Sendportal
Hosting

SendPortal is what phpList would look like if you started fresh in 2020 with Laravel. I genuinely like it. The admin UI is clean, the workspaces feature is properly designed for agencies running campaigns for multiple clients, and the codebase is something a working PHP developer can read without flinching. That last point matters more than people think. When something breaks at midnight, being able to read the code and figure out what's happening is worth a lot.

What works well: the Laravel underpinnings give you proper queues, proper migrations, proper config management, and an artisan CLI for the operational bits. Workspaces let an agency keep clients fully separated. The Markdown campaign editor is faster to use than phpList's visual editor for anyone who already lives in plain text. SMTP relay integration with SES, Postmark, SendGrid and Mailgun is well documented and works first time.

What's annoying: SendPortal is younger than phpList, so the community is smaller, the third-party plug-in catalogue is thin, and there's no twenty years of hardening behind it yet. The default queue setup on shared hosting works, but Redis really helps once you're past a few thousand subscribers, and Redis is more naturally a cloud-server feature on our platform. The Markdown editor is great for plain content but limiting if your campaigns lean on rich layouts.

"SendPortal is the right pick for anyone who finds phpList's admin too dated and Mailchimp too expensive. Laravel under the bonnet, workspaces for agency use, and a codebase you can actually read. I'd put it on a cloud server rather than shared hosting once volumes pick up."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

On hosting: SendPortal runs fine on our shared hosting from £5.99/mo for small lists and infrequent sends, but I'd genuinely recommend cloud servers from £9.99/mo once you're sending to more than about 2,000 subscribers regularly. The reason is the queue worker. SendPortal uses Laravel queues, and on shared hosting you're using the database queue driver with cron polling, which works but isn't ideal. On cloud servers you get Redis, supervisord-style worker processes, and proper systemd-like control over the queue, which means faster sends and cleaner failure handling.

The other thing to plan for is the SMTP relay. SendPortal does not send mail directly through the local mail server in any volume scenario. You'll connect it to Amazon SES (cheapest at scale), Postmark (best deliverability for transactional), SendGrid, or Mailgun. We can help with the relay setup as part of 7-day expert support, but the relay account itself is your responsibility. Plan for that as part of your monthly running costs.

One practical tip: SendPortal's bounce handling needs an inbound webhook from your relay to update subscriber statuses. SES, Postmark and Mailgun all support this. Set the webhook up on day one rather than waiting for your first hard bounce, otherwise your list quality degrades faster than you'd expect.