Self-hosted marketing automation without the per-contact pricing.
Part of our ongoing series covering the best apps available through Softaculous.
Commercial marketing platforms have a bad habit of punishing growth. They start cheap right up until your contact list starts growing. Before long, you’re paying double all because there are a few more names in the database.
Mautic solves this by giving you the same tools you expect from commercial platforms, but on infrastructure you control.
What is Mautic?
Mautic lets you track how people interact with your website and business, then automatically send targeted messages based on what they do.
One install can handle newsletter signups, drip campaigns, lead nurturing, gated downloads, landing pages, contact scoring, and more. Because Mautic is self-hosted and open source, you stay in control of your customer data instead of handing it over to another platform.
WordPressDrupalLaravelCustom websitesAny site where you can add forms or tracking
Who Should Be Using Mautic?
Mautic isn’t for everyone
Businesses That Want More Than a Basic Newsletter. Once you move beyond “send one newsletter to everyone once a month,” commercial platforms can get expensive fast. Mautic makes more sense when you want better segmentation, automation, and control without paying more every time your list grows.
Agencies Running Campaigns for Clients. Keep your clients (and their data) under one roof.
Privacy-Conscious Organizations. Don’t feed the machine if you don’t have to.
What Mautic Does Well
Not just a newsletter script.
Email Campaigns and Broadcasts. Mautic handles scheduled newsletters, transactional emails, and one-off segmented sends.
Segments. You can group contacts by pretty much any useful data point: form submissions, tags, page visits, field values, campaign behavior, and plenty more.
Campaign Builder. The drag-and-drop campaign builder is probably Mautic’s best feature. Once an automation starts branching in several directions, being able to visualize the logic makes a huge difference.
Forms and Landing Pages. You can quickly build and test multiple versions of landing pages or forms without having to loop in a developer every time.
Lead Scoring. You can apply points to practically any user action. Combined, those scores give you a quick idea of which contacts are showing the most interest.
Tracking and Analytics. You’re not limited to opens and clicks. Mautic can also track things like page visits, form submissions, and activity associated with individual contacts.
Extensibility. It’s open source, so you’re not stuck waiting on Mautic to add features. You can change it yourself, see if a plugin exists, or find someone who can build your feature for you.
Pros & Cons
Pros & Cons
The Good
You are not paying more just because your contact list grows
The campaign builder is powerful once you get comfortable with it
Your marketing data stays on infrastructure you control
Flexible enough to handle newsletters, funnels, onboarding, and lead nurturing
The Drawbacks
Requires some technical elbow grease
Sender reputation and email delivery become YOUR problem
The interface has a learning curve
Large contact databases and busy automations can get heavy on smaller hosting plans
Performance & System Requirements
Mautic is usable on normal hosting for modest projects, but it is more demanding than a basic CMS because it is continuously segmenting, queueing, tracking, and processing campaigns.
System Requirements
CPU
1+ Core
RAM
1 GB+ recommended
Storage
300 MB base + contact growth
PHP
8.2+
MySQL
MySQL / MariaDB supported
Use this as a starting point. Resources vary wildly based on the size of your contact database and how often your cron-driven automations run.
How to Install Mautic on Your Hawk Host Account
Softaculous makes the initial installation easy. The important work comes right after.
Decide where Mautic should live.
- Installing on a subdomain like marketing.yourdomain.com keeps it separate and tidy.
- Installing in a folder like yourdomain.com/mautic is also perfectly workable.
Subdomain Recommended
A dedicated subdomain usually makes the cleanest long-term setup, especially if multiple people will log in or if this install becomes central to your team’s workflow.
Choose your admin username, password, and email address, then complete the install. Softaculous will handle the application files and database setup for you.
These are not created automatically during installation. If you skip this step, your Mautic install may look perfectly fine while key features simply do not work.
Your First 10 Minutes Inside Mautic
Don’t build anything clever yet. Just get one simple path working.
