Open Source ActiveCampaign Alternatives

Mautic is the largest open source marketing automation project, and it exists so an organization can run integrated campaigns without renting a platform to do it. Contacts, segments and campaign history live in a database you administer, on a server you control.

The project frames its aim as being the most privacy-focused, accessible and extendable marketing automation product on the market. It was verified as a Digital Public Good in 2024, and both the frontend and the backend are meant to be customized rather than merely configured.

What that self-hosted position actually buys is worth being specific about.

• No third-party dependency: campaigns run on infrastructure you own instead of a vendor SaaS.
• Data ownership: contact records and campaign history sit in your own database.
• No vendor lock-in: the software can be modified, extended or left behind at will.
• Unlimited segmentation: segments and automation are not capped by a pricing tier.
• Multi-channel reach: additional channels arrive without additional cost.
• Custom integrations: anything the project does not ship can be built against it.

Installing with Composer is the recommended route, and a prepackaged production download exists for anyone who would rather stay away from the command line. A DDEV configuration ships in the repository, so a single start command runs the first-run process and configures the application automatically.

One caution from the maintainers deserves repeating. Source outside a tagged release should be treated as alpha and kept out of production, where a schema drifting from the release line can break the updater and require manual repair.

SendPortal is email marketing software you run yourself. Subscribers, segments, campaigns, and the tracking data they generate stay in your own database, and sending goes out through whichever provider you already hold an account with, which is where most of the cost difference against hosted services comes from.

It is a Laravel application, and it exists in two forms. The core package holds the functionality and drops into an existing Laravel application that already handles user authentication. The standalone application wraps that core with authentication and workspace management for anyone starting fresh. Version 3 requires PHP 8.2 or later, Laravel 10 or later, and MySQL 5.7 or PostgreSQL 9.4 as a floor; older PHP and Laravel installations are served by version 2 instead.

The application covers the loop from importing a list to reading a report.

• Subscriber management: import or update contacts by CSV upload or through the API, then divide them into custom segments.
• Campaigns: send to a whole list or to a segment, using templates you design yourself.
• Message tracking: sends, opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes recorded per campaign.
• Workspaces: several teams or domains handled through a single interface.
• REST API: templates, subscribers, tags, and campaigns all addressable for integration and automation.

Sending providers include Amazon SES, Postmark, Sendgrid, Mailgun, Mailjet, and plain SMTP. No per-subscriber or per-message caps are built into the software, so the limits are your provider's and your server's rather than a pricing tier's. Installation is a clone, a composer install, and a web server.