Do you want to integrate Mailchimp with your WordPress site and want to find the best plugins?
Mailchimp is a popular email marketing service that lets you create email campaigns, send automated messages, and more. With the right plugin, you can grow your email list, automate workflows, and make the most out of the service.
In this article, we’ll show you the best WordPress Mailchimp plugins that you can use for your business.
If you’re just getting started with email marketing, then you must have come across Mailchimp. It is one of the best email marketing services in the market. The best part is that you can get started for free and send up to 1,000 emails every month.
With Mailchimp, you can set up emails, create campaigns, and manage your subscribers with ease. It also integrates with other third-party plugins and tools for WordPress.
For instance, you can use it with lead generation software to grow your email list. Or you can connect it with a WordPress contact form plugin and automatically collect email addresses in Mailchimp.
You can even set up automation with Mailchimp using the right plugin. For example, automatically send an email using Mailchimp when publishing a new blog post. This way, your audience is immediately notified about new content, news, announcements, and sales.
That said, let’s look at some of the best Mailchimp plugins you can choose for your business.
WPForms is the best WordPress form builder plugin for WordPress that lets you easily create Mailchimp signup form with its powerful drag-and-drop form builder.
With its Mailchimp addon, you can create a newsletter signup form and select which audience or group the subscribers should be added to in Mailchimp. This makes it very easy to save form entries and add them to your email list.
Besides that, you also get options to unsubscribe, archive, delete, and record events. The Mailchimp addon also lets you mark subscribers as VIPs, so you know your high-value customers.
By integrating Mailchimp with WPForms, you can assign Mailchimp tags to segment subscribers. Or use WPForms smart tags to save additional information about subscribers in their Mailchimp profiles.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: If you’re looking to create different WordPress forms and want to collect subscribers’ contact information in Mailchimp, then WPForms is the best plugin.
Pricing: WPForms pricing plans start from $49.50 per year. However, you’ll need the Plus plan to use the Mailchimp addon, which will cost $99.50 per year. There is also a WPForms Lite version you can use for free.
Uncanny Automator is the best WordPress automation plugin. You can think of it as Zapier but for WordPress. Uncanny Automator offers different recipes that you can create for Mailchimp and automate workflows.
You can choose from hundreds of actions and triggers to create an automated recipe. It helps 2 or more WordPress plugins to talk to each other.
For example, let’s say a user cancels their membership on MemberPress. They’re then automatically unsubscribed from the Mailchimp audience. Similarly, if a user completes an online course on LifterLMS, then a tag is automatically added to the user’s profile in Mailchimp.
Aside from Mailchimp, Uncanny Automator integrates with over 130 different plugins and social media apps. Plus, its recipe builder is user-friendly, and you don’t need to edit code to set up automation.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: If you’re looking for a way to automate your workflows between Mailchimp and other plugins on your WordPress site, then Uncanny Automator is the perfect solution for you.
Pricing: Uncanny Automator prices start from $149 per year.
WP WooCommerce Mailchimp is a free WordPress Mailchimp plugin. It helps you add customers to your email list automatically.
You can select which Mailchimp list the subscribers should be added to. The plugin lets you choose when to collect customers’ email addresses. For instance, you can collect information when a customer places an order, the order is processed, or when the order is completed.
Other options offered by the plugin include asking permission from customers to subscribe to the email list, editing the opt-in field text, and more.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: If you have a WooCommerce store, then the WP WooCommerce Mailchimp plugin is a great plugin to automatically add customers to specific email lists. This way, you can create custom email campaigns for each customer group and send personalized messages.
Pricing: WP WooCommerce Mailchimp is a free WordPress plugin.
OptinMonster is the best lead generation and conversion optimization software. It helps you get more leads, grow your email list, and boost conversions.
OptinMonster easily integrates with Mailchimp, and you can gather email addresses through different campaigns in your Mailchimp account.
With OptinMonster, you can create all types of campaigns, like a simple popup, floating bar, full-screen welcome mats, and more. There are lots of pre-built campaign templates to choose from. You can then use its drag-and-drop campaign builder to easily customize your campaigns.
