Listmonk, the alternative to Mailchimp
What is the point of theses tools ?
Discover two tools designed for collecting email lists and sending bulk emails. Explore their features, benefits, and find the right solution for your mass email needs.
Where to find them ?
MailChimp an "all-in-one" tool
MailChimp is an "all-in-one" tool. It includes mail servers, automation, data collection, registration forms... Almost nothing is missing.
Listmonk, a tool focused on emails.
Listmonk doesn't burden itself with all the features of automation or a WYSIWYG editor (which would still be nice). But what it does, it does well, and most importantly, it uses external mail servers.
On the financial side:
In terms of pricing, Listmonk is unbeatable since it is free. Even when factoring in the costs of servers and mail server providers, Mailchimp's prices remain much higher.
With a user base of 10,000 users and an average of 5 emails per person per month:
MailChimp, as of December 3, 2023, costs €125/month.
Assuming you use Amazon SES for emails (€0.09/1k emails), MailChimp would cost you €4.5 per month.
Your infrastructure costs (solely dedicated to Listmonk) would need to exceed €120 per month for MailChimp to be more cost-effective.
It's evident that in terms of savings, Listmonk can be highly beneficial, especially considering that with Listmonk, your subscriber lists are unlimited.
How to Address Listmonk's Feature Gaps:
As mentioned earlier, Listmonk lacks user journey automation or automatic email sending capabilities. However, with a self-hosted n8n, you can easily create more advanced automations without the need for coding.
Below is an example of an n8n-listmonk automation workflow. This workflow is triggered by a webhook call, retrieves user information from the database, creates the user in the listmonk database if necessary, and then sends them an email.
In the following example, this workflow allows scheduling the sending of a transactional email to a user in n days|hours|minutes.
While Listmonk may lack the WYSIWYG editor found in MailChimp, a few email templates are likely to suffice. You can easily acquire them for a few euros, compensating for this specific feature gap.
You can find the n8n listmonk node in this npm package
How to install Listmonk ?
The Listmonk installation page is comprehensive, but here's a quick summary:
If you don't already have a PostgreSQL database, you can use the following command:
mkdir listmonk && cd listmonk
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/knadh/listmonk/master/install-prod.sh)"
If you already have a database, just launch a container with the associated configuration.
How to Integrate Listmonk into Your Infrastructure:
Here's a diagram that consolidates all the previous elements to provide an example of how to integrate Listmonk into your tools.
