Your contacts live in one tool, your forms in another and your follow-up emails in a third, so every new lead means a CSV export and a manual import. So, what is Mautic? Mautic is a free, open-source marketing automation platform that you run on your own server to manage contacts, build campaigns and send email.
Teams often call it a self-hosted alternative to HubSpot or ActiveCampaign. It is a different job from general workflow automation, though. If you are weighing it against a tool like n8n, our guide on what n8n is covers the other side of that line.
In this guide, you will learn how Mautic works, what each feature does and who it suits. You will also see how it compares with HubSpot, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign and Listmonk, what it needs to run and how to host it.
TL;DR: Mautic in 60 Seconds
Short on time? Here is the whole guide in a few lines:
- Mautic is open-source marketing automation software under the GPL v3 license. It is free, and you host it yourself.
- It covers contacts, segments, a visual campaign builder, emails, landing pages, forms, lead scoring and focus items in one dashboard.
- The project is community-run. Its trademarks are held by the Open Source Collective, and the current major version is Mautic 7 (7.2.2 as of November 2026).
- Mautic does not send email on its own. You connect an SMTP or API email provider.
- It depends on cron jobs. If the scheduled commands stop, campaigns and segment emails stop too.
- Against HubSpot or Mailchimp, you trade a contact-based bill for server costs and your own time.
What Is Mautic?
Mautic is an open-source marketing automation platform that tracks how people interact with your website and emails, then sends the right message to the right contact automatically. The Mautic project calls itself the world’s largest open-source marketing automation project, and it runs on your own server and database.
Think of Mautic like a shop assistant with a perfect memory. It notices who walked in and what they browsed, then follows up at the right moment. The difference is that the shop and the notebook live on a server you control.
A few things worth knowing:
- The software is free. You pay for hosting and email sending, never per contact.
- It has a long history. David “DB” Hurley launched Mautic in 2014, and Acquia acquired the company behind it in May 2019.
- It is independent again. In 2023, Acquia transferred the trademarks, domains and governance to the Open Source Collective, the project’s fiscal host. An elected community Council now guides it.
- Releases are active. On October 26, 2026, 7.2.2 shipped alongside security updates for the 6.0 and 5.2 lines.
Mautic at a Glance
| Detail | Value |
|---|---|
| License | GNU GPL v3 |
| Language | PHP, built on the Symfony framework |
| PHP version | 8.2 or newer for current releases |
| Database | MySQL or MariaDB |
| First release | 2014 |
| Current major version | Mautic 7 (latest: 7.2.2, October 2026) |
| Governance | Community project, fiscally hosted by the Open Source Collective |
| GitHub | About 10.9k stars on mautic/mautic (November 2026) |
| RAM | No single published minimum; it grows with contacts and send volume |
How Mautic Works
Mautic is a PHP web application with a few moving parts:
- The web app serves the dashboard, landing pages, forms and tracking.
- The database stores every contact, visit, email open and campaign step.
- A tracking snippet on your website links anonymous visitors to contacts once they fill in a form or click an email.
- Cron jobs run the scheduled commands that rebuild segments, add contacts to campaigns, run campaign steps and send segment emails.
- An email transport hands every message to your SMTP server or email API.
Here’s the part that trips people up: Mautic does almost nothing on a schedule unless cron runs it. The official Mautic docs list required commands such as mautic:segments:update, mautic:campaigns:update and mautic:campaigns:trigger. They also advise staggering them, for example at minutes 0, 5 and 10 of every 15-minute block. If cron jobs are new to you, our guide to scheduling tasks with cron jobs explains the syntax.
For email, SMTP is the default transport. Mautic can also use other Symfony Mailer transports, such as the SendGrid API, and Mautic Marketplace plugins add batch sending and bounce handling. For large sends, it can hold emails and send them in batches instead of one by one.
9 Key Mautic Features
Mautic’s feature list is long. These nine are the ones you will use every week.
1. Contacts and Companies
Contacts are the core of Mautic: known or unknown people who visited your website or interacted with your business. Each contact gets a timeline of visits, email opens, form submissions and points. For B2B work, you can group contacts under Companies.
2. Segments
A segment is a group of contacts that share attributes or behavior, such as “visited the pricing page twice this month.” Segments refresh on a schedule, so a contact who qualifies today joins once the segment cron job runs.
3. Visual Campaign Builder
The campaign builder is where Mautic earns its name. You start from a segment or a form, then chain actions, decisions and conditions on a visual canvas.
A simple flow sends a welcome email, waits three days and checks whether the contact opened it. Openers get a case study, everyone else gets a reminder, and any branch can add points or change a stage.