Plus, it offers powerful display rules that let you show personalized messages based on user behavior. You can learn more by following our ultimate guide to using Mailchimp and WordPress.
For instance, you can show a campaign when a user is about to leave your site with an exit-intent popup. Or display campaigns based on the time a user spends on a page, visit a specific page, and more.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: OptinMonster and Mailchimp are an explosive combination to have on your website. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to create attractive and nonintrusive popup campaigns using OptinMonster and collect email addresses in Mailchimp.
Pricing: OptinMonster pricing plans start from $9 per month (billed annually).
MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress is a free plugin that lets you add signup forms to your WordPress site. It easily integrates with Mailchimp and collects email addresses from the sign-up form.
The plugin is simple and easy to use. It even integrates with other form builders and plugins like WooCommerce, WPForms, AffiliateWP, and more.
While the plugin is free to use, it doesn’t offer the customization options or form templates that you’d get in other form plugins, like WPForms. There are only a handful of form fields to choose from and limited customization options.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: The plugin is best for anyone who wants a free WordPress plugin that creates basic sign-up forms and integrates with Mailchimp.
Pricing: MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress is a free to use plugin.
SeedProd is the best WordPress website builder that helps you create custom themes and landing pages without editing code or hiring a developer.
SeedProd easily integrates with Mailchimp. This way, you can create custom landing pages with subscription forms and collect email addresses in Mailchimp.
Besides that, you can also select which segment or group to add your subscribers to in Mailchimp, enable double opt-in, and more.
Other features offered by SeedProd include a drag-and-drop theme builder, pre-built theme and landing page templates, lots of customization options, and more.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: If you’re looking for a plugin that lets you design and create custom landing pages and works seamlessly with Mailchimp, then SeedProd is the perfect solution.
Pricing: You’ll need at least the Plus plan in SeedProd to use Mailchimp integration. This will cost you $99.50 per year.
Another Mailchimp Widget is the next Mailchimp WordPress plugin on our list. The plugin lets you add clean and basic sign-up forms for your WordPress site.
You can show the signup form through a shortcode or use a widget. The plugin also shows different lists from your Mailchimp account. You can select a list and group to add new subscribers.
That said, there are not many customization options or templates to choose from. The plugin just lets you edit the first and last name labels and show a success message and a failure message. The form also only contains 3 fields, which include first name, last name, and email.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: The plugin is best for anyone looking for a free option to add simple Mailchimp signup forms. It is lightweight, and you can add the form anywhere using a shortcode.
Pricing: Another Mailchimp Widget is 100% free to use.
Thrive Themes offers powerful tools to build high-converting WordPress sites without editing code. It is a complete suite of plugins that help you build, convert, sell, and engage.
Thrive Themes suite includes popular tools like Thrive Leads, Thrive Architect, Thrive Theme Builder, Thrive Quiz Builder, Thrive Ovation, and more.
You can easily integrate Mailchimp with Thrive Theme and then use the email marketing software with different tools in the suite.
For instance, you can connect Mailchimp’s API with Thrive Themes and then use Thrive Leads to gather email addresses. Or use Thrive Apprentice to build online courses and integrate it with Mailchimp for all your email needs.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: The plugin is great for anyone looking for a complete marketing toolkit for their WordPress site and wants to integrate Mailchimp as well. You can do so much with Thrive Themes tools, from creating landing pages to building online courses, popups, quizzes, and more.
Pricing: The Thrive Themes suite will cost $299 per year.
MemberPress is the best WordPress membership plugin that’s beginner-friendly to use. You can use it to create a membership site, lock content based on user roles, set up content dripping, sell online courses, and more.
MemeberPress easily integrates with different email marketing tools, including Mailchimp. This allows you to add your members to Mailchimp and segment them based on their membership levels. You can then create targeted email campaigns for each segment.
MemberPress also lets you send custom fields to Mailchimp and add additional user information. By default, it will only send the email address and first name to Mailchimp. But you can edit the settings to map other fields as well.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: MemberPress is one of the best Mailchimp plugins because it makes it very easy to create a membership site. Plus, it helps you manage all your email needs by seamlessly integrating with Mailchimp.
Pricing: MemberPress is a premium plugin with prices starting from $179.50 per year.
RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin that helps you run viral giveaways to grow your email subscribers, social followers, and website traffic.
The plugin easily integrates with Mailchimp. You can add an option in your giveaway content to join your email newsletter and integrate it with Mailchimp. This way, when users enter their email addresses, they’re automatically added to Mailchimp.
Besides that, RafflePress offers a drag-and-drop giveaway builder, pre-built templates, social media integration, a custom giveaway landing page, and more.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: The plugin is perfect for anyone who wants to run a viral giveaway and collect email addresses in Mailchimp. Both plugins smoothly integrate with each other.
Pricing: You’ll need at least the RafflePress Pro plan to unlock email integrations. This will cost you $99.50 per year.
Formidable Forms is another popular contact form plugin for WordPress, and it also offers a Mailchimp addon. Formidable Forms lets you create complex and advanced forms without editing code.
For instance, you can create advanced calculators like mortgage calculators, time sheet forms, amortization calculators, registration forms, content download forms, web applications, and more.
With the Mailchimp addon, you can automatically send contacts gathered from the form over to Mailchimp. You also get options to sort leads with tags and groups in Mailchimp.
Other options include selecting a single or double opt-in, asking users to update their information when filling out the form, and more.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: Do you want to create advanced and complex WordPress forms and manage leads in Mailchimp? If yes, then Formidable Forms is perfect for you. It offers pre-built form templates, a drag-and-drop form builder, lots of customization options, and more.
Pricing: Formidable Forms is a premium WordPress plugin. You’ll need at least the Plus plan to unlock Mailchimp integration, which is priced at $99.50 per year.
MailChimp Forms by MailMunch is one of the best free WordPress Mailchimp plugins on our list. The plugin deeply integrates with Mailchimp and lets you create beautiful opt-in forms for your website, eCommerce site, or blog.
With different opt-in forms, you can grab user’s attention and grow your email list. MailChimp Forms by MailMunch lets you create opt-in forms like popups with exit, sidebar widgets, top bars, scroll boxes, landing pages, and embedded forms.
Besides that, you can add additional information about your subscribers in Mailchimp. For instance, it lets you collect first and last names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, and more.
The plugin offers other features as well. For instance, you can A/B test Mailchimp opt-in forms, enable welcome emails, and more. However, MailChimp Forms by MailMunch doesn’t offer many display rules or templates compared to OptinMonster.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: If you’re looking for a free Mailchimp WordPress plugin to create opt-in forms for your site and grow your email list, then MailChimp Forms by MailMunch is among the best free solutions in the market.
Pricing: MailChimp Forms by MailMunch is a free WordPress plugin.
Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) is among the best eCommerce plugins for WordPress, and you can use it to sell digital products on WordPress. The plugin comes with powerful features and lets you create beautiful digital stores.
We use Easy Digital Downloads to sell our software, like WPForms and MonsterInsights. With that, we can easily say that it’s the best eCommerce platform for your site.
Easy Digital Downloads offers different extensions, including a Mailchimp extension. This helps you connect your email lists in Mailchimp to Easy Digital Downloads. When a customer purchases a product and enters an email address, it’s automatically saved in Mailchimp.
You can also show different email lists at checkout and let customers choose which list they’d like to subscribe to. EDD also supports Mailchimp’s eCommerce tracking, which shows the products that are driving the most subscribers.
If you’re using the Free Downloads extension in Easy Digital Downloads, then you can integrate it with Mailchimp. This way, you can grow your email list faster by offering free downloads.
Other than that, you can also use email templates offered by Mailchimp to run email campaigns, A/B test different email versions and improve email deliverability.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: Easy Digital Downloads makes it very easy to sell digital products. It is the best Mailchimp WordPress plugin, as you get to do so much more with your eCommerce website. For instance, automatically add customers to email groups, send targeted messages, create segments, and more.
Pricing: Easy Digital Downloads pricing plans start from $99.50 per year.
MC4WP: Mailchimp Top Bar is a WordPress Mailchimp plugin that lets you add a customization sign-up bar at the top of your WordPress website.
