Resources

Short, practical guides for choosing and switching to newsletter tools, plus links to good documentation elsewhere.

How to read the stats on each tool page

Stars: how many people have bookmarked the project on GitHub or GitLab. It is a rough signal of popularity, not of quality, and projects hosted on SourceForge, Savannah or Bitbucket have no star count at all.
Last commit: when code was last pushed to the project's repository. A recent date means someone is actively working on it. An old date isn't always bad: some mature tools change slowly.
Licence: the terms you get the software under. Copyleft licences (GPL, AGPL, LGPL, MPL) keep the code open when it's shared; permissive licences (MIT, BSD, Apache) allow almost any use. "Free, proprietary" tools cost nothing but you can't see or change the code, and some limit commercial use.
Not open source: shown when a tool has no public source code, so there is nothing to count.

Start from the job: list the handful of things you actually do in the paid tool every week, and test those first.
Check files in and out: make sure the free tool can open your existing files and export what your colleagues, supervisor or supplier needs.
Check where it runs: Windows, macOS, Linux or the browser, and whether your organisation lets you install it.
Look at activity: the last-commit date and recent releases tell you whether bugs get fixed.
Read the licence: especially for business use: some free proprietary plans are for non-commercial use only.
Trial it on real work: run one real but low-stakes project in both tools and compare the results before switching fully.
Find the help: official documentation, forums and community chat matter more than a feature list when you get stuck.

Mailchimp: About pricing plans ↗Mailchimp's own help page on free-plan limits and sending allowances.
ECB euro reference exchange rates ↗The rates we use to show approximate pound prices for dollar-priced platforms.
ICO: direct marketing and PECR guidance ↗The UK regulator's guidance on consent for marketing emails.
SelfHostAlts: self-hosted Mailchimp alternatives ↗Our sister directory's list of self-hosted newsletter and mailing-list software.
WriterAlts: writing and publishing tools ↗Our sister directory for writers: formatting and publishing tools.

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