4. Emails
Template emails go out from campaigns, form actions and point triggers, and a contact can receive them more than once. Segment emails are broadcasts that each contact receives only once, like a newsletter. Both use the built-in drag-and-drop builder, and Mautic can A/B test a send and mail the winner to the rest.
5. Landing Pages
Landing pages are built for one purpose, such as an ad campaign or a webinar sign-up. They use the same builder as emails, and every visit is tracked against the contact.
6. Forms and Assets
Forms turn strangers into contacts. Embed them on your website, a Mautic landing page, inside your app or in a pop-up. Pair them with Assets, such as a white paper or video the contact gets after submitting.
7. Lead Scoring With Points and Stages
Points score each contact by what they do, so a pricing page visit can count for more than an email open. Stages track where a contact sits in your funnel, such as “Lead” or “Customer.” Together, they tell sales who to call first.
8. Focus Items and Dynamic Web Content
Focus items are pop-ups, bars and splash screens that appear based on visitor behavior, and they can hold a form. Dynamic web content swaps a block on your own website per visitor, so a returning customer and a first-time visitor see different offers.
9. Integrations, API and Reports
The docs include plugins for Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Twilio, Zapier and WordPress, among others. Mautic also has an API and webhooks. Dashboards and reports show how campaigns, emails, forms and pages perform, and reports can arrive by email on a schedule.
Who Is Mautic For?
Mautic fits teams that want marketing automation without handing their contact list to a SaaS vendor.
Small Businesses Outgrowing a Newsletter Tool
You started with a newsletter, and now you want welcome series, lead scoring and landing pages. Mautic gives you all of that without a bill that rises with every new contact.
B2B Teams Nurturing Leads for Sales
Points, stages and CRM plugins make Mautic a solid nurturing engine. Marketing warms leads up, then hands the hot ones to sales with their history attached. Agencies use the same setup with one instance per client.
Privacy-Conscious Organizations
The project describes itself as privacy-focused. Self-hosting lets you choose where the server sits and who can access the data. You still need your own consent process, since software alone does not make you compliant.
Who Should Skip It
If you send one newsletter a month to a small list, Mautic is more tool than you need. The same goes if nobody wants to look after a server.
Mautic vs HubSpot, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign and Listmonk
Every tool here is good at its job. The question is which job you have.
| Mautic | HubSpot | Mailchimp | ActiveCampaign | Listmonk | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Marketing automation | Marketing, CRM, sales and service suite | Email marketing | Email marketing automation | Newsletter and mailing-list manager |
| Hosting | Self-hosted | Hosted SaaS | Hosted SaaS | Hosted SaaS | Self-hosted |
| License | Open source (GPL v3) | Proprietary | Proprietary | Proprietary | Open source (AGPL v3) |
| Pricing model | Free software, you pay for server and email | Free tools, paid tiers by contacts and seats | Free plan with limits, paid plans by contacts | Paid plans by contacts, free trial | Free software, you pay for server and email |
| Automation | Visual campaign builder with lead scoring | Workflows on paid tiers | Customer journeys | Visual automations | Not its focus |
| Where data lives | Your server | Vendor cloud | Vendor cloud | Vendor cloud | Your server |
| Maintenance | Yours (or your host’s) | Vendor | Vendor | Vendor | Yours (or your host’s) |
HubSpot is the most complete package, and its CRM is a real strength. Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign are polished, quick to start and run the sending side for you. Mautic wins when you mainly need marketing automation and want a fixed server cost instead of a contact-based bill.
Listmonk is the closest open-source neighbor: a single Go binary backed by PostgreSQL, fast and simple for newsletters. If you only need lists and broadcasts, start with Listmonk hosting and move to Mautic once you need scoring and multi-step campaigns.
Rule of thumb: Listmonk sends newsletters; Mautic runs funnels.
What Mautic Needs to Run
- A Linux server with a web server and PHP 8.2 or newer for current releases.
- MySQL or MariaDB. Mautic 7 raised the minimum database versions, so check the official requirements page for your release.
- Cron jobs for segments, campaigns and segment emails.
- An email provider over SMTP or API, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set on your sending domain.
- A domain and an SSL certificate for forms, tracking and landing pages.
Sending is the step people underestimate. Our roundups of SMTP and email API providers for SaaS and transactional email services compare the options. xCloud Mail Delivery is built for transactional email such as password resets, so for bulk campaigns choose a provider whose terms allow marketing email.
Ways to Run Mautic
- Manual install. Use Composer on your own server, then configure the web server, database, cron jobs and SSL.
- Docker. The official Mautic Docker image runs in three roles: web, background processing and cron. It is tidy, but you still own updates and backups.
- Managed one-click. A platform creates the server, database, domain and HTTPS for you, so you start at the Mautic login screen.
