Recently there has been huge news for the Marketing and Funnel industry, the Drupal and OpenSource advocate Acquia recently purchased Mautic. Some of you may already have experience with Mautic, but for others, this may be the first of hearing of it. Put simply Mautic is an OpenSource solution for building email marketing campaigns, landing pages, lead capture forms, and has many if not more of the features of some of it's Closed Source counterparts.
Acquia has spent years developing amazing tools to allow users and companies to leverage one of the worlds most powerful, flexible, and scalable Enterprise CMS platforms available today. They now are turning their attention to competing directly with the likes of companies like Adobe. This purchase will mean a fresh flood of features and likely a new growth in the community. I wanted to go over some of the key things I think Mautic makes for a stronger argument over the various closed source options when it comes to running your online marketing campaigns and managing your email lists.
| Mautic | Clickfunnels | |
|---|---|---|
| Feature | ||
| Location | Self-hosted | Cloud-based |
| Landing Page | Built-in Drag and drop builder and some base themes to start with, expandable with custom themes, a community of professionals | Provided page builder and themes, a network of professionals |
| Third-Party Support | Opensource means being able to connect with any third party you can think of and comes with a built-in RestFUL API and webhook functionality. | Provides a library of integrations for third-party platforms. Most third-party integrations rely on Zapier Cloud service. |
| Campaigns | Comes with an email, and social media campaign manager that allows you to build out a Sales funnel and can integrate with your existing sites to extend the amount of information you can see from your users. | Provides campaign functionality with Actionetics Cloud service and has similar features for developing campaigns and email series. |
| CRM | Comes with built-in CRM functionality | Provides CRM features via Pypeline cloud services |
| Affiliate Programs | Not provided built-in, but for most cases can be integrated with Wordpress or Drupal-based systems that provide affiliate systems. | Provided by Backpack another Cloud Service |
| Membership software | Not provided built-in, but again can leverage Wordpress and Drupal to provide the same functionality | Provided by Wasabi another Cloud Service |
| Ownership | You own the content you create as it is hosted on your server. | Owned by ClickFunnels and service is based on their terms. |
| Pricing | Can be hosted on a small/medium server. | $297/month for all of the above |
The biggest recurring theme you will notice above is that much of the solution provided by Clickfunnels is broken up into multiple Cloud services. This is a business model common to SaaS companies and can be useful for specific cases, but can also quickly cause your budget to inflate to an unsustainable level. Similarly going with a self-hosted solution Mautic, like Wordpress or Drupal allows you to control your budget and plan out the features you need that are specific to your business's goals.