Listmonk vs Sendy: free and flexible, or $69 and built for SES?

Listmonk and Sendy are both small self-hosted tools for sending bulk email. Listmonk is free, written in Go, and works with any SMTP relay. Sendy is $69 per domain, written in PHP, and built around Amazon SES, with native support for three other services. The deciding question is automation: Sendy has autoresponders and Listmonk does not.

At a glance

What each one is for

Listmonk is a Go binary and a Postgres database. Import a list, write a campaign, send it through whatever relay you point it at. It is fast and it sustains high throughput on modest hardware. The API is clean. There are no drip sequences, no triggered emails, and no branching. Reporting is spare and the subscribe form is one basic embed.

Sendy is a PHP application that exists to make Amazon SES usable for marketing email. It handles bounces, complaints and unsubscribes in real time, which is the part people underestimate when they try to roll their own. It has autoresponders: a timed series that fires after someone signs up. There is no conditional branching and no behaviour triggering. The UI has not moved much in years.

The relay question

Listmonk sends through any SMTP relay: Amazon SES, Postmark, Mailgun, SendGrid, or your own server. It runs several SMTP servers at once and can pick one by the From domain. If a relay starts throttling you or raises prices, you change a setting.

Sendy is built around Amazon SES. Its site says it also works natively with SendGrid, Mailjet and Elastic Email, so you are not locked to one provider. Postmark, Mailgun and your own server are not on that list.

Bounce handling is closer than it looks. Sendy processes bounces, complaints and unsubscribes in real time. Listmonk has webhooks for SES, SendGrid and Postmark bounces, can read a POP3 bounce mailbox, and its SES setup blocklists an address after one complaint. You turn it on in Settings.

Deliverability itself is mostly the relay’s job either way. On SES, both land about the same.

Automation

Sendy wins this one, narrowly.

Sendy has autoresponders. Someone joins a list, and they get email one on day zero, email two on day three, and so on. That covers a welcome series, which is the automation most small senders want. What it cannot do is branch on behaviour. Everyone on the list gets the same sequence in the same order.

Listmonk has nothing. If you want a welcome series you write it against the API and run it from cron, and then you own that code.

If you need branching, neither tool has it. That is the gap Broadcast and Mautic fill, from opposite directions.

Cost

• Listmonk: free to license. A $5 to $20 a month VPS, plus your relay’s per-send rate.
• Sendy: $69 once, and each license covers one domain. Same VPS range, plus SES at $0.10 per 1,000 emails. The per-domain licensing is the catch. An agency running twenty clients on twenty domains pays twenty times.
• Broadcast, for comparison: $250 once, and the Extended License at $1,000 covers up to 25 servers, which is the case where per-install pricing starts to hurt.

Who should pick what

Choose Listmonk if: - You want a free tool and you are comfortable in a terminal. - You want to keep the option of changing relay later. - You are sending high volume and want throughput per dollar.

Choose Sendy if: - You are on Amazon SES and plan to stay there. - You want a signup autoresponder without writing any code. - One installation covers your whole business.

Consider Broadcast if: - You want sequences with conditional branching, not only a timed autoresponder. - You want SES, Postmark, SendGrid, Resend, Mailgun, or plain SMTP, decided by you. - You run several installs and per-install licensing is adding up. Details on Broadcast vs Listmonk and Broadcast vs Sendy.

Frequently asked

Is Listmonk free and Sendy paid?

Yes. Listmonk is AGPL and free. Sendy is $69 one-time, and each license covers one domain, so a second domain means a second license.

Can Sendy send through something other than Amazon SES?

Yes, but only a few. Sendy is built around SES and its site says it also works natively with SendGrid, Mailjet and Elastic Email. Listmonk sends through any SMTP relay.

Does Listmonk have autoresponders like Sendy?

No. Listmonk has no drip sequences or triggered emails. Sendy has timed autoresponders after signup, though without conditional branching.

Which is faster at sending?

Listmonk. It is written in Go and sustains high throughput on modest hardware. Sendy’s speed is bounded by your SES sending limits and the PHP stack underneath it.

Which one handles bounces better?

Both handle them. Sendy processes bounces and complaints in real time with no setup beyond SES. Listmonk has bounce webhooks for SES, SendGrid and Postmark and can read a POP3 bounce mailbox, but you turn bounce processing on and configure it yourself.

Can I move from Sendy to Listmonk?

Yes. Subscribers export and import as CSV. Sendy autoresponders do not transfer because Listmonk has nowhere to put them. Moving to Broadcast works the same way: CSV import with tags and custom fields intact.

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