Mautic

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.