Mautic

Mautic is a comprehensive open source marketing automation platform that empowers businesses and organizations to run sophisticated, multi-channel campaigns while retaining full ownership of their contact data. Originally launched in 2014, it has grown into the world’s largest open source marketing automation project, supported by a global community of contributors and verified as a Digital Public Good in 2024.

At its core, Mautic provides a complete toolkit for managing the entire contact lifecycle: capturing leads through forms and landing pages, segmenting contacts into dynamic lists, nurturing them through automated campaign workflows, and measuring engagement across email, SMS, web notifications, and social channels. Every interaction is tracked and tied back to individual contacts, giving marketers the behavioral intelligence typically locked behind expensive SaaS subscriptions.

What distinguishes Mautic from commercial alternatives is its commitment to data sovereignty. Your contact database lives on infrastructure you control, subject only to your own privacy policies. There are no per-contact fees, no sending limits tied to pricing tiers, and no API rate limits imposed by a vendor. The plugin system enables custom integrations with CRMs, cloud storage, social platforms, and marketing tools — and because these integrate at the bundle level, they share the same event and DI access as core features.

Mautic is production-ready for organizations of all sizes, from small nonprofits sending a few thousand emails per month to enterprises running millions of automated touchpoints. It ships with a REST API, webhook support, and a visual campaign builder, making it a platform teams can build on, not just configure.

What You Get

• Visual drag-and-drop campaign builder for designing multi-step automation workflows with conditions, actions, and time-based triggers
• Multi-channel message delivery across email, SMS, web push notifications, social media, and dynamic website content blocks
• Lead capture with embeddable and standalone forms, landing pages, and progressive profiling to enrich contact records over time
• Dynamic contact segmentation using behavioral filters, custom field values, and activity history — segments update automatically as contacts meet criteria
• Detailed contact timeline showing every tracked interaction: page visits, email opens, link clicks, form submissions, and campaign events
• REST API and webhook system for integrating with external tools, CRMs, and custom applications
• Plugin ecosystem covering CRM sync (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive), social platforms, cloud storage, and third-party email providers
• Role-based access control, multi-user teams, and audit logs for enterprise governance requirements

Common Use Cases

• Email nurture sequences — Marketing teams build drip campaigns that send personalized emails based on contact behavior, time delays, and segment membership without paying per-send fees to a SaaS vendor
• Lead scoring and routing — B2B companies assign point values to contact actions (visiting a pricing page, downloading a whitepaper) and automatically route high-score leads to CRM pipelines
• E-commerce re-engagement — Online retailers send cart abandonment emails, post-purchase follow-ups, and win-back sequences triggered by behavioral events passed in through the API
• Nonprofit member communications — Organizations with limited budgets self-host Mautic to run sophisticated multi-channel outreach campaigns without the per-contact costs of platforms like Mailchimp or HubSpot
• Compliance-sensitive industries — Healthcare and financial services organizations use Mautic to keep contact data on their own infrastructure, satisfying GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific data residency requirements
• Multi-tenant agency deployments — Digital agencies install a single Mautic instance and use role-based permissions to manage marketing automation for multiple clients from one platform

Under The Hood

Architecture Mautic is built on a modular Symfony bundle architecture, splitting the application across roughly 28 core domain bundles — campaigns, leads, emails, forms, SMS, reporting, webhooks, and more — plus a separate layer of official plugin bundles for CRM and social integrations. Each bundle encapsulates its own controllers, entities, DI configuration, event listeners, and database migrations, enforcing a clean separation of concerns without requiring a microservices deployment. The campaign engine is the architectural centrepiece: a dedicated Executioner hierarchy separates concerns across kickoff, scheduled, real-time, and inactivity execution modes, allowing mixed cron-driven and webhook-triggered campaign logic to coexist on the same campaign graph. The IntegrationsBundle contributes a bidirectional sync framework with a SyncJudge component for deterministic conflict resolution when reconciling contact fields with third-party CRMs — a design that isolates sync complexity from the core contact model entirely.

Tech Stack Mautic runs on PHP 8.2 or higher with Symfony 7.4 as the application framework and Doctrine ORM 2.x for database access against MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 10.11/11.4. Server-rendered views use Twig 3.x, while frontend assets are bundled via Webpack and Grunt. Async processing uses Symfony Messenger for queue-based campaign delivery and background jobs. The REST API layer is built on API Platform 4.1 combined with FOSRestBundle 3.8. Email sending uses Symfony Mailer with configurable transports including SMTP, SendGrid, Amazon SES, and Mailgun. Deployment is Composer-based and targets a conventional PHP/MySQL stack, with optional DDEV support for local development.

Code Quality The codebase maintains an extensive test suite exceeding one thousand PHP test files, covering unit tests with PHPUnit and functional/acceptance tests with Codeception and WebDriver. Continuous integration runs matrix builds across PHP 8.2 and 8.5 against both MySQL and MariaDB versions, with a daily scheduled run to catch dependency compatibility regressions early. PHPStan static analysis runs with a maintained baseline file, and Rector automates PHP modernization refactors — ongoing Rector passes targeting PHP 8.1 and Symfony 7 patterns are visible in recent commits. Constructor-injected typed dependencies are the standard throughout, error handling uses typed domain exceptions, and PHP-CS-Fixer enforces code style. Security advisories follow a documented responsible disclosure process.

What Makes It Unique Mautic’s most consequential differentiator is architectural: it treats contact data sovereignty as a first-class design constraint rather than an afterthought. Where every major commercial alternative routes data through vendor infrastructure, Mautic runs entirely on self-controlled servers under the operator’s own privacy policies. The SyncJudge abstraction for resolving bidirectional field conflicts during CRM sync is a sophisticated piece of domain logic absent from simpler automation tools. The campaign engine’s execution mode separation lets the same campaign graph serve both batch-scheduled contacts and real-time webhook-triggered events without special-casing. Mautic was verified as a Digital Public Good by the DPGA in 2024, and its GPL v3 license ensures that any improvements made to the core platform remain available to the community.

Self-Hosting

Mautic is released under the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL v3). This means you can freely use, modify, and distribute the software, including for commercial purposes, but any derivative works you distribute must also carry the GPL v3 license. For most self-hosting scenarios — running Mautic internally for your own marketing operations — the copyleft requirement does not apply, because you are not distributing the software. Organizations that build and sell custom Mautic distributions or managed Mautic hosting services would need to comply with GPL v3’s share-alike requirements for their modifications.

Running Mautic yourself is a meaningful operational commitment. The recommended installation path uses Composer and a PHP 8.2+ environment with MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 10.11+, Symfony Messenger configured with a queue backend for async processing, and a cron scheduler to fire campaign jobs. You are responsible for server provisioning, database backups, SSL/TLS certificates, deliverability reputation (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), and applying Mautic security patches when they are released. Mautic ships regular minor and patch releases with multiple supported version branches, so maintenance discipline is required. Upgrading major versions (e.g., 5.x to 6.x or 7.x) involves database migrations and may require consulting upgrade guides. Email deliverability also depends on your choice of SMTP relay or transactional email provider, which you configure and manage separately.

Mautic does not have a first-party enterprise license tier in the traditional sense — there is no paid version that unlocks additional core features for self-hosted deployments. However, a growing ecosystem of commercial partners offers managed Mautic hosting, professional support contracts, and implementation services if you prefer not to manage the infrastructure yourself. Community support is available through the official forum and Slack workspace, and the contributor community is active, but there are no SLAs, guaranteed response times, or vendor-backed escalation paths without a third-party support contract.