2024 is the first full year that Mautic has been an independent open source project, and what a year it's been!
Let's dig into the year in review and explore all the amazing things we've achieved together over the last twelve months.
Mautic 5 lands
We couldn't start our 2024 report without a huge shoutout to the colossal effort that went into getting Mautic 5 into General Availability and released into the world on 9th January which included a whopping 742 pull requests (referred to as PRs, each one is a bug fix, enhancement or feature) and saw the percentage of our code covered by automated tests (which catch bugs before they land with users) jump by 10% to nearly 60%. Back in Mautic 3.0 days we were only at around 30% coverage, so this has been a huge improvement over the years, reflecting greater stability and commitment to quality of code.
It's been quite a journey since the release of 5.0 and we learned a lot from the release which will help us to make future major updates much smoother for our users.
Since 5.0 General Availability we've also shared two additional minor releases of Mautic 5.1 with 316 PRs, and 5.2 which consisted of 226 PRs - a monumental effort in both cases.
I'd like to take a moment to stop and appreciate not only the creators of the 749 pull requests adding bug fixes, features and enhancements over the last 12 months, but also to the testers - each PR merged requires two testers - code reviewers, security team and release leaders. Without their contributions we would not have been able to ship so many improvements and updates to Mautic.
Many of you will know of the many changes to the user interface and user experience that have been shipped in 5.1 and 5.2, thanks to the outstanding work of the UX/UI Tiger Team led by AJ Eccel. It's been fantastic to see dedicated action being taken on user feedback and substantial improvements for the marketer using Mautic, so a big thank you to them, also.
Mautic Conference India
Normally our in-person conference is at the end of the year, but to avoid clashing with major festivals we took the decision to move it to February.
What a wonderful event it was!
Over 100 Mauticians from across India came together for two days of conference and contribution with some great sessions and a fantastic local team who did a great job of organising the event.
Mautic becomes a Digital Public Good
One of the exciting breaking news stories I shared from the stage at Mautic Conference India was that Mautic had been recognised as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a multi-stakeholder initiative which is endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General.
Being recognised as a DPG increases the visibility, support for, and prominence of open projects that have the potential to tackle global challenges. To become a digital public good, all projects are required to meet the DPG Standard to ensure that projects truly encapsulate open source principles. It means means a great deal. It’s a recognition of the importance of what we’re doing with Mautic - enabling equitable growth and empowering organizations worldwide to compete on a level playing field by making available powerful marketing automation software.
Mautic selected as a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code
After many attempts, Mautic was finally successful in being selected as a mentoring organization for the prestigious Google Summer of Code.
We were awarded two projects which saw university students Ketu Patel and Priyanshi Gaur funded to work on projects over their university vacations.
Priyanshi developed a Codeception End to End Test Suite, and Ketu worked on extending the Mautic Marketplace with ratings and reviews.
Both completed their projects successfully and were a delight to work with.
I was grateful to represent Mautic's mentor team along with John Linhart at the Mentor Summit in San Francisco which was a fantastic experience - read John Linhart's blog post about his experiences here.
Mautic celebrates 10 years
We kicked off celebrations of Mautic's 10 year anniversary from the first commit on our GitHub repository with some great interviews with the original team members and more featured during my introduction to Mautic Conference Global later in the year. There will be more celebrations this year as we celebrate 10 years from our first public release.
Mautic trials launch
In March we launched the official Mautic Trials which was put out to tender in an RFP the previous year, and won by Dropsolid for a three year term. It was great to see this getting off the ground as we knew that a big roadblock for users who are new to Mautic with getting started has always been needing to install it - this gives them a quick and easy way to get an active instance to play with within 15 minutes.
The trial system has been a great success, although the conversions to paying customers were quite lower than we had been expecting which had an impact on finance - read more in the financial report.
Mautic receives European Commission funding via NLNet
In an exciting development, our proposal for developing portability of campaigns and ultimately a campaign library within Mautic was successful in its bid for funding from the NGI Zero Commons Fund. Work has just started on this project and we expect to ship the work with Mautic 7.
New release strategy and ELTS provides up to five years support for each major release
Towards the end of the year after much discussion and debate in the community, Mautic announced its new release strategy including Long Term Support releases and the provision of an Extended Long Term Support paid service to extend security support for a further two years after official support ends, offering up to five years support for each major version of Mautic.
Mautic does Hacktoberfest in style!
