Experience with Mautic Open Source Marketing Automation
In this article, I will tell you about my experience with Mautic, the best open-source marketing automation software currently available.
Making a choice for new software is always difficult. Especially if it is to be used productively in your company. Often an important criterion is: “Will these decisions make my boss happy?”. Unfortunately, the selection based on benefits, requirements analysis, and functions takes a back seat.
Far too often I have experienced that the selection of software was made on the basis of your name recognition and marketing perception. “We pay 350€ per month for the software” and “I heard from acquaintances that the company is the market leader”.
Have you ever thought about how to best implement newsletter and Marketing Automation for your Online Store?
In the field of marketing automation, there are certainly more than 300 software packages with different focuses, benefits, cost structures, etc. that are constantly changing! It is impossible to provide an up-to-date overview.
Instead, I would like to report here about experiences I have gathered from my customers and general users of Mautic with this marketing automation software. For this, I have analyzed online reviews and collected feedback from customers and from previous projects.
The source of the online reviews was:
https://www.trustradius.com/products/mautic/reviews
https://www.getapp.com/marketing-software/a/mautic/reviews/
https://www.capterra.com/p/191998/Mautic/reviews/
https://www.chamberofcommerce.org/review/mautic
https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/mautic/
https://www.stackshare.io/mautic
Experience with Mautic at a Glance
Depending on the comparison, evaluations naturally turn out differently. I have tried to evaluate based on collected online reviews, own experiences, and comparisons between SaaS, open-source, and manual newsletter.
| Functionality |  |
| Usability |  |
| Integration / Marketing Automation | |
| Scalability | |
| License, Data Sovereignty, Data Control | |
| Documentation / Support |  |
| Maintainability | |
Functionality
Functionality
Mautic offers many features that only the largest marketing automation software packages have.
Indeed! Mautic has a feature set that is quite impressive. Hailed by many as the best open source marketing automation, it offers much that you would otherwise only find in expensive solutions.
CRM Experience with Mautic
Mautic can come up with simple CRM functions. You have the possibility to store and manage contact and company in Mautic. Many fields are prepared for both types of data. After installation, you can also add more fields that are specific to your company and important for your marketing strategy.
One Stop Shop / Complete range of functions
Another experience with Mautic that I hear over and over again relates to the feature set. You get a lot of functionality in one piece of software that covers the needs of digital marketing teams. Drip emails, campaigns, CRM, profiling, onboarding, scoring, newsletters, segmentation, A/B testing, and much more.
Usability
Usability
The issue can always be critical when introducing new software. In many popular software packages today, usability is quite good. The concept and vocabulary of the software must be learned, of course, before you and your staff can use it efficiently. Often a Mautic training helps here to subjectively increase usability.
Intuitive User Interface
The user interface in Mautic can be grasped quite intuitively. Clear and tidy, the interface supports the daily work in marketing.
Landing page builder is not easy to use
Yes, that’s true. If you compare it to HTML itself, it’s easier. Compared to systems like WordPress, the experience with Mautic is much worse. And that’s why I recommend WordPress or your own CMS! Mautic integrates great. You create a form in Mautic and can easily embed it in a landing page that you have created in your CMS as usual.
Integration
Integration / Marketing Automation
Especially if several systems are already in place or planned, then integration plays an important role.
Your data needs to be consistent across systems. Your employees ideally want to log in to only one system for a process. And you’d like the most meaningful analysis and reports from marketing and sales.
Automation of Tasks in Marketing is possible
The experience with Mautic is top here! This is exactly what the software was developed for. With campaigns and elements, it is possible to accompany your visitors on their customer journey. Mautic starts at the very beginning with landing pages and page elements and accompanies customers long after the first orders.
Experience with Mautic and Integration into Websites
It is easy to integrate Mautic with the existing website!
That’s actually true. For some systems, there are plug-ins that Mautic integrates quite easily. If you have a CMS and a store system that does not have a plug-in for Mautic, it still works. Here you can simply generate a tracking pixel or a Mautic Java Script in Mautic. This code only has to be integrated into your theme and Mautic is already integrated!
