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.

We saw the following downloads of releases made in 2024 via GitHub.

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.

Becoming an independent open source project

Of course Q2 was largely taken up with the news that Mautic was going to become an independent open source project – you can read more about this in our blog post, and posts on Project Lead Ruth Cheesley’s blog and Dries Buytaert’s blog.

Associated with this change was the need to revisit and update the governance model which took place collaboratively in the Governance Working Group and on the Forums.

This resulted in the new Governance Model and the creation of the General Assembly, an elected Council, our first Extraordinary General Meeting which formally adopted the new governance model and inaugurated the new Council, and our new Community Portal which facilitated the voting process – powered by the open source project Decidim.

Open startup reporting

We started to report on a monthly basis how things were going in the community, using the Open Startup Reporting principles, to improve transparency by more regular updates.

Read more about Open Startup reporting in our blog, and check our reports for: April, May and June July, August and September October, November and December

I also continued the quarterly roundup reporting which you can read here:

Q1 2023, Q2 2023, Q3 2023, Q4 2023.

Mautic Conference Global 2023

With the arrival of the summer comes of course the excitement that another Mautic Conference Global event is around the corner!  This year didn’t fail to delight, with a training day and two full days of conferencing filled with inspiring keynotes, informative sessions, and engaging networking opportunities.  

Dmitry Kudrenko – CEO of Stripo kicked off the conference with his keynote, and the second day saw an insightful keynote from Christopher Penn of Trust Insights.  It was great to get to chat with many of you and share the Mautic Update to bring everyone up to speed with where we’re at as a project and where we’re going in the future.

Mautic Community Sprint – Vienna

Another great opportunity to come together as a community saw us co-hosting with Drupal Developer Days in Vienna for a two-day Community Sprint.  We had a lot of progress to make on several projects and it was awesome to come together around a table and knock a lot of things off the to-do list!

Mautic 5 progress

Much of our product focus during 2023 has been on getting the stable version of Mautic 5 released this year – and by December we had made the final Release Candidate available for testing, with the final release made in January 2024.

A phenomenal amount of work went into this release, so a huge thank you to every single person and organization who contributed in any way!

Mautic wins an award!

We won the Marketing Automation award in the 20i FOSS Awards. This was great news, showing that Mautic remains the primary contender when it comes to open source marketing automation.

Mautic supports its dependencies with Back your Stack

Each year we allocate a percentage of our revenue towards supporting our third-party dependencies. This year on Giving Tuesday, we chose to narrow the number of dependencies we supported and instead give them more of the funds available.

We supported five open source projects:

• Doctrine, which underpins much of Mautic’s codebase
• Composer, which is becoming the default way to install Mautic and plugins/themes
• Guzzle, which is used for handling all the HTTP requests in Mautic
• PHPSTAN, which is a central part of improving our code quality and highlighting bugs
• Rector, which has been an invaluable resource in helping us to update and improve our outdated, legacy code

Read more in the blog here.

Free trials of Mautic

We released a Request for Proposals for an ambitious new project which will see a community-driven trials service being established. We wanted to find a way to help people try Mautic without having the need to set up a server and install it themselves. We also wanted to provide an option for them to continue to use the trial instance for a monthly fee, of which a percentage would come back to the Mautic project.

After a rigorous process, Dropsolid were selected as the provider of choice for the next three years, with the trials due to soft-launch towards the end of Q1 2024.

Streamlining Mautic’s core

Aligned with one of our strategic priorities of slimming down Mautic’s core, we began the process this year of decoupling plugins from the core of Mautic and replacing them with third-party maintained plugins.

We kicked this off with the Pipedrive plugin being replaced with an updated plugin supported by Webmecanik, followed by the Citrix plugins being replaced with an updated plugin supported by Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing,

Improving the User Experience

Part of our Strategic Priority of improving product innovation saw the formation of our first active Tiger Team – the User Experience and User Interface Tiger Team.

A small but agile group of folks with expertise and interest in the area of UX/UI, the Tiger Team kicked off in December and are already working on many improvements to Mautic in two projects – one focusing on the User Experience, the other focusing on updating the User Interface. They are also providing UI/UX support to new and existing contributions which impact the user interface.

It’s great to see the Tiger Team finally get spun up and operational, and for this important body of work to get underway. Later in January, Dropsolid offered to fund the work of the Tiger Team lead so that the work could move forward, which we greatly appreciate.

