What features does Keila offer for creating and sending newsletters?

Keila is an open-source email newsletter tool that you can use as a hosted service or self-host. Its feature set covers four areas: writing and designing emails, building sign-up forms, protecting those forms from bots, and personalizing campaigns with contact data. If you want an open-source alternative to Mailchimp with flexible editor options and privacy-conscious analytics, Keila is built for that use case.

Email creation and editing

Keila gives you several ways to produce a newsletter, so you can pick the one that matches your workflow rather than adapting to a single editor.

Keila also ships base templates that are designed to render consistently across clients and devices, including Gmail, Outlook, and Thunderbird, on both mobile and desktop. That matters because email clients handle HTML differently, and a template that breaks in one client can make a campaign look unprofessional.

Sign-up forms and custom fields

Keila includes a Form Builder for creating and designing newsletter sign-up forms. You can extend a form beyond a simple email field with:

• Additional checkboxes
• Text fields
• Dropdowns

These custom fields do double duty: they collect the information you want at sign-up, and they become the data you can later use to personalize campaigns.

Bot protection and list quality

Any public form attracts bots, and bot sign-ups degrade contact list quality and can ultimately hurt email deliverability. Keila addresses this in two ways:

• Captcha check on forms to block automated submissions
• Double opt-in verification for new sign-ups, confirming the address is real and the person intended to subscribe

If list quality and deliverability are priorities for you, enabling both is the safer configuration.

Personalization with custom data and Liquid templates

Keila lets you personalize campaigns using custom data fields collected from sign-up forms or pulled from external sources such as a CMS or CRM system. Each contact's custom data is represented as a single JSON object, and you can use Shopify's Liquid template language to insert that data into emails.

For example, if your form collects a city field, a Liquid tag in the email body can render each recipient's city so the same campaign reads as individually written. The same mechanism works for any field you store, whether it comes from your form or an external system.

Analytics and privacy

Keila provides email analytics for measuring campaign performance, with a stated approach of not collecting more data than is necessary and useful. If you want stricter privacy, you can turn tracking off entirely. This is a meaningful choice point: analytics help you improve campaigns, while disabling tracking reduces what you collect about recipients.

What to check before deciding

• Hosting model — Keila is 100% open source and can be self-hosted, and it is also offered as a hosted service. Which one fits depends on whether you want to run and maintain the infrastructure yourself.
• Editor fit — if your team writes in Markdown or builds in MJML, Keila supports that directly; if you need pure visual editing, the Block Editor covers it.
• Data sources — personalization depends on having custom data, either from your forms or from an external CMS/CRM. Confirm you can supply that data before relying on Liquid personalization.
• Pricing and plan limits — check the pricing page for current terms, since cost and any sending limits depend on the plan you choose.