin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 1.7K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-13 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 90 |
| 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 bruin if
- You want the bruin feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and bruin 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 bruin
Bruin is a data pipeline tool that brings together data ingestion, data transformation with SQL, Python & R, and data quality into a single framework. It works with all the major data platforms and runs on your local machine, an EC2 instance, or GitHub Actions. Bruin is packed with features: 📥 ingest data with ingestr / Python ✨ run SQL, Python & R transformations on many platforms 📐 table/view materializations, incremental tables 🐍 run Python in isolated environments using uv 💅 built in data quality checks 🚀 Jinja templating to avoid repetition ✅ validate pipelines end to end via dry run 👷 run on your loca…
read the full bruin overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Listmonk or bruin more popular?
Listmonk has 23,472 GitHub stars and bruin has 1,709. Listmonk has the larger community by that measure.
Are Listmonk and bruin free?
Both are open source. Listmonk is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and bruin under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Listmonk and bruin?
Listmonk is written in Go and bruin 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 bruin?
Choose Listmonk if you want the larger community (23,472 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose bruin if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.