head to head · open source
Listmonk vs dbt
Listmonk has 23,471 GitHub stars, 2,604 forks, 111 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. dbt has 13,851 stars, 2,567 forks, 1,534 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Listmonk leads on adoption by 69% (23,471 vs 13,851 stars). Listmonk is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; dbt is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. Listmonk has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, dbt 19%. dbt 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 8884 open source comparisons
Side by side
| Listmonk | dbt | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 14K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-13 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 2.6K |
| 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 dbt if
- You want the dbt feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and dbt 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 dbt
dbt is an open source data transformation framework that lets data analysts and engineers transform their data using the same practices software engineers use to build applications, and it is aimed at analytics teams that model data inside a warehouse.
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 dbt more popular?
Listmonk has 23,471 GitHub stars and dbt has 13,851. Listmonk has the larger community by that measure.
Are Listmonk and dbt free?
Both are open source. Listmonk is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and dbt under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Listmonk and dbt?
Listmonk is written in Go and dbt in Rust. 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 dbt?
Choose Listmonk if you want the larger community (23,471 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose dbt if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.