In previous years we've tried to engage with Hacktoberfest but never really seen a tangible impact on the project - this year our Education Team Lead Favour Chibueze took the project on, partnering with several organizations and driving incredible engagement, seeing over 50 new contributors onboarded, and nearly 60 tasks completed.
It was by far our most effective contributor engagement programme and we have learned a lot about onboarding en-mass and managing so many new contributions at once, while also retaining many contributors on an ongoing basis which has been great to see.
I have great expectations for next year!
Mautic Conference Europe
As the end of the year approached we headed over to the beautiful Lisbon, Portugal for our annual in-person conference which this year would be Mautic Conference Europe.
We welcomed Jenna Tiffany who gave a fantastic opening keynote on pitfalls to avoid with marketing strategy, and then followed a full day of conferencing and an inspiring day of community contribution, and even an amazing Mautic BBQ to round it all off!
The first Mautic Awards
I've wanted to introduce the Mautic Awards for a long time and this year we finally did it!
At the end of day one at Mautic Conference Europe in Lisbon, we held our inaugural Mautic Awards, recognising projects, companies and individuals for their outstanding work with Mautic. Some awards were panel-voted, some were community-voted - it was a wonderful celebration of everybody's successes with Mautic. A huge thank you to all of our panel members who helped to judge the nominations.
We also welcomed newcomers to the Mautic community Robert and JAM from Open Strategy Partners who MC'd the whole event, and had a great celebration!
The year in numbers
You can check the annual report on our community health here. For comparison, 2023 is here, 2022 is here and 2001 is here.
Here's some highlight stats from 2024:
- 1,124 new members (⬆️ 21% from 885 last year)
- 175 new contributors (⬆️ 50% from 117 last year)
- 38,044 conversations (⬆️ 38% from 27,529 last year)
- 11,874 connections between members (⬆️ 62% from 7,331 last year)
- 3,198 contributions (⬆️ 12% from 2,867 last year)
- 84 new companies engaging in the community (⬆️ 20% from 105 last year)
- 228 events on the calendar (⬆️ 240% from 67 last year)
Let's do our annual shout-out of the companies and individuals who are making Mautic.
⬆️= Increase from last year
⬇️ = Decrease from last year
Most active companies:
Activity means that these companies are engaging within our community - whether that's discussions in Slack, answering or asking questions on the Forums, responding to GitHub issues and pull requests, posting Mautic-related questions in places like Stack Overflow and Reddit, for example. This is important because an active, vibrant community means that people both feel more welcome and are more likely to find someone to help with their questions when they arrive. It also shows that we have an engaged community who care about Mautic, which is diverse and spans multiple companies.
Dropsolid 4585 (⬆️ 180.60%)
Acquia 2950 (⬆️ 52.30%)
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 1379 (⬆️ 28.52%)
Aivie 1030 (⬆️ 78.20%)
Axelerant 765 (⬆️ 313.51%)
Friendly 677 (⬇️ 55.78%)
Webmecanik 674 (⬇️ 29.79%)
Crafting.email 591
PreviousNext 494 (⬆️ 353.21%)
Moorwald | Sven Döring 385 (⬇️ 15.01%)
Top contributing companies:
Contributions are the life-blood of an open source project, and here we see the companies who are taking the time to give back to Mautic. They might be contributing code, or running events, or answering questions in the forums, or testing features and bug fixes - check the many ways you can contribute here It's important that we build a wide and diverse base of contributing companies so that Mautic is not overly dependent on a small number of companies. While Acquia is still the top contributor this year, there are other companies who are increasingly contributing at much higher levels this year, which is great to see.
Acquia 677 (⬆️ 1.96%)
Dropsolid 560 (⬆️ 137.29%)
Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 201 (⬆️ 27.22%)
Aivie 163 (⬆️ 61.39%)
Webmecanik 132 (⬇️ 28.65%)
Comarch 95 (⬆️ 15.85%)
Axelerant 76 (⬆️ 850%)
UpScale 46
Friendly 31 (⬇️ 61.25%)
Crafting.email 31 (⬆️ 520%)
Most active individuals:
These are the folk you are most likely to come across if you're part of the Mautic community. They're taking time out of their day to give back to Mautic through many ways, and actively engaging across the community to help others succeed with Mautic.
