Business Focus
The Role of Automattic in the WordPress Story
Business Focus
Table of Contents
Let’s dive right into the intricate and often misunderstood role of Automattic in the WordPress story. Understanding Automattic is key to understanding the commercial engine, the innovation driver, and sometimes the controversial center of the WordPress universe.
The Origin: Why Automattic Was Born
To understand Automattic, you have to go back to the beginning of our story. After Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked the b2/cafelog software to create WordPress in 2003, it quickly grew into a beloved open-source project . But by 2005, it was facing a classic open-source dilemma: how to sustain and grow the project without compromising its free and open nature.
Mullenweg, then just 21 years old, saw an opportunity. He founded Automattic Inc. in 2005 as a for-profit company with a clear mission: to “democratize publishing” and find a way to monetize the wildly popular but non-commercial WordPress software.
The idea wasn’t to sell WordPress, but to build commercial services and products around it that would fund its continued development. The company’s name itself is a play on his name and the word “automatic,” hinting at its founder-driven, efficient ethos .
The Dual Relationship: The Benevolent Overlord and the Steward
This is the most critical part to grasp. Automattic and the open-source WordPress project (managed by the non-profit WordPress Foundation) have a symbiotic, but deliberately separated, relationship.
| Entity | Role | Relationship to WordPress |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress Foundation | Non-profit organization | Owns the WordPress trademark and protects the open-source project’s core values . |
| Automattic | For-profit company | A major contributor to the open-source project, and the company behind commercial services like WordPress.com. |
Think of it this way: The WordPress Foundation is the guardian of the “cathedral”—the open-source code and the community’s core values. Automattic is the most influential and resource-rich “builder” working within that cathedral, using its skills to create both free tools for everyone and paid services for those who need them. To safeguard this separation, in 2010, Automattic formally transferred the WordPress trademark and control over related open-source projects like bbPress and BuddyPress to the WordPress Foundation.
In the early 2000s, publishing on the internet existed—but true participation was still out of reach for most people. Websites were not built by creators. They were built by developers.
The Commercial Arm: Automattic’s Flagship Products and Acquisitions
Automattic’s involvement is most visible through its portfolio of products, which serve users at every level, from a first-time blogger to a large enterprise.
WordPress.com (2005): This was Automatti’s founding service. It uses the open-source WordPress software to offer hosted blogging and website creation . For users, this solved the biggest hurdle of the .org experience: technical complexity. It offers a free tier and paid plans for more features, making WordPress accessible to millions who don’t want to manage their own hosting.
Akismet (2005): One of Automattic’s first commercial plugins, Akismet is an anti-spam service that protects millions of WordPress sites from comment and form spam. It’s a perfect example of a commercial product built to serve the open-source community
Gravatar (2007): Acquired early on, Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) is a service that links your avatar image to your email address, automatically displaying it on any WordPress site (and thousands of other platforms) when you comment or post.
Jetpack (2011): A super-plugin that brings many cloud-powered features (like site stats, CDN, and security tools) typically found on WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress.org sites, blurring the lines between the two experience.
WooCommerce (2015): This was a landmark acquisition. WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress, powering a significant percentage of online stores. This move solidified WordPress’s role not just as a blogging platform, but as a serious tool for commerce.
Tumblr (2019): In a move that surprised many, Automattic acquired the once-dominant microblogging platform Tumblr for a reported $3 million . The long-term goal has been to gradually migrate Tumblr’s backend to WordPress, showcasing the software’s flexibility and scale.
Pocket Casts (2021), Texts.com (2023), Beeper (2024): More recent acquisitions point to Automattic’s broader ambition in the “Cosmos” space—building and acquiring modern communication and media apps . This shows the company is evolving beyond just website-building tools.
In summary: Automattic in a nutshell
In a nutshell, Automattic’s involvement with WordPress is that of a founder, primary funder, commercializer, and occasionally, a controversial leader. It is the engine that has driven much of WordPress’s innovation and widespread adoption through services like WordPress.com and WooCommerce, and its financial success and corporate strategy are inextricably linked to the health of the open-source project.
The story begins in 2005, when Matt Mullenweg—who had co-founded the open-source WordPress project two years earlier with Mike Little—founded Automattic as a for-profit company to channel the commercial potential of the rapidly growing software.
Mullenweg’s first hire was Donncha Ó Caoimh, a developer who had been merging his B2++ project into WordPress, and together they began building a company around a bold mission: democratizing publishing. That mission later expanded to include commerce and messaging, particularly after landmark acquisitions like WooCommerce in 2015 and Beeper in 2024.
As the primary commercial steward of the WordPress ecosystem, Automattic has driven adoption through an expanding suite of products. WordPress.com launched in 2005 as a hosted service that introduced millions to the software without the technical hurdles of self-hosting.
The anti-spam tool Akismet followed soon after, and over the years, the company acquired or developed Gravatar, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and Simplenote, among others. Today, WordPress powers over 43% of the web, with WooCommerce standing as the world’s leading e-commerce platform—a testament to Automattic’s role as the innovation engine behind the open-source project.
To preserve the integrity of the open-source movement, Automattic established a careful structural separation. In 2010, the company transferred control of the WordPress trademark, along with related projects like bbPress and BuddyPress, to the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit organization.
This created the dual structure that persists today: the for-profit Automattic builds commercial services around the software while contributing heavily to its development, and the non-profit Foundation guards the project’s core values and trademark. As Mullenweg himself described it, this “for-profit, nonprofit, open source, working in concert” model has proven influential, with the free version of WordPress.com alone introducing more than 100 million people to the software .
Yet Automattic’s leadership has not been without controversy. The company‘s most turbulent chapter unfolded in late 2024 and into 2025, when Mullenweg engaged in a public and legal battle with WP Engine, a major WordPress hosting provider. He accused WP Engine of benefiting from WordPress’s open-source model without contributing sufficiently, calling them out for contributing roughly 40 hours per week compared to Automattic’s thousands.
The dispute escalated dramatically: WordPress.org blocked WP Engine’s access to its servers, took over one of its plugins, and Mullenweg offered severance packages to Automattic employees who disagreed with his stance, resulting in over 150 departures.
In January 2025, Automattic announced it would reduce its contributions to the open-source project by approximately 97%—a move later reversed by June after widespread community concern.
A class-action lawsuit was filed against the company over allegations of unfair business practices, and calls for Mullenweg’s resignation circulated online, though he has made clear he has no intention of stepping down.
Throughout these controversies, Mullenweg has articulated a distinctive philosophy of leadership. He has stated that he does not want to pass WordPress or Automattic to a committee, but rather to a successor who can serve as a steward in the same mold—someone who understands that the role is “a lot more like being a mayor than a CEO,” accountable to the community that could, at any time, fork the software and walk away.
This vision reflects the delicate balance Automattic must maintain: as the company that has done more than any other to commercialize and popularize WordPress, its fortunes rise and fall with the open-source project it helps sustain, and its leadership must continually navigate the tensions between commercial ambition and community trust.
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