The trade-off is simple: your time is the hidden cost. A manual install is free on paper. Then a campaign quietly stops at 3 a.m. because cron failed after a server update, and nobody notices until Monday’s report.
Mautic Pros and Cons
| ✅ Pros | ❌ Cons |
|---|---|
| ✅ Free, open-source software with no per-contact fees | ❌ You set up and maintain the server, cron jobs and upgrades |
| ✅ Contacts and campaign data stay in your own database | ❌ Deliverability is your job: provider, SPF, DKIM and DMARC |
| ✅ Visual campaign builder with decisions and conditions | ❌ Steeper learning curve than Mailchimp-style tools |
| ✅ Lead scoring, stages, focus items and landing pages built in | ❌ Large lists need a well-sized server and tuned cron jobs |
| ✅ CRM plugins, API and webhooks | ❌ No vendor support desk; help comes from the community or partners |
| ✅ Community governance under the Open Source Collective | ❌ Major upgrades need a backup and a careful test |
Deploy Mautic on Your Own Server With xCloud
If you want Mautic without building the server stack yourself, xCloud deploys it as a One Click App with a database and HTTPS. Here is how it works:
- Pick the app. Click New Site, choose your Server, open One Click Apps and select Mautic.
- Choose a mode. Add a Site Title and Tags, then pick Go Live or Demo Site (a temporary subdomain). A promoted demo site cannot switch back to the demo domain.
- Set the admin login. Review the Admin Username, Admin Password and Admin Email Address.
- Pick a database. Keep Create Database to a Server (the recommended default) or choose Add Your Existing Database, then click Next.
- Add your domain. Attach your own domain, plus an Additional Domain if you need one.
- Log in. Click Visit Site and sign in with the admin details. xCloud already created the admin user.
Two tasks stay yours. Add the Mautic cron jobs from your server’s Cron Jobs page with Add Cron Job, as the site user (see how to add a custom cron job). Then connect your email provider in Mautic’s email settings.
What you get on xCloud:
- ✅ A dedicated Cloud VPS, from $24.99/month for 6 GB RAM, 4 vCPU and 100 GB NVMe storage, or 16 GB RAM for $59.99/month
- ✅ A free SSL certificate and your own domain
- ✅ Server backups and snapshots, plus server security updates (how backups work in xCloud)
- ✅ 30+ server locations, so you can keep data in the region you prefer
- ✅ A self-managed option: connect your own VPS and pay a per-server management fee instead
Two honest limits: xCloud does not upgrade Mautic for you, and it does not set up your sending provider. Take a server backup before each Mautic upgrade.
Ready to run your own marketing automation? Start with Mautic hosting on xCloud.
👉 Follow the step-by-step guide: How to set up Mautic with xCloud One Click Apps.
Start Owning Your Marketing Automation This Week
Mautic gives you what most marketing SaaS tools sell: segments, campaigns, email, landing pages and lead scoring. In return, you own the server, the cron jobs and the sending setup.
This week, map one funnel you run by hand, such as a welcome series. Pick your email provider, deploy Mautic on a demo domain and rebuild that funnel. If it works, move your contacts over.
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Frequently asked questions
What is Mautic used for?
Mautic is used to automate marketing on your own server. Teams use it to collect leads with forms and landing pages, group contacts into segments, send emails and run multi-step campaigns. Lead scoring then shows which contacts are ready for sales.
Is Mautic really free?
Yes. The software is free and open source under the GPL v3 license, with no per-contact fee. You still pay for the server it runs on and for the email provider that sends your campaigns.
Who owns and maintains Mautic now?
The Mautic community does. Acquia bought Mautic Inc. in 2019, then handed the trademarks, domains and governance to the Open Source Collective on the project’s behalf in 2023. Today an elected community Council guides the project and its finances are published publicly.
Does Mautic need cron jobs?
Yes. Mautic updates segments, adds contacts to campaigns and runs campaign steps through scheduled commands, so without cron jobs your campaigns stall. The Mautic docs recommend staggering the main jobs so they do not run in the same minute.
Can Mautic send email without an SMTP provider?
Not in a way you should rely on. Mautic uses SMTP by default and can also use API-based transports such as SendGrid, but it needs a sending provider either way. Pick one whose terms allow marketing email and set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your domain.
Mautic or Listmonk: which one do I need?
Pick Listmonk if you only need newsletters and mailing lists. Pick Mautic if you need behavior tracking, lead scoring, landing pages and multi-step campaigns. You can start with Listmonk and move to Mautic when your funnel grows.
I built a campaign in Mautic but no emails go out. What should I check first?
Check your cron jobs first, because campaigns only move forward when the campaign commands run. Then send a test email from the email settings to confirm your SMTP or API details work. Finally, check that the contacts are actually in the segment the campaign uses.