listmonk vs Mautic

Listmonk and Mautic both replace Mailchimp, and both are listed on our site as self-hosted alternatives to it, but they are not the same kind of tool. Listmonk is a newsletter and mailing-list manager: one Go binary and PostgreSQL, with subscriber lists, campaigns, templates and mail sent through your own SMTP servers. Mautic is a marketing-automation platform: contact and company records, segments, landing pages and forms, email campaigns and visual campaign workflows, with lead scoring and tracking, and our site lists HubSpot as well as Mailchimp among the SaaS tools it can replace. If you mostly send newsletters, you want the first. If you nurture leads, you want the second.

A mailing list vs a marketing platform

Listmonk is Go and Vue on PostgreSQL, licensed AGPL-3.0. Its scope is deliberately narrow: lists, campaigns, templates and transactional mail. That scope is why it is small.

Mautic is PHP on Symfony and MySQL, licensed GPL-3.0-or-later. It tracks who a contact is and what they did, then lets you build campaign workflows from that. The wider scope is why it needs more moving parts.

Moving parts

Listmonk's official Compose file starts the app and Postgres, and runs its database install step on first start. You open port 9000 and create the Super Admin user. We rate it 2 out of 5.

Mautic's example Compose is larger: a MySQL database plus three Mautic containers from the same image, one for the web app, one for cron and one for the queue worker. Ours is adapted from the official docker-mautic "basic" example, pinned to a version, and you finish setup in a web installer on port 8080. We rate it 3 out of 5. Both paths passed verification on Ubuntu 26.04.

What it costs to run

Our minimum RAM figures are estimates: 512 MB for listmonk and 2 GB for Mautic. Measured idle on a GCP e2-standard-2 box, listmonk used about 66 MB and Mautic about 456 MB. Disk was around 0.5 GB against 4.4 GB. That is a sevenfold gap in idle memory, and on a small VPS it decides how many other things you can run beside the mailer.

Neither number includes sending. Both rely on a mail-sending service you configure, so deliverability, authentication records and sending limits are outside this comparison.

Which to choose

Choose listmonk if the job is newsletters and announcement lists, you want a tiny footprint and a two-container install, and you are happy with campaigns, templates and lists as the model.

Choose Mautic if you need segmentation driven by behaviour, landing pages, forms and multi-step campaign workflows with lead scoring, and you have the RAM and patience for a larger stack.

Related

For a lighter newsletter alternative, see Keila vs listmonk. Step-by-step setup for Mautic is in the Mautic deploy guide, and app pages are listmonk and Mautic. The SaaS side is covered in Mailchimp alternatives and HubSpot alternatives.