John Linhart 2717
Anderson José Eccel 2028
Avinash Dalvi 1591
Mike Van Hemelrijck 1113
Rahul Shinde 929
Joey Keller 658
Ekke Guembel 612
Mattias Michaux 609
Ricardo Freire 591
Surabhi Gokte 573
Top contributing individuals:
These folks are the people who are building Mautic. They are contributing in many ways, as earlier mentioned - all of which are extremely helpful and valuable in Mautic's growth.
John Linhart 541
Anderson José Eccel 323
Rahul Shinde 161
Zdeno Kuzmany 109
Mattias Michaux 73
Patryk Gruszka 66
Simran Sethi 60
Saurabh Gupta 53
Rembrand 49
Ekke Guembel 47
Top contribution sources
Contributions can come in many different forms - here's how they break down for this year's contributions:
Pull Request 1283
GitHub Pull Request Review 829
Jira Issue Completed 301
Slack - Support 247
Community Portal Calendar 252
Forums Support 128
Blog Post 52
Slack - Feedback 47
Other event 41
KB Article 11
MautiCast 6
Reddit 1
Mautic's usage
There were 16,584 downloads of Mautic via the Downloads page on mautic.org over the past 12 months, you can see the breakdown of the top releases by number of downloads in the table below. This only represents a small proportion of Mautic users as you can also download Mautic through several other channels, such as GitHub and through Composer.
| Release | Number of downloads |
|---|---|
| 5.1.0 | 4397 |
| 5.1.1 | 3163 |
| 5.0.3 | 3082 |
| 5.0.4 | 2910 |
| 5.0.2 | 832 |
| 5.2.0 | 648 |
| 5.2.1 | 520 |
| 4.4.10 | 371 |
| 4.4.11 | 161 |
We saw the following downloads of releases made in 2024 via GitHub.
| Release | Number of downloads | Upgrade downloads |
|---|---|---|
| 5.2.1 | 1,588 | 926 |
| 5.2.0 | 1,004 | 450 |
| 5.1.1 | 3,029 | 2,489 |
| 4.4.13 | 1,742 | 635 |
| 5.1.0 | 3,402 | 2,817 |
| 5.0.4 | 2,100 | 2,883 |
| 4.4.12 | 2,360 | 1,411 |
| 5.0.3 | 2,258 | 2,591 |
| 4.4.11 | 2,454 | 1,250 |
| 5.0.2 | 923 | 1,260 |
| 5.0.1 | 586 | 368 |
| 5.0.0 | 260 | 338 |
We can see from these stats that uptake can be slow with a new major release - we have noticed that a lot more people are installing and in particular updating when we get to the first new bug fix and minor releases of the software.
This year we also introduced some new metrics which pulls from the data collected by our updates server rather than using the slightly less reliable measure of websites with Mautic tracking deployed.
Here's some of the charts which are generated from that data (which I often reference in the Open Startup reports each month), helping us to get a better understanding of the proportion of sites running the different versions of Mautic and how that's changed over time. This data is collected when a Mautic instance is updated, so the date along the horizontal access is the last updated date.
The chart below shows the number of sites updating each month, and you can see that after something of a lull during previous years we're now almost up to the highest number of instances being updated in all time.
Summary
2024 has been quite a challenging year for Mautic from the fiscal perspective - our first full year 'going it alone' as an independent project - and also from the practical perspective of maintaining the software itself.
I remain humbled on a daily basis by the number of businesses and individuals who contribute to help Mautic grow and thrive, and I think that you can see in the number of things we have achieved this year just what an impact that is happening.
In the coming year while we have some exciting projects coming on stream like our Extended Long Term Support, Campaign Library project and the work to bring Mautic up to date with Symfony, we mustn't lose focus on the absolutely vital task of establishing a solid financial base with sufficient reserves being built up to ensure longer term sustainability and fuel further growth.
We are aiming to be able to take on more paid staff in 2025 to help with more consistent development and also with marketing and communications - none of which will be possible if we don't achieve our goals in respect of fundraising.
So, if your business or organization receives benefit from Mautic and you're in a position to do so, please become a Corporate Member from $1,200 per year, or consider sponsoring one of our upcoming events. If you can't afford to contribute up-front, please consider making a regular sponsorship contribution on Open Collective. If your company can't contribute, perhaps think about becoming an individual member.
It really does make a big difference and we a relying on people like you stepping up and supporting Mautic to achieve our ambitious goals.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/2024-year-review