Mautic vs MailerLite
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Post-Mautic-7 reset, the project is layering meaningful capability on a freshly modernized core.
Mautic just shipped 7.1 'Canis Major' — the first feature-heavy release after the 7.0 platform reset that took the codebase to Symfony 7 and PHP 8.4. The 7.1 line bundles S/MIME email signing, scheduled email sending, login throttling, optimistic locking on emails and pages, an inline CKEditor inside the GrapesJS builder, and an upgraded bot-detection layer that auto-blocks 500+ user agents. Maintenance is active across three branches (7.x, 6.x, 5.x), with security backports landing simultaneously when CVEs warrant.
Having paid down the dependency and PHP-version debt in 7.0, the team is now spending that headroom on concrete deliverability and operator features rather than architecture. The 7.1 changeset leans hard on email integrity, anti-spam, and editor ergonomics — the things self-hosters and agencies actually feel. Cadence is healthy: roughly one minor feature line per quarter, with point releases hitting every two to three weeks.
Expect the next minor (7.2) to keep building on the deliverability and tracking surface — likely deeper privacy-mode tracking, more API Platform coverage, and continued GrapesJS/builder polish. A 6.x security-only train will keep running in parallel until the long-term-support window closes.
MailerLite is quietly becoming a creator commerce stack — email is just the front door now.
MailerLite has expanded well beyond its email-marketing core. Recent releases add free and paid digital products, 1:1 and group bookings with calendar sync, and Stripe-driven promotional automations launched straight from product pages. The May editor rebuild adds an in-flow AI agent for HTML email composition, putting embedded LLM editing on a surface most competitors still treat as static.
The arc is from 'send newsletter' to 'run a creator business from one tab.' Each shipped feature tightens the loop between audience, offer, and automation — bookings trigger email sequences, product pages spawn campaigns, and the new Custom reports let operators attribute growth across email, products, and calls. Internal UX work (brand styles moved to its own section) reads as housekeeping ahead of another expansion wave rather than as user-facing change.
Expect the AI agent to step out of the HTML editor and into the automation builder and product-page copy next, and for the Stripe-product-to-automation pattern to grow into reusable multi-step funnels. The Bookings module is the next obvious place to add analytics into Custom reports.
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