What’s the Difference Between Mautic and Acquia Campaign Studio?

When Mautic was created in 2014, it was an open source project designed to bring the power of marketing automation to the people. Alongside this open source initiative, Mautic founder DB Hurley also co-founded Mautic Inc. to sell a SaaS variant of the marketing automation platform as a hosted service. As the Mautic community grew, so did the vision of creating a world where every business had access to technology that would help them better reach their audience and expand their reach. 

In May of 2019, Acquia acquired Mautic, Inc., to bring the power of open marketing and campaign management to the Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Alongside Mautic Inc.’s marketing automation platform, was a second product called Maestro: a distributed marketing solution designed for franchises, enterprises, and agencies to manage multiple Mautic marketing automation instances. Later on, Acquia rebranded these two solutions as Acquia Campaign Studio and Acquia Campaign Factory, respectively, to form the marketing automation and the multi-tenant campaign management part of Acquia Marketing Cloud.

Self-Hosted Marketing Automation  vs. Enterprise-Ready Open Marketing

The first and most obvious difference between Mautic Open Source and Acquia Campaign Studio is that Mautic (sometimes known as Mautic Self-Hosted) is free to all. As an open source project, anyone can download Mautic and begin building their own campaigns. Conversely, Acquia Campaign Studio is a SaaS solution within Acquia DXP. So how do marketers determine which version is best for them? It ultimately depends on your organizational goals and the scale of your marketing operations. 

Campaign Studio has an in-house team supporting its development and success that works on optimizing its overall performance. Acquia’s Campaign Studio team works to create integrations and features for an enterprise audience that typically has much higher demands for the number of emails, campaigns and communications they must send out each day. To date, Campaign Studio offers faster functionality in terms of page load times, campaign execution and email sends.

Lower email volume may be the perfect fit for individuals and smaller businesses. However, for multinational companies or retailers with large subscriber lists that are sending out multiple messages per day, more volume and faster performance is likely the way to go. Campaign Studio also offers features that aren’t included in Mautic’s community version, such as custom objects and more advanced A/B testing and segmentation capabilities. 

Another important differentiator between the two offerings is the ability to upgrade your Campaign Studio instance to Campaign Factory in order to host multiple marketing automation instances within a single framework for distributed marketing use cases. For franchise organizations that host a number of brands under the umbrella of one parent company, Campaign Factory provides a golden template to ensure overarching governance. This master template empowers marketers to create and roll out multichannel campaigns that meet their brand standards and release it to each Campaign Studio instance within their framework. 

Acquia’s Role in Supporting Open Source and the Mautic Community

While Campaign Studio and Campaign Factory are commercial solutions, Acquia is still deeply connected to the open source Mautic community and project. From the start, Acquia has believed in the values of open source collaboration and community-driven innovation. We’ve continued to support the growth and development of the Mautic community by sponsoring and speaking at Mautic Conference Global events and keeping informed of community needs and developments through our dedicated Mautic Project Lead, Ruth Cheesley. Having a liaison that can provide direct feedback from those who are invested in Mautic’s success helps inform Campaign Studio’s own upgrade path and also allows Acquia to identify the types of integrations and features that would be most beneficial to make open source. 

As experienced supporters of the thriving open source Drupal community, Acquia also believes in helping the impact of open source marketing expand and grow its influence. Acquia has helped the Mautic community develop a governance model to support new innovations for the open source project as well. By more clearly defining roles and responsibilities, the aim was to accelerate the development of Mautic as an open source initiative and sustain the community long-term. We know that open source communities are essential for the health and success of technology and are looking forward to seeing the evolution of Mautic beyond the upcoming Mautic 4. The innovation and collaboration happening in the community will also help shape Acquia’s own approach to open marketing going forward. 

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For more information on how Acquia uses Acquia Campaign Studio for our own open marketing efforts, check out our e-book: Migrating from Marketo to Acquia Campaign Studio: A Guide.