Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
play.templatical.com
Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
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Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
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Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
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Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
#4Hi looks nice. I am in the process of building a email management system for a client with a small coaching base, and decided to go with Maily to integrate with the React and resend stack.
I hadn't heard of beefree or unlayer before this post. What would you say are the reasons we would want to use Templatical over our current integration or Beefree/unlayer?
Thanks.
Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
#5does it store our data persistently on your server/system
Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
#6Looks like a grapes fork?
Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
#7Hi looks nice. I am in the process of building a email management system for a client with a small coaching base, and decided to go with Maily to integrate with the React and resend stack. I hadn't heard of beefree or unlayer before this post. What would you say are the reasons we would want to use Templatical over our current integration or Beefree/unlayer? Thanks.
Thanks. Honestly, I hadn't heard of Maily until your comment :) Just spent a few minutes with it. Looks like a clean React-first editor.
I can't directly compare it with Maily, but what I see from first glance is that it is a minimalist email template editor that gets the job done. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Beefree and Unlayer are paid services that offer powerful features like custom blocks, merge tags, display conditions, theming. The catch is most of those features sit behind enterprise tiers, and you're tied to their cloud render API to get HTML out.
Templatical aims for that same feature set, open-sourced and self-hostable. No vendor render API — output is MJML, which is battle-tested across the major email clients.
Check out the playground — it has templates showcasing different features. See if it suits your use case.
Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
#8What do you use for the onboarding guide?
Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
#9does it store our data persistently on your server/system
No — and this is actually one of the real architectural differences from the closed-source competitors like Beefree and Unlayer.
The SDK is fully client-side — it runs in your app, the JSON templates go wherever you decide to store them (your DB, S3, anything). Nothing touches my infrastructure. SDK also has zero telemetry.
The Cloud tier on the roadmap (AI rewrite, real-time collab, MCP, saved modules, media library, comments) is opt-in — you only hit it if you actively sign up.
Re: Show HN: I built an open-source email builder, alternative to Beefree/Unlayer
#10Looks like a grapes fork?
No — built from scratch on Vue 3 + TipTap. Different data model entirely: Templatical stores templates as a typed JSON tree of blocks and renders them as MJML; GrapesJS is a generic HTML/CSS page-builder retrofitted for email via an MJML plugin.