Groundhogg

What Groundhogg is

Groundhogg is a self-hosted CRM and marketing automation plugin for WordPress that sends email broadcasts, timed email sequences and automated flows from your own site. The home page says it is "Made specially for agencies, businesses, and nonprofits using WordPress," and the product is made by Groundhogg Inc. The pitch is ownership and a flat price: "Groundhogg is 100% self-hosted. Data lives on your servers, and stays there!" The site adds that neither Groundhogg nor any other service has access to your customers' personal information, and that most businesses using it do so anonymously.

The code is GPL and open source. You can customize it, redistribute it or extend it, and the site points out that even if the company were to go away, the CRM would keep working.

Email marketing

Emails are built in a drag-and-drop block editor or in an HTML editor, and personalized with replacement codes. Conditional content tailors the message depending on whether a contact matches criteria you set. You can schedule broadcasts to segments of your list and watch results arrive in real time, or create timed sequences of emails so each contact gets the next message at the right moment. Campaign archives are listed among the marketing features, so past campaigns can be published.

Sending: bring your own SMTP

Groundhogg does not lock you into one sending service. The home page says you take control of deliverability by using your own SMTP service, and that Groundhogg integrates with the most popular services and even lets you use several at the same time. The SMTP integrations named in the menu are Amazon (SES and SNS), Elastic Email, MailHawk, Postmark and Resend. MailHawk is listed among the company's own sites, and one reviewer describes using Groundhogg's pro features with MailHawk as a simple combination that just works.

Automation

The flow editor is built on a "do this, until that" model: you drag steps into the order you want them to run. Integrations such as WooCommerce and LearnDash appear right in the flow editor. Over a dozen pre-built flow templates come with pre-written emails so you do not start from nothing. Automation features listed in the menu include automated flows, cart abandonment, flow templates and a sales pipeline, and conditional logic, part of the pro plan, lets you build more sophisticated journeys that branch on each contact's situation.

Contacts and segmentation

Everything about a contact sits on one screen inside the WordPress admin: custom fields, tasks, notes, files and the activity history, plus information pulled in from other plugins. The advanced search filtering system can find and segment contacts on dozens of criteria, and the site calls it the most flexible CRM search available short of enterprise software. Contacts can also be segmented with tags. Staff permissions control what team members can see and do.

Reporting

The home page claims Groundhogg "offers the most comprehensive CRM and marketing automation analytics suite of any self-hosted and open-source CRM." In practice you see opens, clicks, unsubscribes and bounces at a glance for flows and broadcasts, compare broadcast performance across campaigns from the dashboard, get monthly and weekly summaries by email, break down what works inside each flow with flow analytics, and build custom reports. Activity tracking records what contacts do.

Integrations and add-ons

Because Groundhogg runs inside WordPress, it reads data from your other plugins directly and syncs it with the CRM, which the site says removes the need for Zapier, WPFusion or other paid integration services. Integrations can add steps to the funnel builder, info cards and activity to the contact record, and new search filters. Named integrations include HelpScout, BuddyBoss, LearnDash, LifterLMS and Twilio and WhatsApp, and on the ecommerce side GiveWP, AffiliateWP, WP Simple Pay (Stripe), Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce. Add-ons include companies, conditional logic, text messaging (SMS), content restriction and the sales pipeline. Add-ons can be bought one by one, but the site says a plan that bundles many add-ons and integrations is better value.

Developer tools and AI

For developers there are hundreds of hooks and filters, a REST API, incoming webhooks, custom and low-code flow steps, and AI agents and MCP support, all listed in the developer features menu.

Pricing and trial

Pricing is flat: the home page table shows $50/m for 500, 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, 25,000, 50,000 and 50,000+ contacts alike, under the heading "Flat-rate pricing, no matter how big your list!" You can try it for 14 days before committing, and subscribers to the newsletter get a 15% discount on any premium plan for the first subscription year. Email delivery is billed by the SMTP service you connect.

Support and onboarding

Help comes through the documentation, videos, live training calls, a Facebook group and community, and tickets for technical questions; bugs go to the GitHub issue tracker. The company keeps a list of certified partners and an agency directory for managed support, customization and setup, and runs a Marketing Automation Grant that gives financial support to nonprofits. One customer quoted on the home page says the founder, Adrian, sets up an onboarding call and the team installs Groundhogg for free on one website. Many reviews on the page single out the support team, and several users say they came to Groundhogg from hosted email platforms.

In customers' words

The reviews on the home page give a sense of how it is used. The founder of LifterLMS likes doing broadcast emails, tagging and marketing automation from inside his WordPress site. A store owner says connecting Groundhogg to an Easy Digital Downloads storefront took minutes and gave him funnels to thank customers, broadcasts about new features and automations for daily work. Agency users say it gives them a full-system solution for clients and is extensible enough for client needs, and a consultant who had paid more than $500 a month for a cloud system describes rolling it out across all his sites.

The site also publishes learning material beyond the manual, including a CRM Buyers Guide for WordPress and "Email is hard," a collection of essays on sending better email.

Who it suits

Groundhogg suits WordPress-based agencies, businesses and nonprofits that want a real CRM with email marketing and automation, keep their contact data on their own server, and would rather pay one flat monthly price than a fee that grows with the list. Stores on WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads, course sites on LearnDash or LifterLMS, and communities on BuddyBoss get native integrations. The caveats are the usual self-hosted ones: it only runs on WordPress, you choose and pay for your own SMTP service, and the performance and upkeep of your server are your responsibility.