Mautic Review: Free Open Source Marketing Automation Worth It?

What Is Marketing Automation (And Why Should You Care)?

Marketing automation lets you track and segment prospects based on the actions they take on your website — long before they ever fill out a form or hand over an email address. Instead of waiting for someone to convert before you know anything about them, marketing automation follows visitors from the very first page view through to becoming a paying customer.

That's a powerful concept. Most small businesses only start engaging leads after an opt-in, which means weeks of website visits go completely untracked. With proper marketing automation, you can build a picture of what someone cares about, which pages they visit, and how engaged they are — then use that data to send the right message at the right time.

The catch? Most tools that do this well aren't cheap. That's where Mautic enters the picture.

Where Mautic Fits in the Marketing Automation Landscape

Think of the email marketing world as a Venn diagram. On one end you have ActiveCampaign — extremely capable, but the pricing can be prohibitive once your list grows. On another end, MailChimp offers a free tier for up to 2,000 subscribers, but the automation features are limited. ConvertKit sits in the middle with a great user experience, though it gets expensive quickly.

Mautic carves out its own niche: high quality features at rock-bottom cost. The trade-off is ease of use. It's not going to hold your hand, and the learning curve is steeper than any of those commercial alternatives. But if you're comfortable with a bit of technical setup, you get enterprise-grade marketing automation without the enterprise price tag.

Why Mautic Is Worth Considering

The biggest draw is that Mautic is entirely self-hosted. You control your data, your server, and your destiny. No third party has access to your subscriber list, and you're not locked into a platform that could change its pricing or terms overnight.

Then there's the unlimited contacts advantage. Most email platforms charge you more as your list grows — MailChimp's free tier caps at 2,000 subscribers, and ActiveCampaign scales pricing with your contact count. With Mautic, whether you have 500 or 500,000 contacts, there's no per-subscriber fee.

Pair Mautic with Amazon SES for sending, and you're looking at roughly 10 cents per 1,000 emails. Deliverability stays solid because you're leaning on Amazon's infrastructure, and if you need even better inbox placement, you can add a dedicated IP through SES for roughly the cost of a coffee per week. On top of all that, you get advanced tagging, tracking, segmentation, and workflow automation — features that would normally require a premium tier on competing platforms.

Open Source: The WordPress of Email Marketing

Mautic is open source, which means the community develops and maintains it — much like WordPress. And just like WordPress, there are two sides to the project. Mautic.org is the open source project where you can download the software and host it yourself. Mautic.com is the commercial arm that offers a hosted, managed version.

If the hosted version sounds appealing, prepare for sticker shock. The commercial offering targets enterprise customers, and pricing runs into thousands of dollars per month. The good news is that the self-hosted version doesn't sacrifice any features. You get the exact same software — you just handle the installation, updates, and server management yourself.

The Honest Downsides You Need to Know

Support is entirely community-based. When something breaks or you hit a wall, your options are the Mautic Slack channel or hiring a freelancer on Fiverr. There's no support ticket system, no live chat with a team that knows the product inside out. For some people that's fine — for others, it's a dealbreaker.

Development moves slowly. And that's putting it kindly. At the time of this review, it took 18 months to go from version 2.15 to a beta of version 3, and most of the originally planned features for v3 didn't even make the cut. If you're expecting rapid iteration and frequent feature drops, Mautic will test your patience.

Updating your installation is another pain point. Whatever you do, don't press the update button inside the GUI — that's a trap every new Mautic user falls into. Updates need to be run from the command line, which means getting comfortable with SSH and a terminal. It's not difficult once you've done it, but it adds a layer of maintenance that tools like ConvertKit or MailChimp handle invisibly.

Should You Actually Use Mautic?

For most people, the honest answer is probably not. If you want something that just works out of the box, a commercial tool like ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign will save you hours of setup and troubleshooting. The monthly fee is the price you pay for convenience, support, and regular updates.

But if none of those downsides scare you — if you're comfortable managing a server, running command-line updates, and troubleshooting with community support — Mautic is genuinely impressive. You get a full-featured marketing automation platform with unlimited contacts, and your only ongoing cost is server hosting and email sending.

The best approach is to spin up a test installation on a VPS, run it alongside your current email tool, and see how it feels. You'll know pretty quickly whether Mautic fits your workflow or whether you'd rather pay for the polish of a commercial alternative.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.