2023 has been a very significant year in Mautic's history for many reasons, so let's take a year in review and see where we came from, where we are now, and some highlights from the journey between the two.

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.

Release	Number of downloads
Mautic 4.4.10	4328
Mautic 4.4.9	4254
Mautic 4.4.7	2519
Mautic 4.4.6	1902
Mautic 4.4.8	1573
Mautic 4.4.5	1476

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.

Release	Number of downloads	Upgrade downloads
Mautic 4.4.6	1,655	2,394
Mautic 4.4.7	1,814	2,945
Mautic 4.4.8	1,711	2,184
Mautic 4.4.9	4,226	4,054
Mautic 5.0.0-alpha1	359	101
Mautic 4.4.10	4,646	5,406
Mautic 5.0.0-beta2	213	40
Mautic 5.0.0-rc1	352	70
Mautic 5.0.0-rc2	145	73

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.

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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!