Customer engagement platforms are some of the most expensive and important software, that any company can use. Despite it becoming a crowded software category a true platform option can cost upwards of $40K USD for an enterprise. Alternatively if you need something that can message across channels, has a nice interface, can ingest customer events and data you will need to buy a constellation of point solutions and try to stitch them together, all the while losing sight of the true 'customer journey'. Luckily there is one true open source platform solution Laudspeaker that offers a wonderful User Experience, Omnichannel message capabilities, customer and event data ingestion, and powerful segmentation abilities, and crucially is in use by some of the worlds largest enterprises (including financial and health care companies)
There are other open source marketing automation solutions but they tend to be point solutions for email only, do not include a no-code tool to create journeys, or you need to buy into a wider ecosystem that they are part of. These include:
- Odoo
- Listmonk
- Ghost
Before experimenting with solutions you need to figure out your own company's needs
These are some features and questions you should consider while looking at different vendor options:
Depending on the projects license you may be able to self host the project (or a community version of it) for free, or pay a reasonable license for the business or enterprise versions. These licenses often offer better pricing models to per end-user or per message
Even if you purchase a license for a enterprise version of an open source project, the open source project provides insurance of sorts since you have access to the code. With proprietary platforms, companies can go under, get acquired, or shift focus, leaving you without support or stuck with a tool that no longer meets your needs. Open-source projects offer more stability since they are often maintained by a community of developers, ensuring that the software can continue to evolve even if the original company behind it changes direction..
One of the biggest reasons companies opt for self-hosting is to maintain complete control over their data. If your business handles sensitive customer information or is subject to strict data privacy regulations (such as GDPR or HIPAA), having full control over where data is stored and how it is processed becomes critical. Self-hosting gives you the ability to manage data in-house, ensuring compliance and minimizing the risks associated with third-party data handling. Laudspeaker the leading open source and self-hostable vendor has a number of healthcare customers who choose us to keep control over data.
If your marketing strategies rely on proprietary or niche marketing channels that aren’t supported by most out-of-the-box solutions, self-hosting offers the flexibility to integrate these channels. This can be vital if you’re using internal communication platforms or industry-specific channels that aren’t readily available through mainstream marketing automation tools.
Self-hosted systems can be fully integrated with your internal databases and data sources. This can be especially important if your marketing campaigns need to access proprietary or siloed data that’s not easily accessible through cloud-based solutions. With self-hosting, you can create seamless connections between your marketing software and your internal systems, enhancing the personalization and effectiveness of your campaigns. With Laudspeaker we also offer a specific extension of liquid templating where you can make api calls in your messages that get resolved at send time, so you can access sensitive data without loading it into our system
If you need to offer marketing automation to a number of your clients, but want to provide a unified experience, you can take an existing on-prem solution and customize it to fit in with the rest of your experience.
While the benefits of self-hosting are clear, it’s important to evaluate whether your organization has the resources to manage a self-hosted solution effectively. There are two key resource areas to consider:
Self-hosted open source customer engagement platforms require ongoing development and maintenance. This includes setting up the software, ensuring integrations with your existing tools, and troubleshooting any issues that arise. Your development team must have the capacity to dedicate time to both the initial deployment and the ongoing management of the system.
In addition to development, DevOps plays a significant role in maintaining a self-hosted environment. Your DevOps team will need to manage the infrastructure, ensure that the servers are running efficiently, handle backups, and provide system updates. They will also need to monitor the system for performance issues or security vulnerabilities. If your organization does not have a dedicated DevOps team or enough resources to support this, self-hosting may be a more challenging undertaking.
If you have questions, we recommend you set up vendor calls to look at products and feature sets yourself, and off course if you are interested in Laudspeaker don't hesitate to reach out (book a call or send us an email through this page)!
