Mautic vs Keila
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Mautic hardens security across three branches and lines up a feature-heavy 7.2.
Mautic is in a maintenance-and-hardening phase. The standout is a coordinated security release across three supported branches (7.1.2, 6.0.9, 5.2.11) fixing seven CVEs, including SQL injection in API contact filtering and an API v2 authorization bypass. In parallel, 7.1.3 cleans up campaign and email reliability bugs, and a 7.2.0 release candidate stages the next feature line.
The project is balancing three commitments: keeping older branches (5.2, 6.0, 7.0/7.1) patched for security, steadily fixing campaign and GrapesJS-builder reliability, and building 7.2 around transactional email, better bot detection, and PHP 8.5 support. It reads as the cadence of a mature open-source platform serving a broad installed base, not one chasing new categories.
The 7.2.0 RC points to a stable 7.2 GA next, carrying truly transactional emails, Matomo-based bot detection, and the GrapesJS builder improvements out of pre-release.
Keila adds transactional emails and multi-format templates, broadening past pure newsletters
Keila, an open-source, privacy-focused newsletter tool, made a notable leap in v0.30.0: MJML/HTML/plain-text templates, reusable content slots, and transactional emails — a new product surface beyond bulk campaigns. Surrounding releases add manual contact-status control, API-driven contact events, pre-filled forms, more languages, and a new email scheduler that re-architected the messages schema to enable transactional sending.
The direction is clear: Keila is evolving from a newsletter sender into a more general email platform. The v0.20.0 scheduler/messages-schema rework laid the groundwork, and v0.30.0 cashed it in with transactional email and flexible templating. Internationalization and API/contact-lifecycle features show parallel investment in reach and automation.
Expect transactional email and content-slot templating to mature, with follow-on work on triggered/automated messages now that the messages schema supports them. Continued localization and contact-API expansion are likely.
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