Open-source alternatives to Substack
Substack publishes newsletters and handles paid subscriptions to them. The list below is every catalog tool tagged Communication - Email - Mailing Lists and Newsletters or Blogging Platforms, which is the closest the catalog gets to the same job; none of them has been checked feature by feature against Substack.
| Tool | Stars |
|---|---|
Just a blogging platform. MIT · released 2026-09-01 | 55,204 |
High performance, self-hosted newsletter and mailing list manager with a modern dashboard. AGPL-3.0 · released 2026-09-06 | 23,305 |
Marketing automation software (email, social and more). GPL-3.0 · released 2026-09-02 | 10,452 |
Writing software for starting a minimalist, federated blog — or an entire community. AGPL-3.0 · released 2026-08-10 | 5,251 |
Omni-channel customer engagement and messaging automation platform (alternative to Braze, Customer.io, Iterable). MIT · released 2026-03-28 | 2,926 |
Reliable and easy-to-use newsletter tool (alternative to Mailchimp and Sendinblue). AGPL-3.0 · released 2026-09-06 | 2,204 |
Lightweight federated publishing platform focused on personal idea sharing (documentation in Chinese). AGPL-3.0 · released 2026-08-28 | 2,053 |
Databaseless PHP blogging platform. A flat-file CMS that allows you to create a fast, secure, and powerful website or blog in seconds. GPL-2.0 · released 2025-11-03 | 1,361 |
Collaborative social publishing platform. Apache-2.0 · released 2026-03-01 | 1,123 |
Newsletter and email marketing with advanced management of subscribers, bounces, and plugins. AGPL-3.0 · released 2026-08-09 | 870 |
Private blogging system with markdown editing and built in RSS reader. MIT · released unknown | 802 |
Extra-awesome, extra-lightweight blog engine. BSD-3-Clause · released 2026-08-07 | 493 |
Naked blogging platform for minimalists. MIT · released 2026-01-03 | 367 |
Micro-blog tool offering built-in syntax highlighting, mobile publishing and more (alternative to Twitter, Bluesky). MIT · released 2026-08-29 | 325 |
Mailing list manager. GPL-2.0 · released 2026-08-14 | 313 |
XML-based blog/CMS platform. GPL-3.0 · released 2026-08-27 | 234 |
Serendipity (s9y) is a highly extensible and customizable PHP blog engine using Smarty templating. BSD-3-Clause · released 2026-07-22 | 227 |
Access GNU Mailman v3 archives. GPL-3.0 · released 2024-09-21 | 225 |
A lightweight, easy-to-set-up flat-file blogging engine. GPL-2.0 · released 2026-03-24 | 215 |
Web user interface to access GNU Mailman. GPL-3.0 · released 2024-09-21 | 91 |
Free, open source project aimed at the development of a high performance, feature rich weblog hosting software. Apache-2.0 · released 2025-03-01 | 90 |
Podcast management hosting platform that includes the latest podcast 2.0 standards, an automated Fediverse feed, analytics, an embeddable player, and more. AGPL-3.0 · released unknown | n/a |
Take control over your blog. GPL-2.0 · released unknown | n/a |
Manage electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. GPL-3.0 · released unknown | n/a |
GPG-enabled mailing list manager with resending-capabilities. GPL-3.0 · released unknown | n/a |
Self-hosted email newsletter application that lets you send bulk emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) or other SMTP services. ⊘ Proprietary · released unknown | n/a |
Mailing list management made joyful. MIT · released unknown | n/a |
All mapped products · data from awesome-selfhosted, CC BY-SA 3.0