AWeber vs Mailtrain

AWeber is an email marketing platform for small businesses and entrepreneurs, with tools for newsletters, automated message series, opt-in forms, and blog-post notifications. It also supports landing and ecommerce pages, web push notifications, audience segmentation, and A/B testing. Messages can be made with drag-and-drop, HTML, or plain-text editors, and the platform includes more than 700 responsive HTML templates. Its AI tools assist with drafting newsletters and emails, creating signup forms and landing pages, and generating subject lines. Businesses can sell products, services, subscriptions, and payment plans, track sales, and tag purchases. AWeber connects to more than 750 tools and provides a REST API with webhooks for managing subscribers, campaigns, analytics, and lists. Plans include a free option for up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 monthly emails, with one landing page and automation; free-plan messages carry AWeber branding. Lite is $12.49 per month billed annually, and a 14-day trial starts a paid subscription automatically when it ends. Dedicated mobile apps are retired; phone and tablet access is through the browser-based site.

Mailtrain is a free, self-hosted newsletter application built on Node.js and MySQL or MariaDB. It manages subscriber lists, segmentation, and custom fields, and supports triggered and RSS campaign automation. Email templates include MJML-based templates, while custom reports provide reporting capabilities. Multiple users can work with granular permissions and flexible sharing, and hierarchical namespaces support organization across larger setups. Mailtrain includes Zone-MTA for mail delivery and separates trusted, sandbox, and public endpoints to help avoid XSS attacks in multi-user settings. Its Docker configuration supports LDAP authentication and CAS, with an optional API access-token setting. Mailtrain v2 is distributed under the GPL-V3.0 license and is listed at free. Deployment options include Docker Compose and direct installation on CentOS 7 or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Version 2 requires Node.js 14 or later and MySQL 8 or later, or MariaDB 10 or later; the recommended minimum hardware is 2 vCPU and 4096 MB RAM. Docker users should set ADMIN_PASSWORD because the default is test.