The year in numbers

You can check the annual report on our community health here: https://savannahcrm.com/public/report/456a3fa5-279e-46ea-b3ea-4e3c2471c2e0/.

This year we had 885 people and 96 new companies join our community. We onboarded 118 new contributors and tracked 2,881 contributions through our Community CRM, which is awesome!

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.

Acquia 1926 ( 18.01%)

Friendly 1511 ( 27.84%)

Dropsolid 1425 ( 203.19%)

Steer Campaign 1359 ( 443.60%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 1064 ( 4.62%)

Webmecanik 958 ( 5.89%)

Moorwald | Sven Döring 451 ( 325.47%)

Codefive 375 ?

Bluespace 367 ( 11.57%)

Aivie 313 ( 32.54%)

Twentyzen 310 ( 146.03%)

rectorphp 304 ?

Comarch 261 ( 86.43%)

Matic Zagmajster s.p. 215 ( 62.15%)

Texthelp 190 ?

Axelerant 185 ?

Lead Genius 177 ( 5.36%)

Surge Media 176 ( 50.14%)

Ionutojica 115 ?

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 quite a dominant force in the community, there are other companies emerging who are contributing at much higher levels this year, which is great to see.

Acquia 673 ( 68.67%)

Steer Campaign 246 ( 530.77%)

Dropsolid 208 (114.43%)

Webmecanik 192 ( 1.03%)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 179 ( 39.84%)

rectorphp 115 ?

Comarch 84 ( 127.03%)

Friendly 80 ( 25%)

Aivie 76 ( 19.15%)

Bluespace 48 ( 6.67%)

Moorwald | Sven Döring 29 ( 480%)

Codefive 27 ?

Texthelp 18 ?

Matic Zagmajster s.p. 15 ( 48.28%)

Bureau Works 8 ?

Axelerant 8 ?

Surge Media 8 ?

Rated Original 8 ?

Ionutojica 6 ?

Twentyzen 5 ?

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 1700

Joey Keller 1505

Abu Musa 1358

Mattias Michaux 995

Sven Döring 451

Zdeno Kuzmany 445

Norman Pracht 421

Avinash Dalvi 400

Ekke Guembel 381

Oluwatobi Owolabi 367

Bill F 350

Joshua Estes 326

Tomas Votruba 304

Dirk Spannaus 295

Lenon Leite 268

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 590

Abu Musa 246

Mattias Michaux 152

Zdeno Kuzmany 149

Tomas Votruba 115

Joey Keller 79

Joshua Estes 65

Volha Pivavarchyk 57

Oluwatobi Owolabi 48

Patryk Gruszka 42

Artem Lopata 37

Miroslav Fedeles 35

Patrick Jenkner 31

Sven Döring 29

Rahul Shinde 28

A really huge thank you to every business and individual who has contributed this year, whether you’re on this list or not – your contributions are so very much valued and without them, Mautic would not be where we stand today.

Mautic’s usage

There were 16,664 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, Composer and Docker.

We saw the following downloads of releases made in 2023 via GitHub, unfortunately we can’t filter the download date range, only date of release.

In addition to the number of downloads of the regular releases growing, these numbers really highlight to me the importance of having more people helping us with testing and reviewing the pre-releases so that we can pick up on potential problems earlier in the process. A huge thank you to all the people who decided to help with testing so that we could get this huge project that is Mautic 5 released.

2023 also saw a strong increase in our quarter-on-quarter growth rates for websites using Mautic’s tracking – up from an average growth of 5% in Q1 to to 22%, 34% and 14% growth rates each quarter respectively. 

This tells us that more and more organizations are trusting Mautic for their marketing automation and this trend has been maintained throughout the year.

Summary

2023 has been a truly transformational year for Mautic, as we transition to being a fully independent open source project and embrace deeper transparency through enhanced reporting and our new governance platform, the Community Portal.  It’s exciting to see the continuing growth, both in the number of people and companies building their livelihoods around Mautic and the proportion of those who are contributing back to the project.

Looking forward into the new year ahead, I’m confident that Mautic’s growth and adoption will continue to soar as we bring on stream many more initiatives including the Mautic Trials and the Mautic 5 series, which brings a huge improvement in both technical code quality and innovation opportunities.

Now is the time to join us in building, innovating and revolutionizing the future of marketing automation – what are you waiting for, get on board today!