You can show a beautiful sign-up bar at the top of the page to attract user attention. The best part, it automatically connects with your Mailchimp account and adds new subscribers to your preferred list or group.
The plugin offers decent customization options. You get to change the bar color, and text color, edit the text for the message and button, and more.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: If you’re looking for a plugin to add a sign-up bar only, then this is the right plugin for you. It’s free to use and allows users to quickly enter their email address and subscribe to your emails.
Pricing: You can use the MC4WP: Mailchimp Top Bar plugin for free.
Featured Images in RSS for Mailchimp & More is a free Mailchimp plugin that lets you add featured images to your RSS feed.
The plugin is super easy to use and offers different image size options, image alignment settings, image-to-text padding, and more. You can also use it with your WooCommerce store to show product photos in Mailchimp RSS campaigns.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: If you want to ensure that your blog post featured images appear in the RSS feed, then this is the plugin to use. You can set a particular image size and customize the image’s appearance in the feed.
Pricing: Featured Images in RSS for Mailchimp & More is a free WordPress plugin.
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress that lets you enable Mailchimp form tracking in WordPress. It helps you set up Google Analytics in WordPress without editing code or hiring a developer.
For instance, you can use its Forms addon to track Mailchimp signup forms on your site. The plugin also shows reports inside your WordPress dashboard, so you can easily view data without having to leave your website.
You can see which Mailchimp form is performing the best. This way, you get to optimize low-converting forms while promoting high-performing forms even more.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: Do you want to track Mailchimp forms on your website and see which campaign is performing the best? Then MonsterInsights is the perfect solution for you. It is beginner-friendly and helps set up tracking without touching a single line of code.
Pricing: The MonsterInsights Forms addon is available in the Pro plan, which costs $199.50 per year. There is also a MonsterInsights Lite version that you can use for free, but it doesn’t include the Forms addon.
Contact Form 7 Extension For Mailchimp is a free plugin that lets you integrate Contact Form 7 with Mailchimp. All your Contact Form 7 entries will be automatically added to an email list in Mailchimp.
The plugin is flexible and easy to set up. You can choose a predefined list to add new contacts to in Mailchimp. The plugin also lets you choose between single or double opt-in, as well as show an opt-in checkbox.
Pros:
Cons:
Why Use This Plugin: If you are already using Contact Form 7 on your WordPress site, then this plugin is for you. It lets you pair Contact Form 7 with Mailchimp.
Pricing: Contact Form 7 Extension For Mailchimp is 100% free to use.
After going through multiple plugins, choosing the best Mailchimp WordPress plugin depends on your needs. You can use multiple plugins in combination and integrate Mailchimp with your site.
For instance, if you’re looking to add different forms on your site and collect emails, then WPForms is the best plugin. You get multiple form templates, a drag-and-drop form builder, lots of customization options, and easy Mailchimp integration.
On the other hand, if you’re looking to get more email subscribers in Mailchimp, then we recommend OptinMonster. It offers pre-built templates, lots of campaign options, and powerful display rules.
Similarly, you can use Uncanny Automator and connect Mailchimp with other plugins and tools on your website. This way, you get to automate different tasks and let the plugin handle everything for you.
We hope this article helped you pick the best WordPress Mailchimp plugin. You may also want to see our list of best WooCommerce plugins and how to create a free business email address.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
A CEO is no longer expected to talk candidly about open source. Maybe business leaders have never expected open source to be anything but serve their business interests. Not every CEO takes advantage of open source to the degree we have seen in recent months. But no one is free of blame. Open source means different things to different people, and everyone uses it for their own purposes.
The colloquial use of open source gives companies like Meta the opportunity to use open source as they wish. Even high-ranking people in the open source community discount the problem. They say it’s OK. Open source is still moving forward. The kids don’t care — all they want to do is build models.
There is no playbook or good versus evil here. Many thoughtful people want to find a way to solve the mess we’ve seen surface in the WordPress saga of the past few weeks.
To recap, for those who haven’t been sufficiently online the past few days: Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress, the popular open source content management system, has been accusing WP Engine, a WordPress hosting provider, of violating WordPress’ trademarks and using its servers without compensation. The two organizations’ lawyers have exchanged cease-and-desist letters (more on those later). At the stroke of midnight UTC on Tuesday, WordPress blocked WP Engine’s access to its servers.
