HubSpot
Marketo
MailchimpAbout Mautic
Mautic is what you move to when marketing automation tools like HubSpot and Marketo start charging by the contact and your bill balloons as your list grows. It's the most widely deployed open-source marketing automation platform, giving you email campaigns, landing pages, forms, contact segmentation and lead scoring — without a per-contact price tag.
The core idea is ownership: because you self-host Mautic, every contact, email and behavioural event lives on infrastructure you control, which matters for GDPR, data residency and simply not renting your own audience. It integrates with your CRM, CMS and hundreds of other tools, so it slots into an existing stack rather than replacing it.
Mautic is GPL-3.0 licensed and backed by a large community plus Acquia's stewardship, so it's mature and battle-tested rather than experimental. The trade-off is that it's a real platform to run — you'll want a proper server, cron jobs and a mail-sending setup — but in return you get enterprise-grade automation at open-source cost.
What makes it different
Design multi-step drip and nurture workflows on a drag-and-drop canvas with branching based on contact behaviour.
Build and send email campaigns, landing pages and forms natively, then track opens, clicks and conversions.
Score contacts on their activity and segment dynamically to target the right people at the right moment.
Keep every contact and event on your own servers — no per-contact fees and full control over data residency.
PHP
Symfony
MySQL
DockerThe honest read
- No per-contact pricing — scale your list without a bigger bill
- You own all contact and campaign data on your own infrastructure
- Mature, battle-tested and backed by a large community
- Integrates with CRMs, CMSs and hundreds of other tools
- Full-featured: email, pages, forms, scoring and multi-channel campaigns
- Requires a real server setup — cron jobs, mail config and maintenance
- Steeper learning curve than a hosted tool like Mailchimp
- UI feels dated next to modern SaaS competitors
- Deliverability depends on your own sending infrastructure
Quick answers
Yes — Mautic is free and open source under the GPL-3.0 license. You only pay for the server you host it on and whatever email-sending service you connect.
Mautic is self-hosted and has no per-contact pricing, so your data stays on your own infrastructure and your costs don't rise with list size — while HubSpot and Marketo are closed, hosted platforms billed per contact.
Yes — Mautic builds and sends email campaigns, drip sequences and newsletters, and tracks opens, clicks and conversions. You connect your own SMTP or a service like Amazon SES for delivery.
Yes — Mautic integrates with popular CRMs and hundreds of other tools, and it exposes an API and webhooks for custom connections.
It's more involved than a hosted tool — you'll need a server, a database, cron jobs and a mail-sending setup — but the documentation and community make it manageable, and managed hosting options exist.
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