Hello Mautic Community,
I am fairly new to Mautic and am considering using it as our marketing automation solution. I am curious about what does the community think the long-term viability/support/direction/etc. is for the self-hosted Mautic option since Mautic was acquired by Acquia somewhat recently. Do you all feel someone new like myself should continue down the Mautic path or consider something else?
Thanks for all your advice and opinions.
Alex
As long as you are aware and accept:
-There is a learning curve
-It does require some technical expertise or access to technical expertise. Root access and the ability to run ssh commands aren’t optional.
-Is designed to run on minimal resources, but will require significant server resources as you scale at enterprise levels.
-You must take advantage of API to perform complex tasks efficiently with a higher number of contacts, segments or campaign steps.
-It will not have all the functionality out of the box that other platforms have. Generally $$$ will have to be spent to add or integrate features not already available.
-3rd party integrations change without warning. If Linkedin for example changes their API they wont notify you, the integration will just break.
Bugs happen. Post to forum with as much info as possible. If its an actual bug and not a setting or server problem post it on github to be addressed. For the good of the community.
I believe Mautic as a platform will be around for some time and a worthy investment IF you are aware that it is not the out of the box rival to other paid options and the results you get are the direct effect of what you put into it.
Thanks for the reply. I have been lurking on the forums for a while and am well aware of the learning curve and it does not scare me off. I am a computer engineer with 20+years experience and am very comfortable with Linux and all the sweat equity it requires. We are a small real estate team, and the plan is for me to handle the technical aspects of the solution, while my partner would be the main user. We already have decided on an smtp provider (Elastic Email) to try and avoid the pitfalls of trying to use Gmail, etc. And we have a free connection available through PieSync where the contacts can be synched with our parent Brokerage’s CRM system and Mautic.
I just didn’t want to invest the sweat equity of getting it all up and running, if this product won’t be supported/improved for the long term.
I understand completely. @rcheesley is the resident voice of Acquia. I’m sure she will chime in shortly.
Do you have specific questions or doubts @attzonko?
What is it exactly that you are worried about?
Cause otherwise, you seem to have answered your own question already…
Hi @attzonko and welcome to the community!
A couple of responses to your questions:
Well, I guess I am biased as I am employed by Acquia as the Mautic Project Lead, but I can tell you that Acquia has absolutely no plans to stop supporting the community and Open Source project.
The last 18 months have been a little bumpy after the acquisition, but we are making real progress in the community, with a governance model, teams that are taking up responsibility and driving things forward, and regular monthly releases. There’s a lot still to do, but things are definitely moving forward, and we welcome anybody who would like to help us drive things forward in whatever way you can!
At MautiCon (our first world conference!) I’m going to be sharing a bit about the longer term vision for Mautic which I’ve been working on with the Project Team and the folk at Acquia in my session.
We’ll also have a deeper dive into the technical side of what was learned from the ‘Mautic 3’ process, where we want to go with the project from the development perspective (both in the community, and at Acquia) and the challenges that we’re going to face in getting there from @alanhartless who is the engineering lead for the Campaign Studio (as was Mautic) team at Acquia. So that’s definitely the ‘place to be’ to learn more about the longer term side of things. Find out more at mauticon.mautic.org - hope to see you there!
Well, as above. We have a clearly defined release schedule which we’ve stuck to so far - we make bug fix releases monthly, feature releases quarterly, and breaking change releases annually as required.
Acquia is working on being able to have more engineering time to support the community - at the moment it has been a bit of a struggle between client commitments, ramping up the new team (the engineering team has nearly doubled for Campaign Studio but it takes time for the new recruits to get up to speed and familiar with the codebase) and supporting Acquia’s migration from Marketo to Mautic which took up a lot of the team’s time.
We are actively working on ways to enable the growing engineering team to be more active within the community in the coming months and hope to be appointing a technical community manager by the beginning of next year which will also enable more contributions.
We’re also seeing lots of other companies and individuals stepping up and contributing back to Mautic. If you haven’t read the quarterly round-up reports, I have been sharing how we’re doing on that:
If you have any further questions you’re absolutely welcome to hop into one of my office hours where we can chat in person - they run weekly either at 7am Wednesday or 3pm Thursday.
Here’s the Zoom links:
Office Hours with Ruth Cheesley EMEA/Americas - Fortnightly Thursdays at 1500hrs UK time Link to join: Launch Meeting - Zoom (Password: 815478) - Next one is 29th October.
Office Hours with Ruth Cheesley APJ - Fortnightly Wednesdays at 0700hrs UK time Link to join: Launch Meeting - Zoom (Password: 502111) - Next one is 4th November.
Thanks for asking these questions, it is important that we’re all able to voice our concerns and have them heard.