Mautic

What is Mautic?

Mautic is an open source marketing automation platform that lets you build, run, and track marketing campaigns across email, SMS, web push, and social — all on infrastructure you control. Built on PHP and the Symfony framework, it gives you a drag-and-drop campaign builder, contact scoring, and landing pages without per-contact license fees.

What is Mautic best for?

Marketing teams and agencies that want HubSpot-style automation without the escalating per-contact bill, and that care about owning their subscriber data outright — a strong fit for GDPR-conscious organizations and anyone who needs to customize or integrate the platform deeply. It suits teams with some technical capacity to run and maintain it.

What can Mautic do?

• Build multi-step campaigns visually with a drag-and-drop builder using decision trees and conditions
• Reach contacts across channels — email, SMS, web push notifications, and social
• Score and segment contacts with unlimited, point-based lead scoring and dynamic segments
• Create landing pages, signup forms, and dynamic content without feature caps
• Automate nurture flows triggered by contact behavior and page activity
• Integrate with your stack through an extensive REST API and community plugins
• Stay GDPR-compliant with built-in privacy and consent features

Where does Mautic fall short?

• Steep learning curve. The interface is dense and less polished than commercial suites; first-time users and non-technical marketers often need real ramp-up time to build campaigns confidently.
• Performance degrades with large contact databases. As lists grow into the hundreds of thousands, sends and segment rebuilds can slow noticeably and need tuning (indexed queries, background queue workers) to stay responsive.
• It’s marketing automation, not a full CRM. Mautic manages contacts and lead scoring but has no built-in sales pipeline or deal management, so sales-led teams usually pair it with a dedicated CRM.

Is Mautic free?

Yes — Mautic is completely free and open source under the GPL-3.0 license, and the self-hosted version has no feature limits or per-contact fees. You only pay for the server it runs on and the email-sending service you connect. The project also offers a paid managed cloud (Mautic Cloud) with a 14-day free trial if you’d rather not host it yourself.

What does Mautic replace?

Mautic is a self-hosted alternative to HubSpot, Marketo, and Mailchimp. It covers roughly 70–80% of a marketing suite’s core automation — campaigns, segmentation, lead scoring, landing pages, and email — but you run it on your own infrastructure and keep the contact data, rather than paying pricing that climbs with your list size.

FAQ

Is Mautic open source? Yes. Mautic is licensed under GPL-3.0, a genuine OSI-approved open source license, and the full source is on GitHub. There is no locked “enterprise” core — the self-hosted edition is the complete product.

Can I self-host Mautic for free? Yes. Self-hosting is free with no feature or contact limits; your only costs are the server and an email delivery service (such as an SMTP provider). The optional Mautic Cloud is the paid, managed alternative.

Is Mautic a good HubSpot alternative? For teams focused on marketing automation and data ownership, yes — it delivers most of HubSpot Marketing Hub’s campaign, scoring, and email features at no software cost. But HubSpot bundles a mature CRM and polished UX that Mautic doesn’t match out of the box.

What do I need to run Mautic? A PHP 8 web server (Apache or Nginx), a MySQL 5.7+ or MariaDB 10.3+ database, around 2–4GB of RAM, and scheduled cron jobs to process campaigns, segments, and email queues.