head to head · open source
Listmonk vs mailtrain
Listmonk has 23,471 GitHub stars, 2,604 forks, 111 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. mailtrain has 5,751 stars, 707 forks, 116 open issues and last shipped 12 months ago. Listmonk leads on adoption by 308% (23,471 vs 5,751 stars). Listmonk is written in Go under AGPL-3.0; mailtrain is written in JavaScript under GPL-3.0. Listmonk has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, mailtrain 12%. Listmonk was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (email-marketing), 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 | mailtrain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 23K | ★ 5.8K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Go | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-13 | 2025-10-05 |
| Forks | ⑂ 2.6K | ⑂ 707 |
| 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 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 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 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 Listmonk or mailtrain more popular?
Listmonk has 23,471 GitHub stars and mailtrain has 5,751. Listmonk has the larger community by that measure.
Are Listmonk and mailtrain free?
Both are open source. Listmonk is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and mailtrain under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Listmonk and mailtrain?
Listmonk 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, Listmonk or mailtrain?
Choose Listmonk if you want the larger community (23,471 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose mailtrain if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.