Mauticvs
Brevo
Brevo: If you want low per-send pricing and managed deliverability without running servers or cron jobs
Mautic
The main open source marketing automation platform, self-hosted and GPL licensed
As of 31 August 2026, Mautic is free to use. A self-hostable marketing automation system with no licence fee, used mostly by agencies and organisations that must keep contact data on their own servers. Softwr lists it under Marketing. Mautic is made by Mautic project, Open Source Collective, available on Web, Linux, Self-hosted.
Overview
What Mautic does
Mautic is marketing automation you run yourself: contact management, segmentation, landing pages, forms, email campaigns, a visual campaign builder, lead scoring, dynamic web content and reporting. It is written in PHP on Symfony with a MySQL or MariaDB database, and it runs on ordinary shared or virtual hosting, which is why it appears so often in agency stacks and in European organisations that want customer data on infrastructure they control rather than in a US SaaS. The governance history is what a buyer should understand. Mautic was founded as a company, and in 2019 Acquia acquired the commercial entity, keeping the open source project alive and building its own hosted product, Acquia Campaign Studio, on top of it. The Mautic trademark now sits with the Open Source Collective and the project is community governed with Acquia as one contributor among several. In practice this means the free product is genuinely free with no feature gating, but the loudest commercial voice in the ecosystem has an interest in a hosted version, and community releases move at community speed. The current major line is Mautic 6. Buyers are marketing agencies running campaigns for many clients on one instance, universities and NGOs with data protection constraints, and companies avoiding per-contact SaaS pricing at high list sizes. The honest trade-off is operational: Mautic requires cron jobs that must run reliably, a mail sending relationship you arrange and pay for yourself, PHP upgrades, and someone who will apply security patches. Teams that install it and then neglect the cron schedule end up with campaigns silently not sending, which is the single most common Mautic failure.
What people use it for
- A marketing agency running automation for many clients that cannot pass on per-contact SaaS pricing at scale
- A European university or public body whose data protection position requires contact data to stay on infrastructure it controls
- A company with a list of several hundred thousand contacts where SaaS per-contact pricing has become the largest line in the marketing budget
- A team that needs to modify the automation logic itself, not just configure it, and wants source access to do so
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Mautic.
- Mautic depends on reliably scheduled cron jobs to process segments and send campaigns, and a misconfigured or silently failing schedule stops sends without an obvious error, which is the most common way Mautic deployments fail in production.
- Email sending is not included: you must arrange, pay for and warm up your own sending infrastructure through Amazon SES, SendGrid or similar, and deliverability problems become entirely your problem with no vendor to escalate to.
- Acquia owns the commercial descendant, Campaign Studio, and is the largest contributor, so the loudest commercial interest in the ecosystem benefits from a hosted product rather than from the self-hosted one being easy.
- Upgrades between major versions have historically been disruptive, requiring database migrations and plugin compatibility checks, so a neglected instance can become expensive to bring current.
- The interface and the reporting are noticeably behind commercial platforms, so marketing teams that came from HubSpot or ActiveCampaign will find everyday tasks slower and will need training.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Mautic
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- MauticvsActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign: If you want a mature campaign builder and reporting with a vendor accountable for deliverability
- MauticvsHubSpot
HubSpot: If you would rather buy an integrated marketing and CRM platform than assemble and maintain one
Pricing
What Mautic costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Self-hosted community
Free
- GPL licensed, no licence fee and no contact limits
- All features included, no paid edition
- You provide hosting, database, cron scheduling and email sending
- Community support via forum, Slack and GitHub
- Security patching is your responsibility
Managed Mautic hosting
On request
- Third-party managed hosting listed by the project
- Updates, backups and cron scheduling handled for you
- Pricing varies by provider and is not set by the project
Capabilities
Features
Visual campaign builder
Drag-and-drop multi-step campaigns with decisions, delays and branching
Contact management and segmentation
Unlimited contacts on your own infrastructure with filter-based dynamic segments
Landing pages and forms
Built-in page builder and forms that write directly to contact records
Lead scoring
Point-based scoring on behaviour, email engagement and page visits
Dynamic web content
Serve different website content based on segment membership
Email builder and A/B testing
Template editor with split testing on subject and content
Self-hosted data control
All contact data stays on infrastructure you own, which satisfies many GDPR postures
No feature gating
GPL licensed with no paid edition holding features back
Plugins and API
REST API plus a plugin ecosystem for CRM and CMS integration
Multi-tenant agency use
Agencies commonly run separate instances or segmented campaigns per client
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is Mautic free?
Yes, GPL licensed with no licence fee and no contact limits. You pay for hosting, email sending and the staff time to maintain it.
Does Acquia own Mautic?
Acquia acquired the founding commercial entity in 2019 and sells Campaign Studio built on it, but the Mautic trademark sits with the Open Source Collective and the project is community governed.
What breaks most often?
Cron scheduling. If segment rebuilding and campaign triggers are not running on schedule, campaigns quietly stop sending with no alert.
Can it handle large contact lists?
Yes, but performance at several hundred thousand contacts depends on database tuning and queue configuration, which is work you must do yourself.
Keep looking
Where to go from Mautic
- Mautic alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Mautic pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Mautic badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Marketing softwareThe full category
- Best Marketing softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Mautic, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Mautic
Mautic alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Mautic pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Mautic
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Mautic badge
Its rating, and an embed for your own site
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