head to head · open source
Listmonk vs bruin
Listmonk has 24,124 GitHub stars, 2,742 forks, 111 open issues and last shipped yesterday. bruin has 1,799 stars, 101 forks, 60 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Listmonk leads on adoption by 1,241% (24,124 vs 1,799 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 6%. 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Listmonk | bruin | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 24K | ★ 1.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Go |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.7K | ⑂ 101 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Listmonk if
- You weight community size — 24K 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. It is fast, feature rich, and packed into a single binary. It uses a PostgreSQL database as its data store. Visit listmonk.app for more info. Check out the live demo . Installation Docker The latest image is available on DockerHub at listmonk/listmonk:latest . Download and use the sample docker compose.yml. Visit See installation docs Binary Download the latest release and extract the listmonk binary. ./listmonk new config to generate config.toml. Edit it. ./listmonk install to setup the Postgres DB (or upgrade to upgrade an existing DB…
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…
read the full bruin overview →
More in Business Software
Related comparisons
More Marketing & Customer Engagement projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Marketing & Customer Engagement field.
Frequently asked questions
Is Listmonk or bruin more popular?
Listmonk has 24,124 GitHub stars and bruin has 1,799. 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 (24,124 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.