Marketing automation platforms track how prospects interact with your website and emails, then send the right message at the right time without manual effort. Commercial platforms are powerful, but pricing that scales with the number of contacts can become expensive as your database grows. Mautic is an open source alternative that offers many of the same capabilities and runs on infrastructure you control.
What Mautic is
Mautic is a web-based marketing automation application written in PHP. It is licensed under the GPL and developed as a community project; check the official Mautic website for current releases, requirements and governance. You can self-host it, or use one of the providers that offer managed Mautic hosting.
Core Mautic features
Contacts and tracking
Mautic stores contacts with standard and custom fields. A tracking script on your website records page visits, linking them to known contacts once they identify themselves, for example by submitting a form or clicking a tracked email link.
Segments
Segments are dynamic lists defined by filters: contacts in a given country, those who visited the pricing page, those with a certain tag. Contacts join or leave automatically as their data changes.
Forms and landing pages
Build forms to embed on your site and standalone landing pages, with submissions feeding directly into contact records and campaigns.
Emails
Create template emails for campaigns and segment emails for newsletters or announcements, with a drag-and-drop builder, personalisation tokens and tracking of opens and clicks.
Campaigns
The campaign builder is a visual workflow: start from a segment or form, then add actions (send email, update field, add tag), conditions (has the contact opened the email, visited a page) and delays. This is where nurture sequences, onboarding series and re-engagement flows are built.
Lead scoring
Points and stages let you score contacts based on behaviour, for example adding points for visiting key pages or downloading content, so sales can focus on the most engaged prospects.
Integrations
Plugins and the REST API connect Mautic to CRMs, content management systems and other tools. Webhooks can notify other systems when contacts change.
Mautic vs commercial platforms
| Aspect | Mautic (self-hosted) | Typical commercial platform |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing basis | Hosting, email sending and support | Subscription, often tied to contact count and feature tier |
| Data location | Your choice | Vendor's infrastructure |
| Setup | Requires installation, cron jobs and email configuration | Ready to use |
| Customisation | Extensive, including code | Within vendor options |
| Polish and built-in analytics | Functional; may need complementing | Often more refined |
| Support | Community, partners or your own team | Vendor support by plan |
Hosting Mautic properly
Mautic is more demanding to run than a simple website. Plan for:
- A suitable server: a Linux environment with a supported PHP version and a MySQL or MariaDB database. Size it to your contact numbers and campaign volume; large databases need more memory and database tuning.
- Scheduled tasks: Mautic relies on cron jobs to update segments, run campaigns, send queued emails and process imports. If these are missing or misconfigured, campaigns quietly stall. This is one of the most common setup problems.
- Email queueing: sending through a queue rather than immediately keeps the interface responsive during large sends.
- Backups and updates: regular database backups and timely security updates, tested on staging before production.
Email deliverability
Mautic does not deliver email itself; it hands messages to a mail service. For reliable inbox placement:
- Use a reputable email sending service designed for bulk and transactional mail, connected through SMTP or an API transport, rather than sending from your web server.
- Authenticate your domain with SPF, DKIM and DMARC records.
- Consider a sending subdomain for marketing, to separate its reputation from your everyday business email.
- Process bounces and unsubscribes so invalid and unwilling recipients are removed automatically.
- Send only to people who opted in, and warm up new sending domains gradually.
Privacy and consent
Marketing automation processes personal data and tracks behaviour, so data protection rules apply. Depending on where you and your contacts are, that may include India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, the EU GDPR or other national laws. In practice:
- Record how and when each contact gave consent.
- Make unsubscribing easy and honour it immediately.
- Use a cookie consent mechanism where required before tracking website visitors.
- Collect only data you will use, and set retention rules.
- Be able to export or delete a contact's data on request.
Self-hosting helps with control over data location, but compliance still depends on how you use the tool. Take legal advice for your specific obligations.
Getting started
- Define two or three automation goals, such as welcoming new subscribers or nurturing trial users.
- Install Mautic, configure cron jobs and connect a sending service.
- Add the tracking script and build your first form.
- Import existing contacts with their consent status.
- Build one simple campaign, test it with internal addresses, then launch.
- Review results after a few weeks and expand gradually.
Our open source solutions include Mautic installation, CRM integration and configuration, and server management can run the hosting, cron jobs and updates reliably.
Key takeaways
- Mautic is a GPL-licensed marketing automation platform with contacts, segments, forms, emails, campaigns and scoring.
- Costs depend on hosting and email sending rather than contact-based subscriptions.
- Correct cron jobs, a reputable sending service and domain authentication are essential.
- Consent, easy unsubscribes and data rights handling remain your responsibility.