I’ve submitted several support questions and I wasn’t able to solve any of them.
The community is not responsive or is really small and the documentation online is very poor.
It’s really a shame, but I think that nobody could use this software in any serious production stage.
If nothing changes soon Mautic is gonna die
Hi there @abracadabra.photogra. Following up on a couple of the points you raised. It’s a bit of a long post, because I believe that these statements need a bit of unpacking in order to do justice to your question.
Before we go any further, I’d ask that you take a few minutes to revisit our Code of Conduct, with particular reference to this section:
- Exercise consideration and respect in your speech and actions.
- Attempt collaboration before conflict.
I absolutely understand that it is frustrating when you have a problem and you can’t find an answer, or you don’t know how to resolve it. However, please have some consideration over how statements thrown out like these impact the people in our community who are giving their time to help and respond to questions.
Your statement in the post above comes across as being really quite disrespectful towards our community by suggesting they are unresponsive, small and dying because a couple of your posts haven’t had a reply in a time that you feel is acceptable.
In case you weren’t aware, the Mautic Community are a community of volunteers, giving their time to help others to learn and grow. This might involve answering questions on the forum, fixing bugs, writing documentation, or organising meetups. All people like you who are interested in Mautic, and want to give something back to help and support others.
Now, let’s dig into these posts where you haven’t had a response to see if we can figure out why that might be, because I know for a fact that the community is very responsive.
Yes, we are small, but we are actively growing. People in our community care deeply about Mautic, and about helping others to succeed using it.
I see one post in Support from January about Maxmind, where you did not use the required template and have not provided your Mautic version (which is critical to helping people troubleshoot with you) or fully explained the problem you were experiencing, the error logs you are seeing, and steps you’ve taken in troubleshooting.
Unfortunately this hinders people who might be willing to help you troubleshoot the problem, especially if they are doing so in their spare time, which I’m sure we all appreciate, is precious. So, the learning point from this thread is to use the template provided, give as much information as possible but at a minimum, the information required in the post template.
Also, I did a quick search and found that there are multiple other forum posts about Maxmind and geolocation from around this time, including one which has a workaround for the fact that Maxmind made an account mandatory which prevented the database from being downloaded.
I noticed you found some of these and posted replies, to which you had responses from community members with suggestions in some cases within 24 hours of your reply. So it seems that people did respond to your messages in a timely way in at least some of the instances where you asked for help.
As regards the Maxmind issue specifically, as this seems to be the one you were having problems with.
The workaround was provided to support community members (linked in the forum thread above) before we merged support for this in 2.16 just a few weeks ago. So this issue is fixed and merged in the latest release, 2.16. The documentation hasn’t yet been updated to reflect the new process but I posted a message today in our Community slack channel to ask someone to update it.
I see another post in Support asking a very generic question AMP pages which doesn’t have enough detail for people to respond, in my opinion.
What exactly do you expect Mautic to do with AMP pages? Build them? Track activity on them? I expect this would be better received if it was written up more fully as a discussion in #general-discussion. Again, folk have limited time when they are responding in the forums, so a clearly laid out question is much more likely to get a response.
Finally, this last post is your third post, complaining that the community is not responsive and documentation is poor.
To speak to your point of not having a response (we’ve already identified that you had some responses to your replies on an old thread, and that the first post perhaps didn’t have enough detail), the second post above was shared three days ago, with a weekend in between.
Many of our community work full time, and give their time on the forums during their working day, over lunch breaks, and in the evenings. Many of our active contributors spend hours supporting releases, answering questions, working on projects - all to support the community, and all in their own spare time.
Many spend the weekend with their families. Please bear that in mind and consider how those judgements land when you make a statement like this.
Finally to speak to your suggestion:
If anything, Mautic is growing and thriving. We’re in beta testing for Mautic 3, which is a complete re-write of the entire platform to support Symfony 3. Acquia’s engineers have been leading this charge, and have spent the last quarter pretty much solely focused on this with support from the Community.
We’ve just released 2.16 and we’re in the process of lining up 2.16.1 to address some outstanding bugs which have been fixed.
We’re rebuilding our mautic.org website in Drupal which is launching in March.
We have shared an initial draft of a product roadmap and are working on introducing a new branching strategy which makes it easier to support multiple versions concurrently (as we are extending support for 2.16 for a while until people have had time to transition to 3.x.
The community organised its first summit in November 2019 in Amsterdam, and we’re just in the process of organising our second one in Ghent which will be in April 2020. The first MautiCon is being organised for September 2020.
So, it’s really about what measures you use to determine the health of the community and the project.
From my perspective, we absolutely have some holes, and we have some aspects where we need to up our game. Rest assured, we’re working on it.
On the whole though, I think we’re doing pretty good.
There’s always room to improve, but we are definitely making good progress.
