Drip vs Mautic
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedDrip compared with Mautic
Mautic is free open-source marketing automation with campaigns, email, landing pages, and lead scoring, but you host it, you supply the sending, and you own the operations forever. Drip costs $39 a month and hands you working ecommerce flows the same afternoon. Choose Mautic when there is no software budget and there is sysadmin capacity; choose Drip when your time is worth more than the subscription, which for a working store it almost always is.
Mautic compared with Drip
Drip costs $39 to $699 a month, works the afternoon you install it, integrates natively with Shopify, and handles deliverability for you. Mautic costs hosting and time, requires a sysadmin, and holds unlimited contacts for free. A working ecommerce store should almost always pay for Drip, because the saved hours are worth more than the subscription. Mautic wins when the constraint is sovereignty, a very large list on a very small budget, or an agency amortizing technical capacity across many clients.
Choose Drip if
Small and mid-sized ecommerce brands on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Magento who want cart recovery, post-purchase flows, and list growth from one tool with no feature tiers and no send limits.
Choose Mautic if
Organizations with a genuine data sovereignty, privacy, or budget constraint and the technical capacity to run a PHP application properly: public sector bodies, agencies running client instances, European companies with residency requirements, and technically confident small businesses who would rather spend engineering time than subscription money.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Drip | Mautic |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Automation | Automation |
| Starting price | $39 per month for up to 2,500 subscribers (14 days trial) | $0 in licence fees; realistically $20 to $150 per month in hosting plus sending costs (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | A single plan with complete feature parity, priced solely on the number of active subscribers, with unlimited email sends at every level. | Free and open source under the GPL with no licence fee and no contact or send meter; your real costs are hosting, an email sending provider, and the staff time to operate and upgrade it. Third-party managed hosting and Acquia's commercial derivative are the paid alternatives. |
| Free plan | No | The entire community edition is free: unlimited contacts, unlimited emails, campaign builder, landing pages, forms, lead scoring, dynamic web content, and the REST API. |
| Free trial | 14 days, limited to 2,500 contacts and 100 total emails, no card required | Not applicable; the software is free to download and run |
| Best for | Small and mid-sized ecommerce brands on Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or Magento who want cart recovery, post-purchase flows, and list growth from one tool with no feature tiers and no send limits. | Organizations with a genuine data sovereignty, privacy, or budget constraint and the technical capacity to run a PHP application properly: public sector bodies, agencies running client instances, European companies with residency requirements, and technically confident small businesses who would rather spend engineering time than subscription money. |
| Setup time | An afternoon for a store on Shopify or WooCommerce: connect the integration, let data sync, switch on the cart abandonment recipe. A full lifecycle programme with winbacks, post-purchase sequences, and onsite capture takes a week or two of thinking rather than of building. | A few hours to a working installation for someone comfortable with PHP and MySQL, a day or two to a properly configured production instance with cron jobs, backups, monitoring, and a verified sending domain. Building an actual campaign programme on top is a further week or more. |
| Learning curve | Low. The workflow canvas is one of the more approachable in the category and the ecommerce recipes give a new user a working example to modify rather than a blank page. Dynamic segmentation is the concept most people take longest to use well. | Moderate to steep, and steeper on the operations side than the marketing side. The campaign builder is learnable in an afternoon; understanding why a segment did not rebuild or why the email queue is stalled requires someone who reads logs. |
| Platforms | Web app, REST API, JavaScript tracking snippet, Store platform apps for Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento | Self-hosted web application, Docker and Kubernetes deployments, REST API, Composer installation |
| Compliance | GDPR, CAN-SPAM, CCPA | GDPR tooling built in, Compliance posture otherwise determined by your own hosting and processes |
| Founded | 2012 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States | Distributed; project governed under the Open Source Collective |
| Ownership | Owned by Leadpages since July 2016 | Community-governed open-source project under the Open Source Collective, with Acquia maintaining a commercial derivative |
Strengths and limitations
Drip
Strengths
- One plan with complete feature parity at every price point, which eliminates the upgrade-to-unlock pattern that makes most competitors exhausting to buy.
- Unlimited email sends at every tier, so send frequency is never a cost consideration and the bill depends only on list size.
- Deep native integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento carrying order, product, and browsing data automatically.
- Cart and browse abandonment recipes plus revenue attribution get a store from installation to measurable recovered revenue in a day.
Limitations
- SMS is not available to new users at all, and where it exists on legacy accounts it is US-only, which is a serious gap for ecommerce in 2026.
- No push notifications and no in-app messaging, so anything reaching a phone screen requires a second vendor entirely.
- Entirely ecommerce-shaped: no account object, no SaaS lifecycle vocabulary, and no product event model beyond what a store integration supplies.
- Subscriber-count billing means dormant contacts are billable, so a large unengaged list costs real money for no return.