As this episode unravels, a fresh flow of ideas about open source has emerged. At least one CEO has established an important approach to solving issues like those we see with WordPress and WP Engine.
In a thoughtful post on his personal blog, Dries Buytaer, creator of Drupal, described the issue today as a makers-takers problem, where “creators of open source software (“Makers”) see their work being used by others, often service providers, who profit from it without contributing back in a meaningful or fair way (“Takers”).”
CEOs are on both sides of the perspective he details. He knows the people involved and has a solution that makes sense for the Drupal community. He calls it a “contributor credit” program.
Buytaer comes from the same world as Mullenweg. Drupal and WordPress are open source content management systems.
Still, open source is a tool for CEOs to use for profits, sometimes illusions, and leverage against commercial competitors. We’ve seen this with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who calls Llama, the company’s large language model, open source, which it is not.
And now we face someone who has long enjoyed a gleaming image in the open source community but now faces many questions about his intent.
Earlier in the week, we interviewed Mullenweg, who said WP Engine should fork WordPress.
“I think a fork would be amazing,” he told TNS. “They should fork WordPress, because what they offer is not actually WordPress. They call it WordPress, but they really screw it up.”
Mullenweg now wants to own a chunk of WP Engine, and he’s using his bully pulpit to pound away until he gets what he wants. He’s called WP Engine “a cancer.” He openly rails about the WP Engine executive team and Silver Lake, the private equity firm that has invested in it, using tactics we’ve become far too accustomed to from all sorts, who we don’t have to name here.
It’s a victim tactic. Mullenweg and Automattic, his holding company, talk like they are the victims of an evil plan, rooted in trademark violations. Following the victim’s logic, Mullenweg has to attack. He and his team have to block WP Engine from the WordPress servers.
Now comes the news from The Verge that WordPress demanded 8% of WP Engine revenues each month in exchange for being considered a contributor to the WordPress open source project. That would also mean WP Engine could not fork WordPress, but it would allow WP Engine to use the trademark.
The Verge:
“[C]hoosing to contribute 8 percent to WP Engine employees would give WordPress.org and Automattic ‘full audit rights’ and “access to employee records and time-tracking” at the company. The agreement also comes with a ban on ‘forking or modifying’ Automattic’s software, including plug-ins and extensions like WooCommerce.”
This raises questions about Mullenweg’s hearty support for a WP Engine fork. For perspective, WP Engine competes with Automattic. Just be clear on that one.
Mullenweg has made it confusing for almost everyone involved. There are huge supporters who want WordPress to survive, and there are end users who don’t have any clue about open source or even that their sites run on WordPress servers.
WP Engine, on the other hand, has its own issues. It does not give much in return for using WordPress. The company, under CEO Heather Brunner and founder Jason Cohen, uses the WordPress name. They call it fair use.
Further, WP Engine uses the work invested by the WordPress community into the service without the engineering overhead required if it had to maintain its own fork, which would cost millions and take quite some time to develop — a year, two, three?
What drama. If you are hearing about this for the first time, Mullenweg, who created the web content management system WordPress, has been relentless with his attacks on WP Engine for what he claims are trademark violations. It came to a head at WordCamp in Portland earlier in September when Mullenweg called WP Engine “a cancer” on the community.
On Sept. 23, attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to WP Engine on behalf of Mullenweg’s holding company Automattic and WooCommerce. Among its demands: that WP Engine stop all unauthorized use of WordPress’s trademarks and “provide an accounting of all profits from the service offerings that have made unauthorized use of our Client’s intellectual property.”
The letter suggested that “even a mere 8% royalty on WP Engine’s $400+ million in annual revenue equates to more than $32 million in annual lost licensing revenue for our Client.”
On Sept. 25, in lieu of action by WP Engine, Mullenweg blocked WP Engine’s access to the WordPress servers. He then gave a reprieve on Sept. 27 after users contacted him. Mullenweg said users thought they were paying WordPress, not WP Engine.