Maybe I’m biased, but perhaps others from the Community will chime in on this discussion and give their own input. We also have a community health dashboard which shows all of what I have mentioned above using cold hard data, should you want to take a look 
If you want to be a part of a growing, thriving community that has many, many opportunities to both learn more about Mautic, and work with some outstanding people from around the world on making it better, we would absolutely welcome you with open arms. There is much to do, and the more skills we can bring into the Community, the better Mautic will become!
Thank Ruth, you’re doing a great job!
I think that Mautic is awesome. And I think it is going to live… 
@abracadabra.photogra I understand your pov and your experiences.
But Mautic is a huge piece of software and there are more “users” which need support with something than “devs” who have knowledge and the time to dig into these “little requests”.
Anyway stay with the community and let’s create something really nice.
Dear @rcheesley,
Really I’d like to be wrong. I think that having a free and open source crm is really a great thing…
However my message above express all my frustration trying to make anything works until now…
I encountered really a lot of, from the installation since today. And if you scroll at the majority of the support questions opened by users you will find that a lot of them remains unsolved. And probably because there is not any solution.
So my questions is not provocatory, but I’m curious if really anybody is using Mautic for his company today.
And really I would like not to pay for a CRM like hubspot or others similar company offering this kind of products, but if I can’t make things works I will be forced to do it.
If you search online about this topic you will see that I’m not the only one who has such thoughts…
However I’m not here to argue and I will explain you all the issues I faced with until know
Installation…was difficult install mautic because the installation stucked and I had to restart it several times (solved this)
Maxmind database. Yes I know that things changed with Maxmind and I know that is not possible to have it automatically.
I downloaded the database and put it it the correct folder, but the geolocalization is not precise, so I created an account with Maxmind geo precision and tried the paid service.
I didn’t have luck with this too and all I wanted at the end was to al least have no geolocation data (better have no data that uncorrect ones). But I was not able to delete geolocation cache. I tried really everything (deleting cache, etc.) but I still get geolocation datas.
I gave up on this point, I think I can work without geolocation
CronJobs. I tried setting up cron jobs but I always get this error
PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘$value’ (T_VARIABLE) in /data/vhosts/abracadabra.photography/crm.abracadabra.photography/vendor/aws/aws-sdk-php/src/functions.php on line 36
I saw that there are multiple forum posts with this error, but all of them without answer, so why opening a new one?
AMP pages. I expect to track activity and use forms in AMP pages. But I don’t know if the tracking code is suitable for AMP pages.
Also about this topic there are other support questions in the forum, without any answer
Sync with Zapier. Since Mautic is not compatible with AMP I wanted to use a workaround. Use forms in my website and sync them with Zapier.
So I installed NinjaForms and connected to Zapier (worked flaweslly), than try to connect Mautic to Zapier (404 error)
It seems that also for this point there are no solution unltil today
This are some of the issues I faced in this 2 months in Mautic world. Sincerly I really expecting a big change from 3.0, because If nothing changes is really not suited for my business.
And I will be forced to switch to a paid service.
There is always the option of going to a paid version of Mautic. I don’t know if that will solve all your specific grievances but it does eliminate some technical hurdles of a self hosted install where YOU are ultimately responsible.
Really I’d like to be wrong. I think that having a free and open source crm is really a great thing…
Oh! You are quite wrong indeed, about several aspects, for starters, Mautic is not a CRM, It’s a Marketing Automation Engine.
I’m curious if really anybody is using Mautic for his company today.
Just a few thousand companies around the world.
And really I would like not to pay for a CRM like hubspot or others similar company offering this kind of products, but if I can’t make things works I will be forced to do it.
Why not, that’s probably your best option, if you don’t have the technical skills, you either need to hire someone to install and run Mautic for you or you need to go SaaS.
You think you’re gonna get help by threatening us with leaving?
I saw that there are multiple forum posts with this error, but all of them without answer, so why opening a new one?
You clearly didn’t do your research properly, there are also many posts in the forum and in several other places explaining in detail how to solve every single one of your issues, which by the way are about the most simple issues to solve, if these were a problem for you, you’re going to get very disappointed going forward…
I expect to track activity and use forms in AMP pages. But I don’t know if the tracking code is suitable for AMP pages.
Why don’t you try it and tell us about it?
And I will be forced to switch to a paid service.
Be my guest!
Folks, please let’s keep this civilised and polite. There is no need to be rude or to make accusations or assumptions one way or another.
Please, consider how your words may land with other human beings at the other end of the computer screen. Let’s exemplify the behaviours we want to see in this community.
Many thanks.
Respectful humans deserve respect indeed.
I feel your frustration. In our case (university) we have opted for a middle way between self hosted and paid hosted. We host ourselves and for questions beyond my technical expertise we pay.
Also for me Zapier connected to Mautic, but I haven’t seen the questions on this topic, as I feel far away from helpful knowledge. I see, if I can find your question and try to help.
I agree with thelamper that is mostly how I survive too.
I have however struggled to get paid help and when I did it didn’t solve the problem.
The only ray of light I encountered was rcheesley, but one person cant do it all.
