phpList vs Sympa

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.

phpList scores 50 against Sympa's 41, putting it slightly ahead on the strength of a stronger recent trend. That measures project health, not feature fit — Sympa may still be the right choice if it does what you need.

	phpList	Sympa
Health score	50/100	41/100
Commits (11 mo)	17	63
Commits (last 3 mo)	16	18
Stars	872	315
Latest release	9 Aug 2026	14 Aug 2026
Licence	AGPL-3.0	GPL-2.0
Built with	PHP	Perl
Typical RAM	1 GB	1 GB

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

Sympa

Mailing list manager.

41/100

Slowing

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

Maintenance 9/40

Releases 25/25

Community 3/20

Momentum 4/15

Commit activity more than 21% of tracked projects; popularity more than 16%. 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.