Email Marketing · head to head
Keila vs Sailthru
Keila
Email Marketing
AGPL newsletter tool from Germany, self-hostable or hosted in the EU with no free plan
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
Sailthru
Email Marketing
Retail and publisher email personalisation, now one product inside the Marigold portfolio
- From
- On request
- Rated
- -
The short version
- Only Keila has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
- Each has a real cost: Keila there is no free hosted plan at all, stated as deliberate policy, so unlike almost every competitor there is no way to run a small list at zero cost without self-hosting it yourself.; Sailthru the product sits in a portfolio with several overlapping platforms under one owner, so roadmap investment is a portfolio decision rather than a product decision and is worth asking about in writing.
- They diverge on capability: Keila covers Priced by emails sent, Sailthru covers Interest profiles.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Keila and Sailthru actually diverge.
Identical on both: user rating (Not yet rated), category (Email Marketing).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Keila
- Priced by emails sent
- Bring your own sender
- Self-hosting
- EU hosting
- Sign-up forms
- Segmentation
- Markdown and block editor
- Multiple projects
Only in Sailthru
- Interest profiles
- Personalisation engine
- Prediction Manager
- Site personalisation
- Zephyr templating
- Lifecycle optimiser
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Keila
- A membership organisation holding forty thousand contacts but sending only one newsletter a month, where contact-metered pricing would cost many times morenot Sailthru
- A European publisher or public body that needs subscriber data held in the EU under a GDPR-friendly arrangementnot Sailthru
- A technical team that wants to self-host its newsletter tool and route sending through its existing AWS SES accountnot Sailthru
- An agency running several separate client lists that does not want to pay per project or per additional listnot Sailthru
Sailthru
- A publisher sending a personalised daily newsletter assembled per reader from a content cataloguenot Keila
- A retailer that wants email and on-site recommendations driven by the same affinity modelnot Keila
- High-cadence sending where per-recipient content assembly matters more than journey branchingnot Keila
- Teams that want churn and lifetime value scores available as native campaign conditions rather than imported fieldsnot Keila
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Keila
- There is no free hosted plan at all, stated as deliberate policy, so unlike almost every competitor there is no way to run a small list at zero cost without self-hosting it yourself.
- Marketing automation is minimal, with none of the behavioural triggers, journey builders or e-commerce revenue attribution that Klaviyo, Brevo and Mailchimp treat as table stakes.
- The self-hosted route puts deliverability entirely on you: reputation, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warm-up and bounce handling are your problem, and a badly configured instance will land in spam folders.
- It is a small project from a small company, so the integration ecosystem is thin and there is no partner network, template marketplace or large body of community expertise to draw on.
- Email volume tiers step in fixed blocks, so an organisation whose sending is uneven across the year either overbuys at the annual peak or has to change plan repeatedly.
Sailthru
- The product sits in a portfolio with several overlapping platforms under one owner, so roadmap investment is a portfolio decision rather than a product decision and is worth asking about in writing.
- Pricing counts stored profiles, so retained inactive readers keep costing money long after they stopped opening anything.
- On-site personalisation requires a developer to implement the JavaScript and maintain the content feed, which puts the highest-value feature behind engineering time.
- Zephyr is a proprietary templating language, so template maintenance skills are scarce compared with the Liquid syntax used by most competitors.
- It is built for high-cadence content and retail sending, and B2B lifecycle programmes with long sales cycles sit poorly on the model.
Pricing, plan by plan
Keila
Free- Self-hostedFree
- AGPL-3.0-or-later licence with no fee
- Official Docker image and sample compose file
- You supply hosting and a sending backend
- Keila XS$8/month
- Two thousand emails per month
- Unlimited contacts and projects
- Send with Keila or bring your own email server
- Keila M$32/month
- Fifteen thousand emails per month
- Unlimited contacts and projects
- Sign-up forms and segmentation
- Keila XXL$256/month
- Two hundred and fifty thousand emails per month
- Unlimited contacts and projects
- Intermediate tiers at 16, 64 and 128 EUR for 5,000, 50,000 and 100,000 emails
Sailthru
On request- Sailthru$undefined/year
- Priced on stored profiles and send volume
- Site personalisation and prediction features licensed by module
- Annual contract through Marigold
Which should you pick?
Choose Keila if
- You need priced by emails sent.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Web, Linux, Self-hosted.
- You also want bring your own sender.
Choose Sailthru if
- You need interest profiles.
- You work on Web, REST API.
- You also want personalisation engine.
Questions people ask
- Is Keila or Sailthru better?
- Neither clearly leads. Keila starts at Free and Sailthru at On request, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Keila or Sailthru?
- Keila has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at Free for Keila and On request for Sailthru.
- Does Keila or Sailthru run on more platforms?
- Keila runs on Web, Linux, Self-hosted. Sailthru runs on Web, REST API.
- Can I use Keila for free?
- Yes. Keila has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Sailthru starts at On request.
- What is Keila best used for?
- Keila is most often used for a membership organisation holding forty thousand contacts but sending only one newsletter a month, where contact-metered pricing would cost many times more, a european publisher or public body that needs subscriber data held in the eu under a gdpr-friendly arrangement, a technical team that wants to self-host its newsletter tool and route sending through its existing aws ses account, an agency running several separate client lists that does not want to pay per project or per additional list. Of those, a membership organisation holding forty thousand contacts but sending only one newsletter a month, where contact-metered pricing would cost many times more and a european publisher or public body that needs subscriber data held in the eu under a gdpr-friendly arrangement are not what Sailthru is typically brought in for.
- What can Keila do that Sailthru cannot?
- Keila covers Priced by emails sent, Bring your own sender, Self-hosting, EU hosting. Sailthru covers Interest profiles, Personalisation engine, Prediction Manager, Site personalisation.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Keila: Is Keila free?
The software is, under AGPL-3.0-or-later, if you self-host. The hosted service has no free plan by deliberate policy and starts at 8 EUR a month.
Sailthru: Who owns Sailthru now?
Marigold, formerly CM Group, which also owns Campaign Monitor, Emma, Selligent, Liveclicker and Cheetah Digital.
Keila: How is the hosted service priced?
By emails sent, from 8 EUR for two thousand up to 256 EUR for two hundred and fifty thousand a month. Contacts and projects are unlimited on every tier.
Sailthru: Does that affect the roadmap?
It can. Overlapping products in one portfolio compete for investment, so ask which platform is the strategic one for your segment before signing multi-year.
Keila: Can I use my own email provider?
Yes. AWS SES, Sendgrid, Mailgun, Postmark, generic SMTP or a personal inbox are all supported as sending backends.
Sailthru: Is it worth it just for newsletters?
For personalised daily newsletters at publisher scale it remains one of the strongest options. For simple broadcast sending it is heavily over-specified.
Keila: Are there discounts?
Pentacent offers reduced rates to nonprofits and open source projects on request.
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