Mautic

What Mautic does

Mautic is a marketing automation platform, which makes it broader than a newsletter tool. Alongside one-off emails and newsletters it stores contacts and companies, groups them into segments, scores leads by their activity and runs multi-step journeys built in a visual campaign editor: send an email, wait, check whether a link was clicked, add a tag, move the contact to another segment, and so on. Forms and landing pages are built in the same application, so signups feed straight into segments and campaigns.

The email builder is a drag-and-drop editor based on MJML with more than 20 included templates. Emails can contain personalization tokens and dynamic content blocks that change according to filters such as segment membership, can be A/B tested, and can exist in several languages, with Mautic choosing the version that matches each contact’s language.

Email delivery

Mautic does not deliver mail itself. Since version 5 it uses Symfony Mailer, so SMTP works out of the box and API-based transports for sending providers can be added through plugins. Sending, segment updates and campaign actions are processed by several cron jobs that work through contacts in batches; the documentation explains how to tune batch sizes and recommends staggering the jobs so they do not overlap.

Self-hosting Mautic

Mautic is a PHP application on Symfony. Mautic 7.0 supports PHP 8.2 to 8.5 and needs MySQL 5.7 or newer (InnoDB) or MariaDB 10.2 or newer, behind Apache or NGINX. The README recommends installing tagged releases with Composer or the packaged download for production; installing from the GitHub source is meant for development. Several cron jobs are mandatory for the application to work, which is the main difference from simpler newsletter tools that send from a built-in queue.

Hosted version

The Mautic project does not run its own hosted service. Managed Mautic is offered through Dropsolid, which the project describes as its official trials and hosting partner, with part of the revenue going back to the community. A trial is available, but it disables plugins, the API and mail settings and only sends a limited number of emails to your own address. Other hosting providers are listed in the project’s partner directory.

Limitations

Mautic has many more concepts to learn than a newsletter sender, and running it well means managing PHP, a database, a mail transport and staggered cron jobs. It is not a publishing platform: there are no paid subscriptions or a newsletter website with an archive of posts. Because the project has no hosted service of its own, teams that do not want to run servers depend on partners.

Who it suits

Mautic suits marketing teams, agencies and organizations that want automated customer journeys, lead scoring, forms and landing pages on their own infrastructure. It is the most complete open source answer to the automation features of Mailchimp and to Kit’s sequences and visual automations. If you only need to send newsletters to lists, listmonk or Keila are far simpler to run.