BenchRank
#11 in Email & Lifecycle MarketingUpdated 2026-08

listmonk

by Listmonk · Self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager in a single binary

BenchRank score

30.5 — BenchRank score out of 100

Screenshots of listmonk

Homepage · listmonk

Homepage of listmonk

Overview

listmonk is a self-hosted newsletter, mailing list and transactional e-mail manager shipped as a single binary backed by Postgres. It manages single and double opt-in lists, segments subscribers with SQL expressions, and sends through multi-threaded, rate-limited SMTP queues. Campaigns, templates, analytics and messenger webhooks are covered by its API.

Best for
Teams that can self-host Postgres and want to run newsletters and transactional e-mail in-house.
Pricing
No prices are shown; the software is free and open source under AGPLv3, so the cost is your own hosting and SMTP.
Runs on
Self-hosted

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

  • Free and open source under AGPLv3
  • Single binary plus Postgres; low CPU and memory use
  • SQL segmentation over single and double opt-in lists
  • Templates via drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG, Markdown or raw HTML

Trade-offs

  • Self-hosted only: you run Postgres, SMTP and upgrades yourself
  • AGPLv3 may rule it out for embedding in proprietary products
  • No hosted plan from the project; listed providers are unaffiliated
  • Dynamic templating relies on Go template syntax and functions

How listmonk markets itself

A structured read of the promise, proof and page design on listmonk’s captured homepage.

Homepage capture

“Self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager”

  • Angle: Open source / ownership
  • Hero: Product screenshot

Pricing

Published plans and prices from listmonk’s own pricing page.

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

  • MCP support

    Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.

  • API quality

    Public API surface: machine-readable spec, official SDKs, documented auth, errors, rate limits and versioning.

  • Documentation

    Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.

  • Agent friendliness

    How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.

  • Changelog

    A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.

  • Marketing site structure

    Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.

  • Page speed

    How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.

  • Operational trust

    Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

  • Openness

    Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.

  • Maintenance

    Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.

This doesn’t look right — report a problem with listmonk’s score

Where this comes from

The listmonk pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.

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