Marketing automation: guides & tutorials

Mautic and Listmonk are the two most common self-hosted answers to Mailchimp and HubSpot email — but they solve different problems. Listmonk is a high-performance newsletter sender. Mautic is a full marketing automation platform with drip campaigns, lead scoring, landing pages, and CRM-lite features. Picking the wrong one means either paying for complexity you don't need or hitting a ceiling on automation you can't reach.

HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro starts at $800/month — and that's before you add Sales Hub or Service Hub. You can replace the entire stack with open-source tools on a Liquid Web Managed VPS for roughly $33–$60/month.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml: Twenty CRM + Mautic + Chatwoot + PostgreSQL + MariaDB + Redis + Caddy
• Measured idle RAM: ~3.0 GB; peak: ~4.5 GB on a 16 GB VPS
• Minimum Liquid Web tier: 16 GB Managed VPS (~$30/mo)
• HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro + CRM + Service Hub Pro: $800–$1,340+/mo; this stack: ~$30/mo

HubSpot charges separately for CRM, marketing automation, and customer support — and the Professional tier alone runs $800/mo before seat costs. This guide deploys all three functions with open-source equivalents: Twenty CRM for pipeline management, Mautic for email marketing and lead scoring, and Chatwoot for multi-channel support — on a single Liquid Web 16 GB VPS using one Compose file.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml: Listmonk (newsletters) + Postal (SMTP delivery) + Billionmail (IP reputation) + PostgreSQL 16 + MySQL 8.0 + RabbitMQ + Redis 7 + Caddy
• Measured idle RAM: 2.4 GB; peak: 3.5 GB (10k Listmonk campaign + Postal queue flush)
• Requires an 8 GB VPS with a dedicated IP — self-hosted email is an ops commitment, not a drop-in replacement
• Replaces Mailchimp Essentials ($20/mo) + Postmark ($15/mo for 10k emails) with unlimited sending at ~$33/mo VPS + dedicated IP
• Postal requires MySQL 8.0 and RabbitMQ — read the first-run section carefully before starting

This guide deploys a three-layer self-hosted email stack: Listmonk handles subscriber lists and campaign management, Postal provides the SMTP delivery engine with bounce processing and DKIM signing, and Billionmail monitors IP reputation and blacklist status. Together they replace the Mailchimp + Postmark combination for teams that want full control over their email infrastructure.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml: Medusa.js (headless commerce) + Mautic (email automation) + Chatwoot (customer support) + PostgreSQL + MariaDB + Redis + Caddy
• Measured idle RAM: ~2.8 GB; peak: ~4.2 GB (10 concurrent Chatwoot conversations + active Mautic campaigns)
• Minimum Liquid Web tier: 8 GB Managed VPS (~$33–$40/mo)
• Shopify Basic ($79/mo) + Klaviyo ($45/mo) + Gorgias ($10/mo) = $134/mo plus transaction fees; this stack: ~$33/mo with 0% transaction fees

Shopify bundles storefront hosting, payment processing, and a basic admin — but the moment you add email automation (Klaviyo) and customer support (Gorgias), costs compound fast. This guide deploys the open-source equivalents: Medusa.js for headless commerce, Mautic for email and marketing automation, and Chatwoot for multi-channel customer support — on a single Liquid Web 8 GB VPS, wired together so new orders automatically flow into Mautic campaigns and Chatwoot agents can look up order history without leaving the conversation.

TL;DR

• One docker-compose.yml: Plausible + Formbricks + Mautic + PostgreSQL 16 + ClickHouse + MariaDB 10.11 + Redis + Caddy
• Measured idle RAM: ~2.3 GB; peak: ~3.5 GB (500 Plausible events/min + 50 active surveys + Mautic sending a 2k campaign)
• Minimum Liquid Web tier: 8 GB Managed VPS (~$30–$40/mo)
• GA4 (free) + Typeform ($50/mo) + ActiveCampaign ($49/mo) = $99/mo; this stack: ~$30/mo on your own server

Most SaaS teams have three separate tools that should talk to each other but don't: an analytics platform, a user feedback tool, and an email automation platform. The data lives in three silos. You see a traffic spike in GA4, you have NPS responses in Typeform, and you have email segments in ActiveCampaign — but you can't close the loop automatically. This stack connects all three: Plausible fires a goal event when a user reaches a key page, Formbricks uses that signal to trigger an NPS survey, and a Formbricks webhook pushes the response straight into Mautic where a campaign branches on score.

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