Mautic vs phpList

Both are self-hosted communication - email - mailing lists and newsletters projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Mautic scores 95 against phpList's 50, putting it clearly ahead on the strength of a higher commit volume and a larger community. That measures project health, not feature fit — phpList may still be the right choice if it does what you need.

	Mautic	phpList
Health score	95/100	50/100
Commits (11 mo)	5226	17
Commits (last 3 mo)	3340	16
Stars	11k	872
Latest release	23 Sept 2026	9 Aug 2026
Licence	GPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0
Built with	PHP	PHP
Typical RAM	1 GB	1 GB

Mautic

Marketing automation software (email, social and more).

95/100

Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 39/40

Releases 25/25

Community 16/20

Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 97% of tracked projects; popularity more than 80%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

phpList

Newsletter and email marketing with advanced management of subscribers, bounces, and plugins.

50/100

Slowing

Activity has dropped noticeably. Check the repository before committing to it.

Maintenance 4/40

Releases 25/25

Community 6/20

Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 9% of tracked projects; popularity more than 32%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted communication - email - mailing lists and newsletters.