Colorlib email templates: 28 MJML-built HTML emails

What is actually in the collection

There are 28 templates, grouped into three families, and the grouping is the useful part of the catalogue. The first family, the classic set from one to twenty, covers the familiar ground: RestoBar for a restaurant, Corporate for an agency, Agency for a portfolio, Stories for a blog, Travel for a travel agency, Shopping for fashion, Winter for a newsletter, Elise for a sale, Photography for a gallery, e-Verify for an email verification, Friend request and Shop for social and cart notifications, Capture for a photo follow, Business for a template builder, Clutch for a portfolio, Fitness for a gym, Real Estate, Minimart for offers, Ministries for a church, and Eventos for a conference. The modern minimal set of four covers SaaS onboarding, an order receipt, a password reset and an editorial newsletter. The designed minimal set of four covers a product launch, a webinar invitation, a winback message and a dark-mode newsletter.

Why the source is MJML and the output is tables

The technical decision that makes the collection work is stated early in the README. Every template is written in MJML and compiled into bulletproof, table-based HTML, and the reason given is that it renders reliably in Outlook on Windows as well as in modern web and mobile clients. That reason is the whole story of email development. A client that renders CSS the way a browser does is the exception rather than the rule, so a layout built on flexbox or grid collapses in the client that most business email still runs on, and the usual answer is to build the layout out of tables from the start. MJML lets an author write a modern-looking source and get that table structure out, which is why the repository ships sources rather than only the output.

Edit the source, not the compiled file

The development section is short and carries a warning that saves a lot of confusion. The HTML files are built from MJML sources, and if you want to change a template beyond simple find and replace, you work in the source file for that template in the src/ directory and rebuild. Editing the compiled page directly is explicitly discouraged, because the next build will overwrite it. The build tooling is three scripts in the package manifest, one that runs the build, one that runs a development server that watches for changes, and one that regenerates the screenshots, with the watcher and the browser automation library as the two dependencies that make those two things possible. The practical workflow is therefore the familiar one of a front end project, edit the source, watch the change, rebuild the output, and commit both.

Running it locally and rebuilding the assets

Getting a template on screen takes a clone and a file open, and the README gives the commands for all three desktop platforms, using the system opener for the template folder:

git clone https://github.com/ColorlibHQ/email-templates.git
cd email-templates

There is also a gallery file at the repository root that links to all 28 templates, and a screenshot per template in the screenshots/ directory, each showing the top of the email at its native 600 pixel width, with the note that the templates themselves are much longer than the preview. To rebuild after changing a source file, you install the development dependencies once and run the build script, and the manifest sets the requirement at Node 20.19 or newer:

npm install
npm run build

The development script watches for changes and rebuilds, and the screenshot script uses a headless browser to keep the gallery images in step with the templates.

Previewing in a real client

Opening the file in a browser tells you very little, because the point of the templates is what an email client does to them, and that is where the table structure earns its keep. The README recommends a real check, and it names two routes. You can upload the template to your email service provider, with Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor and SendGrid given as examples, or you can use a rendering service such as Litmus or Email on Acid. The documentation also lists sections devoted to email client support, to testing and deliverability, to a recommended workflow and to CSS inlining, which tells you the project takes the craft of email delivery seriously rather than treating the templates as static pictures. A reader picking up a template should read those sections before a campaign goes out, because the deliverability material is where a template stops being a design question.

Where a static template falls short

The limits come from the format rather than from the quality of the work. A template is a single HTML file, so there is no shared header or footer, no variable substitution, and no automated test, and a team sending twenty variants of one campaign will end up maintaining twenty copies. There is no dark mode handling beyond what each template happens to include, no image pipeline, and no service for responsive images, so a marketing team with a large image library has work to do. The repository also documents no accessibility testing, and the feature list describes mobile-first responsive layouts while the preview is described at a 600 pixel native width, so a team with a formal accessibility requirement should have the markup audited rather than assume it. And nothing here helps with deliverability itself, which is about the sending domain and its records, not about the template.

Licence, project state and where it fits

The templates are released under the MIT licence, with a licence file named for it in the repository root, and the project states plainly that they are free to use, aimed at startups, marketers and developers. The repository publishes no tagged releases, and the last push was on 2026-09-08, so the state to track is the branch rather than a version. The compiled output is committed, which means a consumer can use a template without installing anything, and that also means the built files and the sources both live in the same tree and have to be kept in step by whoever changes them. The README also links to a much larger list of templates on the Colorlib site, so this repository is a sample of the studio's output rather than the whole catalogue, and a project that needs the same visual system across many emails will find more of the same family there.

Editorial conclusion

The collection fits a small team that needs a presentable transactional or campaign email this week, and it fits a developer who would rather start from a template that already works in Outlook than from a clean canvas. It does not fit a marketing organisation that needs a template system, per-brand variants, automated tests and deliverability tooling, because a folder of static HTML is none of those things. Before using one commercially, read the licence file at the root, and if you send to Outlook, send a real seed through it rather than trusting the preview, since the README itself points you at an email service or a rendering service for a genuine check.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. ColorlibHQ/email-templates on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. Project website
5. README