Sendy and Mautic are very popular self-hosted softwares for sending emails. They are often considered when customers are moving away from costlier SaaS services like Mailchimp. In this article, we try to shed light on the pros and cons of both platforms. The post aims to develop a good enough understanding of which to use in what situation and what to expect out of them.
Mautic is an open source marketing automation software. It is developed by a community of programmers. Though last year, Acquia acquired Mautic and intends to make it even more robust for “Open Marketing Cloud”. Given it is quite exhaustive when it comes to the feature set it offers, Mautic might be an overkill for some. For others, this might be just what they are looking for. Here’s a quick look at the important features
Above is intentionally a short list. Mautic offers much more. The key takeaway here is that Mautic is not simply a newsletter tool. It is a lead gen + marketing tool. It does many things. And as is the case with doing many things, doing all of them well becomes really hard.
Let me summarise some of the disadvantages of using Mautic
From their website, here are the installation setups for Mautic
I will not go into each step of this, but that list looks technical. And if you are really going for “free”, the cost of figuring it out doesn’t justify free. Your alternative is to use hosting provided by Mautic. The pricing is not listed on the website but quick Google tells me that the plans start at $100 per month. 🙄
When it comes to our very own Sendy, things are pretty straightforward. Sendy does a few things and it does them pretty well. A quick summary of important features are -
As it happens, these are actually just the right things you will need if you are a small-medium sized business. Some of the articles on the internet will tell you that it is not advanced enough. That is because the initial version did not have the link and click tracking. Also, powerful automation wasn’t available, until the launch of version 5 recently, which introduced Rules (good one team 🙌)
The internet is littered with articles on how to install Sendy. You can read through either of the articles, which basically tell you to
The instructions are similar to Mautic. So, what's better at Sendy, you ask? Us! 😄
On a serious note, at Sendybay, we provide one click Sendy setup. That takes away all the backend work you need to do to set up Sendy. Just sign up with us, and you are good to go. In addition to that, we provide
That’s right. We are continually working on new features everyday and there are pretty interesting ones in store now (a list cleaning service? maybe!)
A testimonial from WP Crafter probably summarises this better. It is from 2020 and hence an appropriate representation of the current state of affairs.
I am still using Mautic however I wouldn't recommend it right now because of its uncertain future. It has worked for me for the most part, but when there is an issue it becomes a big problem.
Sendy is a solid performer, but it's not modern enough. It still works off of multiple lists vs one big list that you segment with tags.
If you are going with Sendy, try Sendybay’s guide to how to set up Sendy, which is literally just a few clicks and no tech work. For Mautic installation, you probably need to make a bunch of decisions around, as stated above.
As with everything, there is no right or wrong. Depending on your context, you need to make a choice. Setting the right expectation is important. To further help with making a decision,
And if your need best fits the following use cases, use Mautic
Hoping this article helped. In case of correction or any query, feel free to reach out to us at support@sendybay.com