Mautic
Strengths
- Genuinely full-featured marketing automation for free: campaign builder, segmentation, lead scoring, landing pages, forms, progressive profiling, and dynamic web content.
- No contact meter and no send meter, so cost does not scale with list size, which inverts the economics of every hosted competitor at volume.
- Complete data sovereignty, which for public sector, healthcare, and European buyers is frequently the constraint that eliminates every other option.
- GPL-licensed and auditable, so the code holding your customer database can be inspected, modified, and forked rather than trusted on faith.
Limitations
- Free software, expensive operations: server administration, cron configuration, upgrades, backups, and monitoring are permanent obligations that fall on you.
- Cron job misconfiguration is the most common failure mode and fails silently, so campaigns can stop sending without anybody being alerted.
- You supply the sending provider and own deliverability entirely: domain authentication, warming, bounce handling, and reputation are all yours.
- Segments and campaigns process on cron cycles rather than in real time, so this is not the tool for instant behavior-triggered messaging.
Pricing compared
Drip
A single plan with complete feature parity, priced solely on the number of active subscribers, with unlimited email sends at every level.
- Up to 2,500 subscribers$39
- Up to 5,000 subscribers$89
- Up to 10,000 subscribers$154
- Up to 25,000 subscribers$349
- Up to 50,000 subscribers$699
- Up to 100,000 subscribers$1,399
Drip's pricing is the most honest structure in this category and, for its intended buyer, very good value. One plan, every feature, unlimited sends, and a single number that scales with list size means a store owner can budget a year ahead without reading a comparison matrix, and $89 at 5,000 subscribers with cart recovery, dynamic segmentation, onsite popups, and revenue attribution is a fair price for a complete lifecycle programme. Where the value degrades is scope. The absence of SMS for new customers is a real gap in 2026 ecommerce, there is no push or in-app channel, and if your list is large but disengaged you are paying for people who will never buy. Judged as an ecommerce email and automation engine it is well priced; judged as a multi-channel platform it is not one.
Mautic
Free and open source under the GPL with no licence fee and no contact or send meter; your real costs are hosting, an email sending provider, and the staff time to operate and upgrade it. Third-party managed hosting and Acquia's commercial derivative are the paid alternatives.
- Community edition, self-hosted$0
- Third-party managed hostingFrom roughly $16 per month
- Acquia Campaign StudioCustom
Mautic's value proposition is unambiguous at one end and misleading at the other. At the cost end, holding 50,000 contacts and sending a few hundred thousand emails for roughly $150 a month all-in, against $699 for a comparable hosted plan, is a real and large saving that grows with list size. At the effort end, free software with a server behind it is only free if the person maintaining it has nothing better to do. For an organization with existing sysadmin capacity, an agency running client instances, or a buyer with a hard sovereignty constraint, Mautic is exceptional value and often the only viable option. For a five-person startup with no ops capability, the honest arithmetic says a $54 Vero or $89 Drip subscription is cheaper once you price the founder's time at anything above zero.
Editorial verdict on each
Drip
Drip is the easiest recommendation in this batch for one specific buyer: a small ecommerce store that wants cart recovery, post-purchase flows, and list growth working by the end of the week. One plan, every feature at every level, unlimited sends, and a price that depends only on list size makes it the most honest commercial structure in the category, and $89 a month at 5,000 subscribers buys a complete lifecycle programme with revenue attribution that tells you whether it worked. The limits are equally unambiguous. SMS is closed to new customers and US-only where it exists, there is no push and no in-app channel, and none of the architecture makes sense for a SaaS business. For a five-person company selling products online, Drip is the first thing to buy and probably the only thing. For a five-person company selling software, it is the wrong tool no matter how good the price is.
Read the full Drip profileMautic
Mautic is the right answer to a narrow question asked by a surprising number of organizations: what do you use when you cannot or will not hand your customer database to a hosted vendor. It is a genuinely complete marketing automation suite, with a campaign builder, lead scoring, landing pages, forms, progressive profiling, and dynamic web content that hosted competitors charge hundreds of dollars a month for, and it holds unlimited contacts for the cost of a server. At 50,000 contacts the arithmetic is compelling: roughly $150 a month all-in against $699 for a comparable hosted plan, with complete control over jurisdiction and code. The costs it hides are operational rather than financial. Cron jobs fail silently, upgrades on a customized instance take real testing, deliverability is entirely yours to learn, the interface is dated, and there is nobody to call at two in the morning. For an agency, a public sector body, a nonprofit with a large list, or a technically confident team with a sovereignty constraint, Mautic is often the only sensible option and a good one. For a five-person startup with no operations capability, choosing Mautic to save $89 a month is one of the more expensive decisions available, and Drip or Vero is the honest recommendation instead.
Read the full Mautic profileDrip profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Mautic last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.