MauticOpen-source marketing automation you host yourself, the free alternative to HubSpot and ActiveCampaign for teams that own a server and have a developer on call.
Repo
Mautic
Open-source marketing automation you host yourself, the free alternative to HubSpot and ActiveCampaign for teams that own a server and have a developer on call.
The most complete open-source marketing automation there is, email campaigns, drip, lead scoring, landing pages, and forms with no per-contact fee, ever. The cost moves from a monthly subscription to your own servers, cron jobs, and deliverability setup, so it pays off for big lists with technical hands and punishes small teams without them.
Great for
Agencies and SaaS teams with 50k-plus contacts and a developer on call, who want out of per-subscriber pricing and want every contact record on their own infrastructure.
The catch
Self-hosting is real work: PHP, MySQL, Redis, and staggered cron jobs that quietly kill your campaigns if they stop firing. Deliverability, SPF, DKIM, and IP warming, sits entirely on you, and a bad setup tanks open rates fast.
Bottom line
Alive and shipping, 7.x landed January 2026 and 8.0 is in alpha, backed by a 150-plus contributor community and sponsor Acquia. Small teams with no DevOps usually end up paying a managed Mautic host anyway.
Self-hostYes (PHP, MySQL/MariaDB, Redis, cron)
Managed cloudYes via commercial hosts (Acquia, Webmecanik, Elestio); no free first-party cloud
LicenseGPL-3.0 copyleft; no AGPL network clause, so hosting it triggers no source-sharing obligation
LanguagePHP (Symfony framework)
Maintained byMautic community project, 150+ contributors, Acquia-sponsored
Watch out forCron jobs and email deliverability are yours to run; first install and major upgrades are genuinely technical
Email campaignsYes
Drip & multi-step automationVisual campaign builder with triggers, decisions, and timed actions
Lead scoringYes
Dynamic segmentationSegments recalculate via cron on your schedule
Landing pagesDrag-and-drop builder with installable themes
Forms & trackingForms plus a tracking pixel that links web visits to contacts
A/B testingYes
Built-in CRM / contactsLightweight contact records and stages; deep pipeline work needs an external CRM
External CRM syncSalesforce, Pipedrive, and others via plugins; quality and upkeep vary
SMS & multi-channelSMS, web notifications, and social live in plugins, not the core
REST API + webhooksYes
Email sending / deliverabilityNo built-in sending; connect your own SMTP or SES and own SPF, DKIM, and IP warming
What it does
- Send email campaigns to unlimited contacts with no per-subscriber fee, delivered through your own SMTP server or Amazon SES
- Build drip and multi-step automation on a visual campaign builder with behavioral triggers, decision branches, and timed actions
- Score and segment leads dynamically as contacts open, click, and visit, driving who enters which campaign
- Publish landing pages and forms with a drag-and-drop builder, plus a tracking pixel that ties web activity back to a contact
- Manage contacts in a built-in lightweight CRM with custom fields and stages, or sync two-way to an external CRM
- Run multi-channel messaging, email plus SMS, web notifications, and social, from one contact timeline via plugins
What it can’t do
- Install, patch, or scale itself; you own the server, database, Redis, upgrades, and monitoring
- Deliver email on its own; you connect SMTP or SES and handle SPF, DKIM, IP warming, and blacklist recovery yourself
- Run reliably without cron; segments and campaigns silently stop when background jobs are not firing on schedule
- Match a hosted tool on plug-and-play setup; the first install and major version upgrades trip up non-technical teams
- Guarantee integration stability; many connectors are community plugins that can break on updates and carry thin docs
Pros & cons
Pros
- No per-contact pricing, one big list costs the same as a small one, so 50k-plus subscribers save thousands a month over HubSpot or ActiveCampaign
- Every contact record and click stays on your own infrastructure, a real data-ownership and GDPR win
- Feature depth close to commercial platforms: campaigns, lead scoring, segments, landing pages, forms, and a full REST API
- Actively developed by a 150-plus contributor community with a documented release cadence, 7.x shipped January 2026
- Extensible through plugins and an open API, with a large ecosystem of themes, integrations, and specialist hosting providers
Cons
- Setup is technical and slow, PHP, MySQL, Redis, and staggered cron jobs, and it is not a set-and-forget tool
- Deliverability is entirely your problem; a missed SPF or DKIM step drops mail into spam and can damage your whole domain
- Small lists rarely save enough to justify the hosting and maintenance hours, per multiple agency reports
- Community plugins vary in quality and can break across upgrades, and documentation for edge cases is uneven
- Major version jumps, 4 to 6 to 7, can be a genuine migration project instead of a one-click update
1 positive2 mixed2 critical
What the community says
Mautic is AWESOME and I love that it's open source. Mautic is a bit of a learning curve but we went with that over Mailchimp due to the cost, no spammy Mailchimp branding and complete customization. Mautic documentation is very good, and there's great help on the forums plus lots of videos.
Mautic is powerful but honestly it's a pain in the ass to set up compared to Mailchimp's plug and play approach. The biggest advantage is cost. Our clients with 50k+ subscribers save thousands monthly by switching, but smaller lists don't see enough savings to justify the hassle. Deliverability is where most people screw up the migration.
I personally would never do self-hosted again as it's not cost effective for a team that doesn't already have DevOps competencies. Don't do self hosted unless you have those internal FTE's and they're cost-effective. It's not worth the friction otherwise.
I can only recommend mautic. If you are used to dockerized simple containers and everything just working, it will be a bit of a learning curve, since the way it's set up has some peculiarities that do make it a challenge to set up for the first time, and certain big updates are too. And mautic itself is pretty great for any and all email and marketing needs.
Mautic - full marketing automation but heavy. Needs PHP, MySQL, Redis. Overkill if you mainly need event-triggered sequences.
8 sourcesWhere this page’s facts came from. Open the receipts.
- 1GitHub - mautic/mautic repo
- 2GitHub API - repo metadata (stars, language, activity)
- 3Mautic LICENSE.txt (GPL v3)
- 4Mautic Releases (7.1.x current, 8.0 alpha)
- 5Mautic download & self-host requirements
- 6Reddit r/digital_marketing - experience moving from Mailchimp to Mautic
- 7Reddit r/selfhosted - self-hosted email marketing options incl. Mautic
- 8G2 - Mautic reviews
Watch it work
Real tutorials and reviews from YouTube, not ours.