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Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer

play.templatical.com

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Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer

#41

Post by stefanfisk »

oahmadov wrote: post #20
mushufasa wrote: post #18

This is cool! I looked for this in the past. This is the main reason we bothered with mailchimp/hubspot -- simply the ability for nontechnical marketing people to put together nice emails, and the trust that we won't need an engineer to troubleshoot email formatting on their behalf. I remember trying some OSS tools at the time (8 years ago?) and there were some templates we used but then when we wanted to modify them…

Thanks — this is exactly the audience I built it for. The cross-client rendering thing is why Templatical outputs MJML instead of raw HTML. MJML was built to abstract all the table-based, Outlook-2007-quirks, Gmail-strips-style nonsense — you write semantic blocks, MJML compiles to table HTML that works across every major email client. So when your marketing person moves a block or changes a button color, it doesn't…

Even when using mjml you must do render tests of your templates using litmus or a similar service. Mjml is WAY better than hand rolling templates but there are foot guns to be found and the docs won’t mention most of them https://github.com/mjmlio/mjml/issues/2927#issuecomment-2539....

Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer

#44

Post by Nazzareno »

ksajadi wrote: post #30

Looks good! Do you have an MCP or API in your roadmap? The reason: managing a lot of templates and their placeholders can get out of hand pretty quickly and agents can be a good way to deal with the complexity. I'd love to try this with sendops.dev although I'm not sure how it's going to work with the git backed templating it has.

[dead]

Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer

#45

Post by oahmadov »

isaisabella wrote: post #42

The migration page is so good. Being stuck in Unlayer is a real thing, and seeing a clear path out makes this much more tempting to adopt.

Happy to hear you found it useful. :)

I'd love to hear your feedback on what worked and what didn't. Feel free to open an issue or start a discussion on GitHub.

Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer

#49

Post by oahmadov »

artf wrote: post #43

As someone who built a similar open source project (grapesjs), this looks really good Even with LLMs, generating raw HTML emails that render correctly across major email clients is still surprisingly hard, so great choice going with MJML.

Holy shit, it's you! Thank you, that genuinely means a lot coming from you!

GrapesJS is the forever OG that proved this whole space could be an embeddable SDK rather than a paywalled SaaS. It also standardized the palette/canvas/inspector layout that every serious visual builder now ships by default — including Templatical. I took direct inspiration from a few other patterns too: the block-as-first-class-citizen model, and the trait system, which maps almost 1:1 to how Templatical's custom blocks expose typed fields into the inspector.

And yeah — agreed on MJML. Building email layouts that work for most clients is notoriously hard. I think the people who built MJML absorbed an enormous amount of pain so the rest of us don't have to.

Huge respect for what you built.

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