Keila Hosting

How Keila works

Keila stores contacts in projects, groups them through segments, and provides forms for collecting subscription data. Campaigns can be written with a visual editor, Markdown, or plain text. Sender records normally connect those campaigns to SMTP or Amazon SES, while analytics settings decide how much delivery and engagement data the operator collects.

The API exposes campaigns, contacts, forms, segments, and senders for integration with other applications. In the hosted configuration, however, application email is disabled. The workspace can organise audience data and prepare campaign content, but it cannot transmit newsletters, verification messages, password recovery, or other application-originated mail.

Key Keila features

Contacts and custom data support targeted audience management. Segments filter recipients by stored attributes or behaviour, while forms provide a public collection path. Campaign drafts, templates, previews, and analytics controls help a team prepare consistent communication before a send.

Keila’s defining function is delivery through a configured sender. Removing outbound mail changes the practical use case substantially. The hosted page therefore avoids presenting the template as an operational newsletter delivery service and instead describes it as a preparation, data, and API workspace whose sending actions remain unavailable on this platform.

Keila vs Mailchimp

Keila is a self-hosted newsletter application designed to connect projects, contacts, segments, forms, campaigns, and an operator-selected sender. Mailchimp is a provider-managed marketing platform with hosted email delivery, templates, audience tools, automation, analytics, commerce integrations, and commercial administration.

Mailchimp may suit organisations that need a complete provider-operated sending service and marketing ecosystem. Keila is attractive to teams that want control of the application and audience data, but under the current service boundary it should be chosen only when creating and organising campaign material without sending from the hosted instance is useful.

Who uses Keila

Developers can integrate contact or campaign records through the API, and communications teams can prepare templates, segments, forms, and drafts. Organisations evaluating a future self-hosted mailing architecture may also use the interface to understand Keila’s data model before choosing infrastructure where outbound application mail is permitted.

This hosted deployment is not suitable for live newsletter operations. A campaign that cannot be delivered is incomplete, and subscription confirmation or recovery flows may also depend on email. Do not migrate an active mailing list until the non-sending limitation is acceptable for the intended workflow.

Self-hosting Keila: requirements and cost

Resource use is influenced by contacts, custom fields, segments, forms, drafts, templates, API requests, analytics records, and concurrent users. PostgreSQL stores project and audience data. It is included but unmanaged, with database memory excluded from the exported 1024 MB application minimum.

AvaHost assigns Keila to Plan 2 at €5 after the PostgreSQL adjustment. The Keila service includes one-click provisioning, automated HTTPS for a custom domain, application updates, and scheduled backups. Application email is disabled across this service, so newsletter delivery, confirmation messages, invitations, and recovery are unavailable. The page deliberately does not suggest an SMTP workaround because sending is outside the approved product boundary.