Mailchimp

Mailchimp has been the go-to email marketing platform for years, but Intuit's acquisition brought aggressive pricing changes — the Standard plan starts at $20/month for just 500 contacts, and costs escalate quickly as your list grows. A 10,000-subscriber list can cost $100-150/month, and features like advanced segmentation and A/B testing are locked behind premium tiers.

Listmonk is a self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager built in Go — it handles campaigns, subscriber management, templating, and analytics while connecting to any SMTP provider (Amazon SES, Postmark, or your own mail server). Its performance is exceptional: Listmonk can send millions of emails with minimal server resources. Mautic provides a fuller marketing automation suite with email campaigns, landing pages, lead scoring, contact management, and multi-channel marketing flows.

The economic argument is clear. Listmonk + Amazon SES ($0.10 per 1,000 emails) costs roughly $10/month to send 100,000 emails to a 10,000-subscriber list. The same volume on Mailchimp's Standard plan runs $150+/month. For high-volume senders, the savings compound dramatically.

The trade-off is convenience. Mailchimp provides drag-and-drop email builders, pre-designed templates, built-in landing pages, and social media integrations out of the box. Listmonk focuses on the email sending engine — you'll design templates yourself or use simple HTML/Markdown. For technically capable teams comfortable with basic HTML email templates, Listmonk is a fraction of the cost with no subscriber limits.