I wish I understood. As an ex developer I know how hard it is and in the US I was offered huge pay to come out of retirement and write code again, so why anyone is willing to do this foe free beats me.
On the other hand, when you tell everyone its great and they commit their time and money and then treat them not too well, that’s not great either.
There is smething about this particualr opensource comunity that can sometimes make you feel like a fly who just walked on somebodies steak.
I’m sure ts not intended, but I hve felt it when stressed out trying to get to the bottom of fairly basic looking bugs.
I am tempted to learn php just to finish this thng properly because it has huge potential and already has some amazing abilities,
It needs a human layer above the techie layer. I’d contribute some of that, but I don’t sense any appetite and then threes the commercial arm.
I did that with a project called CATS and then they went SaaS and shut us all out. I’m wary.
Open source will go this way unless we all find another way.
Well I’d say you could have put it worse, @Yosu_Cadilla! It’s ok if someone (a) is new to a project and (b) doesn’t get the concept of Open Source, but if that person feels qualified for a general rumbling about things that other people give him without charge, I too find it hard not to be snippy. But ok, point taken @rcheesley - we’re trying our best
Anyway: We all know the Mautic project as a whole is not perfect, but the software already does a fantastic job for many small and large companies around the world.
And a lot of progress is currently being made for exponential yet sustainable improvement in all areas.
@abracadabra.photogra
When I first joined this community I was so bitter not to find solutions to my problem and was actually looking towards dumping a whole project or looking for an alternative but I have so much time energy and resources with Mautic. I was like how can I be planning to introduce this to businesses when I can’t even get it to work myself am gonna look like a fool teaching people how to use it.
I bought two courses on Mautic early on before joining the community so I went back to them, they didn’t fix my problem.
But for a few days and weeks, I struggled with the software and gradually started to get somethings done in other ways and some its because I didn’t check the feature usage properly because it doesn’t come like a plug and play but it works.
More weeks later I started helping others and am glad my information could help a bit and I concentrated on that but you know what happened after that I got my major problems fixed by staying in the community by helping others my problems were solved and am really expecting mautic 3.0 to be greater than what we have now.
I love opensource ideas and I hope in the future I can sponsor fixing bugs in open source so they don’t die but a lot of us who benefit don’t contribute with time or resources and yet we want things to improve on their own.
Just Stay Positive Some People may not be using the feature you want and can’t be talking about problems they have not faced so that is why It may look not responsive but it’s to your post not all.
Take care, I hope you get what you are looking for and very sure Google could help you if the community doesn’t it will take time though but remember this is a free solution
@abracadabra.photogra Apologies for my belated response. Disclaimer, I have nothing to do with Fiverr, nor any gig sellers on the platform. So with that said, I have spent more time than I’d like to admit reading over the docs, Github issues, and community posts, but it should go without saying that free may speak to the actual out of pocket costs, but not in time, but this is a good thing. However, I given that I didn’t have time to help a few friends with their set up, I was able to find pretty competent, English speaking individuals on Fiverr for $10 an hour to do a range of tasks related to Mautic. I reviewed custom templates what were written, and while they are not complex - and plenty of examples online, the work was not horrible. I also reviewed a configuration of stages, and campaign logic and those too were reasonable. Finally, in interviewing a few of the individuals, I found that some of the $15 an hour understood some of the cron mechanics, and usual troubleshooting tasks i.e. rebuilding cache. So if you are finding that the community isn’t specifically responsive to your issues, it wouldn’t be a horrible idea to find someone with lots of past gigs / high rating on Fiverr for relatively cheap.
I understand the frustrations from both ends with this. For me, personally, I’ve been trying to get Mautic working for about four days now. Although I’ve been putting out fires here and there, I’m still not at the stage where I can get Mautic to function at its most basic level. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Being a developer myself, I understand the difficulties, but I’m really at the point where I should just give it away. Four days to get nowhere is enough. I can imagine that many less technical people would have given up long ago.
Hi,
I always look at it as: flexibility comes with a price.
Sure there are lot of improvement to be done.
It’s getting better bro.
I agree. That’s why I’m trying to be tenacious with it. It looks like it could be a great application. If only I could get it working. 
To be fair, two of the issues I had were down to mod_security on the server. Having fixed those, I’m still not able to get out of the starting gate. I may end up downgrading my PHP installation so that I can debug it locally.
BTW - a lot of bugs are coming from Wordfence being a total douche to Mautic. If not mod_sec, than Wordfence is usually my next question if ajax stops working.
Mautic is great; open source self-hosted marketing automation that has all the same features as the big expensive cloud services. What’s not to like? It will not go away, because the value proposition is just too strong for the companies using it.
That installing it can take some effort should be expected. I have had some problems along the way. Most had to do with figuring out Apache stuff etc. Get beyond those issues and Mautic is solid and reliable - and getting more so with recent upgrades.
We’ve been using Mautic for 3 years now. A few random thoughts…