MailWizz has the features but the codebase shows its age. Punchmail delivers the same power with a modern stack, Docker deployment, and ClickHouse analytics.
Punchmail isn't a hobby project with a queue bolted on. It's a multi-layered sending engine designed from day one to handle millions of emails without breaking a sweat.
7 priority queues — tracking, sending, campaigns, automations, bounces, imports, default. Each with dedicated workers via Laravel Horizon.
Campaigns split into 500-subscriber batches. Multiple workers process batches simultaneously. Template compiled once, cached in Redis, reused across all batches.
Every open, click, bounce, and unsubscribe stored in ClickHouse with 6 materialized views for instant aggregation. No more slow MySQL GROUP BY on millions of rows.
Redis SETNX locks → MySQL unique index with INSERT IGNORE → job idempotency. Three layers guarantee zero duplicate sends, even during crashes and restarts.
Enterprise email marketing features without the enterprise price tag. Built by someone who's been sending email since before Gmail existed.
Drag-and-drop email builder with 10 block types. Compiles to bulletproof HTML via MJML. Looks perfect in every client — yes, even Outlook.
Nested AND/OR conditions across subscriber fields, tags, engagement history, and campaign activity. "Opened campaign X but didn't click in 90 days" — milliseconds.
Trigger-based workflows with conditions, delays, and actions. Welcome series, re-engagement, cart abandonment. Set it and forget it.
Connect any SMTP provider. Create pools with weighted distribution for IP warmup. Automatic failover. Per-campaign throttling. This is what enterprise ESPs charge thousands for.
Event tracking powered by ClickHouse. Millions of events, instant queries. Full per-campaign reports and per-subscriber activity timeline.
Test subject lines and content with 2-3 variants. Auto-send the winner based on opens or clicks. Data-driven sending.
IMAP/POP3 mailbox polling plus webhook receivers for SES, Postmark, and SendGrid. Automatic hard/soft classification with configurable thresholds.
Multiple suppression lists with email AND domain blocking. Platform-wide suppression for spamtraps and global unsubscribes. Three-layer dedup prevents duplicate sends.
RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe (Gmail/Yahoo required), in-body unsubscribe, and full preference center. List-Unsubscribe headers automatic on every send.
MailWizz has been a popular self-hosted email marketing choice for years, and for good reason — it packs a lot of features into a single PHP application. Campaign management, automation, segmentation, bounce processing, and multiple SMTP server support. On paper, it checks most boxes.
The challenge with MailWizz is under the hood. It's built on the Yii 1.x framework — a PHP framework that peaked in popularity around 2013. The codebase is large, complex, and increasingly difficult to extend. The UI, while functional, feels dated compared to modern web applications. Setup requires manual PHP configuration, not Docker Compose.
Performance becomes a real issue at scale. MailWizz stores all analytics in MySQL, which means dashboards slow down dramatically once you're tracking millions of events. There's no dedicated analytics engine, no ClickHouse, no materialized views for instant aggregation. Large campaign sends can bog down the entire application.
Punchmail takes what MailWizz got right — comprehensive feature set for self-hosted email marketing — and rebuilds it on a modern stack. Laravel 11, Docker deployment, ClickHouse for analytics, Redis for caching, and a clean UI. Same self-hosted philosophy, built for the next decade.
Built on Laravel 11, not Yii 1.x. Modern PHP, modern patterns, modern tooling. Easier to understand, extend, and maintain.
Docker Compose up and you're running. No manual PHP configuration, no Apache/Nginx tuning, no dependency conflicts.
Dedicated analytics engine replaces slow MySQL queries. Millions of events queried in milliseconds, not minutes.
A dashboard that feels like it was built in 2025. Responsive, fast, and intuitive — not a relic of the Bootstrap 2 era.
We're not competing with Mailchimp's marketing budget. We're competing with their feature set.
| Punchmail | MailWizz | Sendy | Mailchimp | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Docker deployment | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Modern framework | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Block email editor | ✓ | Basic | ✗ | ✓ |
| Automation workflows | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| SMTP pools + warmup | ✓ | Basic | ✗ | ✗ |
| ClickHouse analytics | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| A/B testing | ✓ | ✓ | Basic | ✓ |
| Active development | ✓ | Slow | Slow | ✓ |
| One-time pricing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | $350+/mo |
No PhD required. If you can copy-paste three commands, you can run Punchmail.
Clone the repo, copy the environment file, set your admin credentials.
git clone https://github.com/punchmail/punchmail && cp .env.example .env
One command spins up all 7 containers — app, database, analytics, queue, cache, email renderer. Done.
docker compose up -d
Add your SMTP provider in settings — Amazon SES, Postmark, your own Postfix, whatever. Create pools, set weights, configure failover.
Import subscribers, build your first campaign with the block editor, hit send. Welcome to email freedom.
No subscriber tiers. No send limits. No "contact sales." Just a price that makes sense.
🚀 Launch price for the first 100 customers. Then €99.
MailWizz got me started with self-hosted email marketing, but every time I opened the codebase to customize something, I felt like I was reading code from a different era. Punchmail is what MailWizz would be if it were built today.
Your subscribers. Your data. Your server. One price, forever.