Mautic is the world’s largest open-source marketing automation platform, designed for businesses and organizations that want full control over their customer data and marketing workflows. Unlike SaaS-based tools, Mautic allows you to self-host the entire platform on your infrastructure, ensuring data sovereignty and eliminating subscription fees. It supports email marketing, lead scoring, segmentation, behavioral tracking, and multi-channel campaign automation—all with a fully customizable frontend and backend. Built in PHP and powered by Symfony, Mautic is ideal for developers, DevOps teams, and privacy-conscious marketers who need transparency, extensibility, and freedom from proprietary platforms. With over 9,000 GitHub stars and official recognition as a Digital Public Good since 2024, Mautic combines enterprise-grade functionality with open-source accessibility.
What You Get
- Self-hosted marketing automation - Run Mautic on your own servers or infrastructure; no third-party SaaS dependency, full control over data storage and processing.
- Multi-channel campaign automation - Create automated workflows for email, SMS (via plugins), social media, and web tracking to nurture leads across touchpoints.
- Unlimited segmentation - Build dynamic audience segments based on behavior, demographics, form submissions, and engagement history without artificial limits.
- Full data ownership - Store all contact data, campaign analytics, and user interactions in your own database—no data exports or vendor restrictions.
- Custom integrations - Extend functionality via plugins, APIs, and webhooks to connect with CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, or internal tools.
- 100% customizable UI/UX - Modify both frontend templates and backend logic to match your brand, workflows, or compliance requirements.
- DDEV and Composer support - Use modern PHP development tools like DDEV (
ddev start) or Composer (composer install) to deploy and maintain Mautic locally or in production.
Common Use Cases
- Building a privacy-compliant email marketing platform - A healthcare provider uses Mautic to send personalized patient education emails while complying with HIPAA, keeping all data on-premises and avoiding third-party email vendors.
- Creating a multi-tenant SaaS dashboard with custom segmentation - A marketing agency deploys Mautic for multiple clients, using separate databases or schemas per client to deliver tailored campaigns without shared infrastructure.
- Problem: Vendor lock-in with expensive SaaS tools → Solution: Mautic - A small e-commerce business was paying $2,000/month for a closed marketing platform; they migrated to self-hosted Mautic, reduced costs by 90%, and added custom tracking for product page behavior.
- Team: DevOps teams managing microservices across multiple cloud providers - Mautic is deployed via Docker or DDEV on AWS, GCP, and Azure with automated backups and CI/CD pipelines, enabling consistent campaign delivery across regions.
Under The Hood
Mautic is a feature-rich, open-source marketing automation platform built on PHP and Symfony, designed to facilitate enterprise-level email campaigns, lead management, and customer engagement. It emphasizes extensibility through modular architecture and comprehensive tooling for developers.
Architecture
Mautic follows a layered monolithic architecture with strong modularity and extensibility built into its core.
- The platform leverages Symfony’s kernel-based structure to support a clean separation between core components and plugin modules
- Modular design enables feature-rich extensions via bundles, offering flexibility for customization without modifying core logic
- Middleware patterns are used to manage HTTP request and response flows, ensuring centralized control over processing
Tech Stack
Mautic utilizes a modern PHP ecosystem with extensive frontend and build tooling.
- Built primarily on PHP 7.x+ and Symfony, taking advantage of its component-based architecture for scalability
- Frontend development integrates TypeScript, Webpack, and CKEditor to support rich UI and content editing capabilities
- Comprehensive build tooling includes Grunt, Webpack, and patch-package for asset management and dependency handling
- Testing infrastructure is powered by PHPUnit and Codeception, with CI/CD pipelines supporting automated quality checks
Code Quality
Mautic maintains a mature and consistent codebase with strong testing practices and automated refactoring support.
- Code consistency is enforced through PHP-CS-Fixer, ECS, and Rector, ensuring uniform style and reducing technical debt
- Extensive test coverage spans unit, functional, and integration levels, with Codeception and PHPUnit as primary tools
- Error handling and logging are well-distributed across the application lifecycle, promoting robustness and traceability
What Makes It Unique
Mautic distinguishes itself through its extensibility model and enterprise-grade feature set within a flexible architecture.
- Its bundle-based plugin system enables third-party developers to extend functionality without modifying core code, fostering a vibrant ecosystem
- Deep integration with Symfony’s framework allows for powerful customization and seamless adaptation to diverse marketing needs
- Comprehensive developer tooling and configuration support streamline contribution and maintainability for large-scale deployments