Cheetah Digital vs. Mautic (open source)

I think CheetahMail, being one of the main ESPs in the market, is a quality choice. However, I would suggest that it's really only valuable for a bit larger of an organization, generally having staff of 100+ and revenues in tens of millions -- this is mainly to justify the amount of investment required, so may be cost-prohibitive to some. You also need to make sure that you understand the entire "level of support" you will gain through your specific contract.... the key is understanding what types of resources are within your organization (who's doing the coding? who comes up with the next campaign? What's the overall strategy?) Depending on these questions and resources, may help determine your final needs from a services point of view. CheetahMail can provide a wealth of various services specific to needs (and changes over time as your business changes), but a clear understanding of what you have before you bring them on will really help getting up and running quickly. Also be sure to truly understand the costs for the initial integrations, setups, IP senders, etc.

Mautic is not Salesforce or Dynamics of course; it is hard to install, still buggy and you have to know what you're doing if you want to use it. But that is your admission fee to an always free system that does essentially all the same things as the pricey alternatives, does it effectively and gives you total control. Mautic was acquired by Acquia, the company behind Drupal, and has been making substantial upgrades since that seem to be accelerating. The system has an active user community, active development and will only get better, making it an excellent choice to grow with and build your own systems around and never be dependent on third parties

• Internal management - This is a great web-based tool that allows our users to see what emails go to whom.
• Organization - Many layers of organization for templates since there are many types of remarketing emails that we send out.
• Historical Records - CheetahMail sends us the raw text files of all email actions so we can upload them to our database.

Incentivized

• Marketing email organization
• Email tracking
• Email automation
• Contact management
• Open rates
• Delivery rates
• A/B testing
• Email sending
• Unsubscribe management
• SMTP management

• The organization of CheetahMail could at times be better, as you create more and more mailings, they just pile up in a long list. It would be useful to be able to create folders to store specific mailings in. (ex. editorial, newsletters, marketing, etc.)

Incentivized

• Setting up the email templates has required hiring a professional. The templates that are provided are not fully responsive.
• More responsive form templates are needed.

Incentivized

As I have begun exploring competitors, I've come to realize that every competitor offers so much more functionality and integration than CheetahMail does. When we first signed our contract, CheetahMail was much more innovative and at the forefront of email. Since being bought out by Experian, we've seen a huge decline in service and innovation. They have laid off much of their staff and moved their account representatives to Costa Rica. They also heavily rely on on third parties which you will have to pay large amounts of money for while other Email Service Providers have integrated new technologies into their platform. You will get more for your money going to a different email service such as Responsys, Silverpop, Listrak and the like,

CheetahMail has a high learning curve to master and requires a lot of backend work with tech teams to set up. Navigation is not the best and everything that should be automated is still extremely manual.

I've been very satisfied with the support given by Cheetah, they are always asking and looking for areas where they can help you improve upon your business. They are very knowledgeable and are able to quickly find any answer you are looking for.

Incentivized

I believe Cheetah DMS is a bit more complete and a lot more complex to use than Mailchimp. Mailchimp was born as a mail marketing service while Cheetah has always worked across the whole online advertising spectrum making it a better solution for clients that need a certain level of service and sophistication.

Incentivized

Infusionsoft, at the time I tested it, had a crazy editor--very unintuitive and not very clean. Mautic (open source) makes it much easier to build up campaigns. Besides that, it didn't provide what we needed to justify the lack of possibility to self-host it and the requirement to pay for it.

• Our efficiency has decreased with CheetaMail actually. Too many service calls to find out why something isn't working as expected, account setup questions, issues with PiP, takes too long to get a simple form built, customer service response time, etc...
• Reporting is not very streamlined. This has caused us to take our reporting offline and use a method with better visibility.

Incentivized

• We made our ROI back within a year.
• Fulfills our needs and our client's needs, our clients love it.
• I would just add more templates to the email construction selection, other than that, it is just perfect.

Incentivized