1. Make sure email actually works. Configure your email transport method and send yourself a test message.
2. Check your cron jobs. If you have not already configured them, do it now. Mautic depends on cron for things like segment updates and campaign processing, and skipping this step is an easy way to spend an hour troubleshooting something that was never broken.
3. Create ONE form. Keep it boring. A basic newsletter signup form is perfect.
4. Send those contacts into ONE segment. Something obvious like Newsletter Subscribers works fine. You can build fancy segmentation later.
5. Write ONE email. A short welcome message is enough. You are testing the system right now, not trying to win an award for email copy.
6. Build ONE campaign. Have the campaign send your welcome email when someone enters the segment. Resist the urge to start adding branches, scoring rules, delays, and everything else Mautic lets you do.
7. Be your own first subscriber. Submit the form using your own email address, then follow the contact through Mautic. Make sure it gets created, lands in the right segment, enters the campaign, and receives the email.
That's Enough For Now
If one form can create a contact, add it to a segment, trigger a campaign, and deliver an email, you have confirmed that the important pieces are working together. Build from there.
The sweet spot for growing usage. Better for larger contact databases, more frequent cron execution, and multi-step automation running alongside a busy website.
Best for advanced or high-volume use, especially if Mautic becomes mission-critical or you need more tuning freedom for jobs, mail processing, and database performance.
Mautic’s demands scale with contacts, sends, and automation complexity. A list of 2,000 contacts behaves very differently than a list of 200,000.
Common Questions About Mautic
Yes. Mautic is open-source software and can be self-hosted without license fees. However, there are real costs, such as hosting, email delivery, and the time required to configure and maintain it properly.
In many cases, yes, but it is better to think of it as more than that. Mautic can handle newsletter-style sending, but its real value is segmentation and automation.
If you need something that only sends newsletters you are better off with a purpose-built app like listmonk.
Yes. Mautic relies on cron jobs to process things like segments and campaigns. Unlike WordPress, it does not have a built-in fallback that kicks off scheduled tasks when someone visits the site. If you skip the cron setup, parts of Mautic will simply sit there and do nothing.
Yes, for modest projects it can. The question is less “can it install?” and more “how large and active is your marketing operation?”
If you want the absolute lowest-maintenance experience and never want to think about cron, SMTP, or hosting resources, a managed SaaS platform will be a better fit for you.
Marketing email should be sent through a dedicated third-party email delivery provider rather than your standard hosting email account. Mautic supports several delivery methods and providers, so your best option will depend on your sending volume, budget, and how much configuration you want to manage.
Softaculous Spotlight · The Verdict
Mautic is one of the strongest open-source options available if you want serious marketing automation without handing your contacts and workflows to a third-party SaaS vendor.
8.6
out of 10
Great
Category Breakdown
Ease of Use
7/10
Features
10/10
Security
8/10
Value
10/10
Performance
8/10
Best For
Agencies with technical confidence
Growing businesses that want segmentation and automation
Teams that care about data ownership
Projects that have outgrown simple newsletter tools
Not Ideal For
Users who want a zero-maintenance hosted experience
Very non-technical teams with no interest in cron or SMTP
Massive senders who are not ready to think about infrastructure
LicenseGPL v3
Learning CurveModerate
If you catch yourself thinking, “I wish this newsletter could go out at different times based on each contact’s time zone,” or “I’d like desktop visitors to get a different landing page,” you are probably starting to outgrow a basic newsletter platform.
This is where Mautic shines. It gives you all the bones to build complex campaigns without locking the useful stuff behind a “Pro Plus” plan.
Softaculous Spotlight Series
This is post #3 in our Softaculous Spotlight series, where we take an in-depth look at the best software available through your Hawk Host control panel. Subscribe to see new posts as we add them.
Shared Web HostingSimple, secure, and reliable cloud hosting
Semi-Dedicated Cloud HostingHigher power & more resources
Reseller Cloud Web HostingWhite label & fully customizable
Contact Support