Email Gateway is not included in Mautic
At first glance, this may sound like a disadvantage. However, it is actually an advantage. First of all, it gives you flexibility in which service you use for sending emails. Another aspect to this advantage is your reputation. If you ever want to change your email sending software, you keep the good reputation you have built up with your email gateway.
Pre-built plug-ins for integration with other systems
Here Mautic could offer more. It depends on what kind of system environment you have. There may not be a plug-in that just needs to be enabled to integrate with your environment. However, via the Mautic API and webhooks, it is quite easy to integrate any open system with Mautic.
Scalability
Scalability
At its best, software can grow with your business and your needs.
Mautic grows with your needs
Both freelancers and Fortune 500 corporations use Mautic. It is possible to send a simple newsletter to a few customers. But it is also possible to create complex onboarding processes with landing pages and dynamic content based on points systems and very detailed user segments.
License, Data Sovereignty
License, Data Sovereignty, Data Control
Especially in today’s times with GDPR, DSGVO, CCPA, cloud applications, data scandal etc. the handling of data is more difficult than ever. Many large, US-American applications cannot be used legally in Germany. Having control over your own data seems to become more and more important.
Experiences with Mautic and Open Source in general
Open Source means that the source code is freely accessible. Mautic as software is subject to an open-source license. This gives you the right to use Mautic free of charge and to integrate it into and adapt it to your environment.
Your data belongs to you
Very true! Unlike SaaS solutions that live on servers managed by other companies, you install Mautic on your own server and web hosting package. This gives you full control over who has access to your data and what happens to it.
Open source – can be customized according to your needs
This is one of the great advantages of open source. Wherewith SaaS you simply have to live with some of the peculiarities, with open source you can easily customize it. Here you have many possibilities to improve the software: Webhook, API as a module, and finally also directly via the code.
Local and International Regulations
Especially in Europe with DSGVO, the requirements for software are a bit different than in, say, America and Asia. Fortunately, with Mautic you have options to customize it to fit the requirements in your industry and country.
Documentation
Documentation / Support
Documentation and support make the use of a software easier. Besides training, documentation can be used to look up some details. Support can make sense depending on how your project looks like.
Some Functions are insufficiently explained in the manual
Indeed. Especially in the beginning, a more detailed version is certainly more helpful.
Depending on how you want to approach your marketing automation project, you have a lot of starting points here with Mautic. I recommend setting one to three very simple goals at the beginning. This can be a standard newsletter, for example. You can then implement this with Mautic and learn the basics. In the process, you will find out more functionalities with which you can expand, optimize and automate your marketing activities.
Maintainability
Maintainability
Maintenance of software is something that needs to be done. With SaaS applications, the provider does it for you without you having any influence on the quality of the maintenance. With open source software on your own server and cloud environment, it’s up to you to determine the frequency and quality of maintenance.
Upgrades
Experiences with Mautic, especially with upgrades in version 1 and early version numbers 2, were not always positive. Upgrades have sometimes caused errors. Upgrades within version 3 (for example 3.0 to 3.1) have always worked without errors for me.
A distinction can be made between security and feature upgrades:
Security upgrades should be carried out as soon as possible to avoid unnecessary risks. The upgrades, which only bring new functions, you can plan as it fits best into your needs.
Database growth
In principle, this problem is a very good one. Because it is true that the more visitors you have on your website, the more you will notice the data growth. Mautic stores all the data in your own database and thus at some point, you may experience performance degradation.
To give numbers here: With approx. 50,000 – 100,000 visitors per day on your website, tables with 1 GB size are possible and you have to scale your servers accordingly.
However, if you have 50,000 visitors on your website and a conversion rate of only 2%, you are at 1000 orders a day and have reached a certain size with your company, where your IT department is familiar with such problems. Archiving old data is always a fairly simple solution.
Conclusion
Experience with Mautic – Conclusion
Mautic is a powerful software. There is no comparable solution in the open-source area!
As with so many open-source projects, the capital is missing to become as well known as Hubspot and others. This is not the focus of Mautic. It’s more about solid marketing automation that gives you all the freedom regarding your data, your integrations, and extensions without strict black-box restrictions, lock-in, and high licensing costs.