Keilavs
MailerLite
MailerLite: A far larger feature set with automation and a free tier, if you accept contact-based pricing and non-EU hosting
Keila
AGPL newsletter tool from Germany, self-hostable or hosted in the EU with no free plan
As of 31 August 2026, Keila has a free plan and paid plans start at €8/month. An open source Elixir newsletter platform priced by emails sent rather than contacts, so a large list emailed rarely costs almost nothing. Softwr lists it under Email Marketing. Keila is made by Pentacent, available on Web, Linux, Self-hosted.
Overview
What Keila does
Keila is an open source newsletter tool built in Elixir and Phoenix by Pentacent in Germany, licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later. It handles campaigns, sign-up forms, contact segmentation and templates, and can send either through Keila hosted infrastructure or through your own sending backend: AWS SES, Sendgrid, Mailgun, Postmark, a plain SMTP server or a personal inbox. Self-hosting is supported with an official Docker image and sample compose file. The pricing shape is the differentiator. Hosted plans run from eight euros a month for two thousand emails up to two hundred and fifty six euros for two hundred and fifty thousand, and every tier includes unlimited contacts and unlimited projects. Almost every competitor meters contacts, which punishes organisations that hold a large list and send to it monthly. A nonprofit with forty thousand members sending one newsletter a month is charged on the forty thousand emails, not on holding forty thousand records, and that inverts the usual bill. Pentacent has also written publicly that it will not offer a free plan, on the reasoning that free plans are either marketing spend or a sign that the user is the product. Buyers are European organisations with GDPR concerns, privacy-focused publishers and technical teams that want to self-host. The trade-off is a small product with none of the automation, e-commerce integration or deliverability tooling of a Mailchimp or Klaviyo.
What people use it 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
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about 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.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Keila
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- KeilavsEmailOctopus
EmailOctopus: Cheap sending that also lets you route through your own AWS SES account, without self-hosting
- KeilavsBrevo
Brevo: If you need marketing automation, SMS and transactional email alongside newsletters
Pricing
What Keila costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Self-hosted
Free
- AGPL-3.0-or-later licence with no fee
- Official Docker image and sample compose file
- You supply hosting and a sending backend
- Paid setup assistance available from Pentacent
Keila XS
€8 /mo
- Two thousand emails per month
- Unlimited contacts and projects
- Send with Keila or bring your own email server
- Hosted in the European Union
Keila M
€32 /mo
- Fifteen thousand emails per month
- Unlimited contacts and projects
- Sign-up forms and segmentation
- Discounts available for nonprofits and open source projects on request
Keila XXL
€256 /mo
- 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
- No free hosted plan is offered by design
Capabilities
Features
Priced by emails sent
Unlimited contacts and projects on every hosted tier
Bring your own sender
Send via AWS SES, Sendgrid, Mailgun, Postmark, SMTP or a personal inbox
Self-hosting
AGPL-3.0-or-later with an official Docker image and compose sample
EU hosting
Built and hosted in the European Union for GDPR-sensitive organisations
Sign-up forms
Embeddable double opt-in forms with custom fields
Segmentation
Contact filtering and targeted campaign sends
Markdown and block editor
Campaign composition without HTML wrangling
Multiple projects
Separate lists and branding within one account at no extra cost
Discounts
Reduced rates available for open source projects and nonprofits on request
Elixir and Phoenix stack
Runs comfortably on modest self-hosted infrastructure
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
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.
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.
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.
Are there discounts?
Pentacent offers reduced rates to nonprofits and open source projects on request.
Keep looking
Where to go from Keila
- Keila alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Keila pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Keila badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Email Marketing softwareThe full category
- Best Email Marketing softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Email Marketing software for
Compare Keila with
- MailerLite
- Brevo
- EmailOctopus
- Listmonk
- Sendy
- Zoho Campaigns
- Campaign Monitor
- Amazon SES
- Dotdigital
- Moosend
- Ortto
- ActiveCampaign
- SAP Emarsys
- GetResponse
- Loops
- Mailjet
- Listmonk
- Dotdigital
Other Email Marketing software
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Open source12 researched notesUK-listed email and cross-channel marketing platform with deep Adobe Commerce and Dynamics connectors
Pricing on request11 researched notes
Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Keila, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Keila
Keila alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Keila pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Keila
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Keila badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
Best Email Marketing software alternatives
Email marketing tool with a genuine free tier, priced by contact count once paid
Per month by contact tier once on a paid planEmail marketing platform priced by contact tier, with unlimited sends only from the mid tier up
Per month by contact tier and plan levelRaw transactional email infrastructure priced per thousand messages, with no campaign UI at all
Per 1,000 emails sent, tiered by volume, no campaign features includedSelf-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager that ships as a single Go binary
Open source, no licence feeLow-cost email marketing from 9 US dollars a month, owned by Sitecore since 2021
Per month by contact countSelf-hosted newsletter app bought once for $69 that sends through your own Amazon SES account
One-time purchase