Emma by Marigold vs. Mautic (open source)

Using Emma for weekly templated email use with minimal changes is awesome. If you want you can create a master and make minor graphic edits quickly and easily from your smartphone. Any edit is possible as long as the artwork is on the online server. Only time I hit a bump in the road is when I was asked to change the style sheet and did not know that the pricing plan I was on did not include this feature. Client had to wait to send new format until Emma performed the requested changes.

Mautic is well suited for users who do not require a lot of maintenance on the technical areas and have only the general requirements of the email marketing sector. In case the users have more precise requirements and are more focussed on the quality and a proper quantitative analysis, Mautic would not be an ideal choice. In other words for small companies Mautic would be an idea choice where the budget is a constraint and the extent of use is low but in cases where budget is not really a constraint against the performance and quality, Mautic would not be an ideal choice.

• Drag and Drop Interface - I love the drag-and-drop interface used to design campaigns. It makes it easy for creative types to get the look they want, and it helps less technically and aesthetically adept users to create campaigns that still look great. After using both Constant Contact and Mailchimp, I think Emma comes out on top in terms of ease of template design.
• Master Admin Account - Having a master admin account controlled by one person allows us to deploy brand assets to each sub-account, and we're also able to push out templates for users who aren't ready or don't have the time to design their own.
• Dynamic Content - Dynamic content has proven so useful to us, especially in our Admissions Office. Making it possible for regular users to easily create emails using dynamic content is a VERY strong feature that, in my experience, is unique to Emma.
• Great Tutorials - Emma does a great job taking care of its users. The support folks are always kind and helpful, but Emma publishes an array of tutorials and resources to help with just about anything its users encounter, from how to use custom merge fields to advice on creating the best campaigns.

Incentivized

• Mautic is very good at the tagging system.
• Mautic is very good at tracking website visitors. Visitors are first marked as unknown, however, once you get a signup Mautic automatically updates their profile.

Incentivized

• Setup of users - We used to be able to setup a user and send them our own welcome email. Emma has since set up the ability to add users where they send the welcome email. It's a great new feature, but it doesn't always work. We've had some users who never receive these emails and then we need to reach out to support anyway.
• The code to set up a configurable email is cumbersome. It's great that it is so customizable, but there is a learning curve.

Incentivized

• Reporting can be very misleading sometimes, but you just need to get the hang of it
• When emailing, you need to know the exact time zone the server is set on, because it may not send the task when you think it would.
• We think it may have more room to add more templates, the one the platform has turned boring over time— I think it would be an interesting update.

Incentivized

Easy to use and gets the job done without too many "extras" (ex. we didn't need a full marketing automation platform so Emma had what we needed to send email marketing communications without having to pay for the stuff we didn't need)

Incentivized

While every WYSIWYG software will experience glitches, Emma handles them well. Keep in mind they rarely happen, but they do, it can be of annoyance. Regardless, Emma allows my organization to create seamless email campaigns using fresh data. Emma makes coming up with strategic decisions very easy. The list segmentation that Emma feature allows us to easily manage a large list without issues. Overall, Emma is extremely usable with nearly no learning curve!

Incentivized

I hate that to get support I have to submit a question to a public forum and wait for a response. I just want the ability for a quick live chat to answer my simple help questions quickly or at the very least submit a ticket via email and get a status update.

Incentivized

Emma had a more robust multi-level account structure which empowered individual locations to participate at the ground-level. Additionally corporate was able to maintain oversight, template creation, marketing automation, and data reporting. The goal is to provide the locations with the ability to send their own marketing messages, saving corporate marketing time, and providing more genuine, locally-focused email campaigns. Emma was very effective at making that happen.

Incentivized

Salesforce and Dynamics may be fine if you can afford them, but don't offer much more than what you get from Mautic, for free and with total control and longer term active development. SugarCRM ended development and maintenance of their Community Edition around 2018. The long-term roadmaps for free versions of SugarCRM or its forks were very unclear

• It's been pretty overwhelmingly positive. Our clients are happy about the savings that we're able to pass onto them.
• We're able to better determine what headlines receive the most clicks from our client's emails based on the dashboard.
• Super easy email designer that frees up some of our graphic designers to take on other jobs.

Incentivized

• Automating interactions with clients in an early funnel stage
• Focusing your sales team on the best qualified leads
• Influencing purchase decisions along the customer journey