“They thought they were paying me, to be honest, that’s why they were pissed off,” Mullenweg said. “And so I was like, ‘Oops, OK, we’ll turn it back on.’“
WordPress blocked WP Engine’s access to its servers Tuesday at UTC 00:00.
The odd thing: no sign of trouble so far from WP Engine users; a WP Engine spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by TNS about whether the company had heard from customers having problems. WP Engine must have set up the mirrors and all to WordPress.org. How that affects performance and the rest is still not understood.
In our interview, Mullenweg said users now hopefully understand that they are paying WP Engine, which does not pay WordPress for auto updates and everything else WordPress provides. Users, he argued, should be mad at WP Engine, not him and his team, who run the servers. Again, Mullenweg expresses that he and his team are the victims.
WP Engine is simply not responding, Mullenweg said, except through a cease-and-desist letter its attorneys sent Automattic on Sept. 23 after his repeated attacks.
The letter sent on WP Engine’s behalf reads in part, “Mr. Mullenweg’s covert demand that WP Engine hand over tens of millions to his for-profit company Automattic, while publicly masquerading as an altruistic protector of the WordPress community, is disgraceful. WP Engine will not accede to these unconscionable demands, which not only harm WP Engine and its employees but also threaten the entire WordPress community.”
WP Engine did not answer The New Stack’s question about forking WordPress, but a company spokesperson did have choice words about Automattic’s licensing demands.
“We, like the rest of the WordPress community, use the WordPress mark to describe our business. Automattic’s suggestion that WP Engine needs a license to do that is simply wrong, and reflects a misunderstanding of trademark law. To moot its claimed concerns, we have eliminated the few examples Automattic gave in its Sept. 23 letter to us.”
For example, WP Engine has made some minor changes, namely changing WordPress to WordPress1 and WooCommerce1 on the site’s front page.
Overall, users had almost no warning that their sites would be disrupted. This is an odd way to treat users, especially when they are such huge fans of your platform.
Here’s where open source becomes a problem for users. Most people do not know how they get the updates to their CMS. But once their site stopped working, they became entangled in a battle between Mullenweg and WP Engine.
Meanwhile, most users are just trying to keep their sites working.
Post by @alexelnaugh
View on Threads
Amidst the controversy, Mullenweg acknowledged he could have done better in reaching out to the community.
“To be fair, I have not been the best at public relations or publishing things,” he told TNS. “That’s why we try to be very clear at UTC 00, Oct. 1 … at this exact time, their network, WP Engine servers will no longer be able to access our networks.”
But a fork? The cost to set up the servers, the network, the load balancers, on and on, would cost millions and could take years. At its peak, WordPress serves 30,000 requests per second and 40% of the entire Web, according to Mullenweg.
Users have an option, he said. They can move to a different hosting provider. He mentioned Bluehost and his own company, WordPress.com, as two options.
There has been confusion about open source AI and server-side public licenses. Now, we’ve got the WordPress debacle. Oh, and there’s talk about Oracle owning the JavaScript trademark. The fun never ends.
But people are working on the problem, particularly the single point of failure issue that has become more apparent since WP Engine’s servers were cut off.
Here’s a thread worth reading from Reddit, about how to solve the problem of a single point of truth. The problem is a severe one, but maybe a fork is not the answer. Instead, perhaps it’s a way to solve matters that can easily happen if sites aren’t updated:
The vulnerability should be apparent: if WordPress.org goes down for any reason, millions of sites stop updating. A coordinated attack (zero-day implementation coupled with a DDoS attack that prevents updates from going out from zero-day) could be a disaster the world over. And, if the Foundation ever decided to get out of the update business, or ran into financial difficulty, or Matt decides to retire to Aruba and quit WordPress entirely — whatever the case may be — there’s no Plan B.
So, the community needs a plan B — and maybe that’s most important. Stop the bickering. Instead, look for ways to modernize the WordPress infrastructure so users don’t get entangled in corporate wars that use open source as a proxy to fight battles that leave casualties scattered across the web.
YOUTUBE.COM/THENEWSTACK
Tech moves fast, don’t miss an episode. Subscribe to our YouTube
channel to stream all our podcasts, interviews, demos, and more.
