Overview

Keila is a 100% open source newsletter tool for managing contact lists and sending personalised email campaigns. Written in Elixir and distributed as an official Docker image, it is developed in Germany and can be self-hosted on your own server, with an optional managed Keila Cloud hosted entirely on European infrastructure. There are no proprietary premium features — everything the maintained product can do is available in the open source release.

Key Features

• Four ways to write: Visual block editor, Markdown with a WYSIWYG mode, fully custom MJML layouts, or plain-text email
• Form builder: Build sign-up forms with custom fields (checkboxes, text fields, dropdowns) and embed them on your site
• Spam protection: Double opt-in (confirmed opt-in) plus hCaptcha and Friendly Captcha on sign-up forms
• Segmentation: Visual segment editor and a segment language for complex targeting by tags or contact data
• Personalisation: Liquid template language with a per-contact JSON data object, so campaigns can be fully dynamic
• Privacy-first analytics: Click and open tracking that can be switched off entirely, collecting only what is necessary
• Deliverability: Automatic bounce and complaint handling
• Bring your own sending: SMTP, Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark or Sendgrid
• Transactional email: Send one-off messages such as order confirmations and password resets through the API
• Full REST API and CSV import/export: Integrate with a CMS or CRM and move lists in and out

Why Use It

Keila is the privacy-conscious answer to Mailchimp and Brevo. It is genuinely, completely open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence — there is no paid tier holding features back — and it is built so that respecting subscribers is the default rather than an add-on: tracking can be disabled, new sign-ups are protected by captcha and double opt-in, and unsubscribe and confirmation links include an extra verification step so mail scanners cannot trigger them by accident. Self-hosting is a single Docker service, and because sending is delegated to your own SMTP provider, running costs scale with emails sent rather than with the size of your list.

Use Cases

• Running a self-hosted newsletter for a blog, project or community without per-subscriber fees
• Replacing Mailchimp, Brevo or Substack-style hosted services with infrastructure you control
• Privacy-sensitive organisations and EU-based teams that need contact data to stay in Europe
• Developer and creator newsletters that need Liquid-templated, data-driven personalisation

Platforms

Self-hosted via official Docker image (Elixir/Phoenix; PostgreSQL); a managed Keila Cloud service is also available.

Licence

Open Source — GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0).

Website

https://www.keila.io/

Alternatives

• Listmonk — self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager in a single Go binary (AGPL-3.0)
• Mautic — full open source marketing automation platform (GPL-3.0)
• Browse all self-hosted tools — the full TWiF directory