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julianeon
Great idea. I starred this on GitHub, where by the way for those are interested, your star will be statistically significant (only about 100 now).
oahmadov
Thanks for the star :)
And yeah — at this stage every star is statistically significant, so anyone reading: appreciated.
isaisabella
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.
mushufasa
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, the broken-ness of email html/css standards made it really hard to test.
I know the standards and practice around this are a moving target, though, so I hope you can find a model to sustain and expand this, without charging for delivery/contact list numbers like MailChimp or other incumbents.
d0100
I remember doing a MailChimp "clone" in Laravel some 12 years ago and implementing an email builder using their templates
oahmadov
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 silently break in Outlook two weeks later.
On sustainability — same concern. Even while I was building it, multiple times I caught myself asking "is this even worth theeffort? Maybe not with all the functionalities I've built, but someone could vibe-code a lightweight version of it in a day." But at the same time, I see and personally used SaaS products with the same or fewer features selling for $2,500/mo, which seems ridiculous.
I'm currently working on a subscription-based Cloud version, but only for things that actually need an infrastructure and backend: AI chat/rewrite, image-to-template conversion, MCP integration, hosted media gallery, saved modules, commenting, real-time collab, email testing, version history, etc. Sending stays your own provider — no per-contact, per-email, or per-delivery charges.
stefanfisk
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....
shimi1000
Picking MJML as the output format instead of raw HTML is the move. That's the layer where the cross-client pain has already been solved by people more patient than any of us.
Two questions:
1. How extensible is the block system? Can consumers define their own block types with custom MJML output, or are you limited to the built-ins?
2. Any plans for a headless render path (JSON → MJML → HTML on a server) for transactional emails generated from templates at send time?
Either way, bookmarking. Been waiting for someone to do this without the SaaS tax.
oahmadov
Thanks — yes on both, and both already exist today.
1. Custom block extensibility: full. You define a custom block as a schema — typed fields displayed in the editor (text, textarea, image, color, number, select, boolean, repeatable that contains basic fields) plus a Liquid template that emits HTML using those field values. The editor auto-renders the form for marketers to fill in, then runs the Liquid against those values to show a live preview on the canvas — so consumers don't write a Vue component themselves. The renderer wraps that HTML in <mj-text>, so it still goes through MJML's table layer for cross-client rendering. Optional dataSource.onFetch lets the block hit your API at render time, so use user can fetch custom block contents from existing data source — instead of having to manually type values into every field. Check out the docs and playground for custom blocks usage.
2. Headless render path: that's exactly what @templatical/renderer is. Separate package, zero UI dependency, pure JSON -> MJML conversion. You store the JSON tree in your storage; on the backend you pass it to renderToMjml() and get MJML back. Since MJML has compiler libraries in almost every language, you compile MJML to HTML yourself whenever. Currently the renderer is TypeScript-only (browser + Node.js); porting to other languages as first-party packages is on the roadmap.
The whole shape — store JSON in your DB, render at send time on your server, send via your own provider — is the transactional flow you described.
shimi1000
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SHaD0S
This is really awesome. I'm showing this to my marketing team - we were looking for something similar in the past too. I've had the pleasure of attempting to build fancy marketing emails and a signature and I never wanna look at a Word Table in my life again.
oahmadov
People who know how painful email HTML is are the exact audience here. I believe MJML is the best thing that happened to emails — eliminates almost all the cross-client compatibility quirks.
If your team gives it a spin, I'd genuinely love their feedback.
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recroad
I was thinking this is so nice but too bad I can't use it because I'm so deep into Unlayer. Then I see the the migration page :)
oahmadov
Yes! If you attempt the migration, I'd love to hear your feedback on what worked and what didn't. GitHub Issues / Discussions both open.
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MPiccinato
This looks great! So glad the output is MJML. I will have to see how I can embed it in the project I am working on as I have been wanting to add the feature for clients to build out their own emails or customize some of the standard templates. It will at least be a big help in my own admin UI to start.
oahmadov
Amazing to hear :)
If you ship your app with it, send a link — happy to feature it on the showcase page. Also, if you have existing HTML-based templates, try the @templatical/import-html package to convert them to Templatical JSON true — should get you a reasonably close starting point.
acallaghan
This is great, i've been wanting someone to do this for a while, and was tempted to myself
oahmadov
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rtaylorgarlock
I got you a gold star ;) Excited to use this, as I've been frustrated by vendor lock-in for this exact use case.
oahmadov
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ksajadi
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.
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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.