“WPE’s nominative uses of those marks to refer to the open-source software platform and plugin used for its clients’ websites are fair uses under settled trademark law, and they are consistent with WordPress’ own guidelines and the practices of nearly all businesses in this space,” the lawsuit said.
Mullenweg told Ars that “we had numerous meetings with WPE over the past 20 months, including a previous term sheet that was delivered in July. The term sheet was meant to be simple, and if they had agreed to negotiate it we could have, but they refused to even take a call with me, so we called their bluff.” Automattic also published a timeline of meetings and calls between the two companies going back to 2023.
Mullenweg also said, “Automattic had the commercial rights to the WordPress trademark and could sub-license, hence why the payment should go to Automattic for commercial use of the trademark. Also the term sheet covered the WooCommerce trademark, which they also abuse, and is 100 percent owned by Automattic.”
Exhibit A in the lawsuit includes a letter to WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner from a trademark lawyer representing Automattic and a subsidiary, WooCommerce, which makes a plugin for WordPress.
“As you know, our Client owns all intellectual property rights globally in and to the world-famous WOOCOMMERCE and WOO trademarks; and the exclusive commercial rights from the WordPress Foundation to use, enforce, and sublicense the world-famous WORDPRESS trademark, among others, and all other associated intellectual property rights,” the letter said.
The letter alleged that “your blatant and widespread unlicensed use of our Client’s trademarks has infringed our Client’s rights and confused consumers into believing, falsely, that WP Engine is authorized, endorsed, or sponsored by, or otherwise affiliated or associated with, our Client.” It also alleged that “WP Engine’s entire business model is predicated on using our Client’s trademarks… to mislead consumers into believing there is an association between WP Engine and Automattic.”
Web hosting provider WP Engine has filed a lawsuit against Automattic, and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, accusing them of extortion and abuse of power. The lawsuit comes after nearly two weeks of tussling between Mullenweg, who is also CEO of Automattic, and WP Engine over trademark infringement and contributions to the open-source WordPress project.
WP Engine accused Automattic and Mullenweg of not keeping their promises to run WordPress open-source projects without any constraints and giving developers the freedom to build, run, modify and redistribute the software.
“Matt Mullenweg’s conduct over the last ten days has exposed significant conflicts of interest and governance issues that, if left unchecked, threaten to destroy that trust. WP Engine has no choice but to pursue these claims to protect its people, agency partners, customers, and the broader WordPress community,” the company said.
The case document, filed in a court in California, also accused Mullenweg of having a “long history of
obfuscating the true facts” about his control of WordPress Foundation and WordPress.org
Mullenweg had criticized WP Engine for infringing WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks. He called them the “Cancer of WordPress” and also called out WP Engine’s private equity partner, Silver Lake, for not caring about the open-source community.
Later, WP Engine sent a cease-and-desist letter, asking Mullenweg and Automattic to withdraw these comments. Automattic then sent its own cease-and-desist, accusing WP Engine of infringing WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
Notably, Mullenweg banned WP Engine on September 25 from accessing WordPress.org resources, including plug-ins and themes, and preventing WP Engine customers from updating them. Two days later, Mullenweg provided a temporary reprieve and unblocked WP Engine until October 1.
On Wednesday, Automattic published a proposed seven-year term sheet that it had sent to WP Engine on September 20, asking the hosting company to pay 8% of its gross revenues per month as a royalty fee for using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks.
Alternatively, WP Engine was given the option to commit 8% by deploying employees to contribute to WordPress’s core features and functionalities, or a combination of both people hours and money.
WP Engine didn’t accept these terms, which included a probation on forking plugins and extensions from Automattic and WooCommerce.
You can contact this reporter at [email protected] or on Signal: @ivan.42
WordPress biz Automattic details WP Engine deal demands • The Register
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 30, 2024
Google Volatility With Gains & Losses, Updated Web Spam Policies, Cache Gone & More Search News
6 Things You Can Do to Compete With Big Sites
Daily Search Forum Recap: October 1, 2024
An In-Depth Guide For Businesses
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Praises Nuclear Energy to Power AI
This Minimalist Lamp Lets You Pick From 16 Million+ Lighting Colors for Maximum Productivity
