Mailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.
$35
per month
SparkPost (discontinued)
Score 2.8 out of 10
N/A
SparkPost offered real-time analysis of email delivery and customer engagement as well as personalized email templates. The service has been discontinued.
Even with the list of negatives, Mailgun is still a great solution for how easy it is to work with and how ubiquitous it is to find examples and libraries out there on the internet. The company has great support and are usually quick to address and fix things. I do think they have some room for improvement with the lack of templates and the outdated UI log handling/filtering.
SparkPost is great for automated sending of transactional emails. It appears to be designed for developers—it does not allow the creation and sending of emails from within the SparkPost user interface. If you're building a software system that needs to send emails, SparkPost is a great choice, but it is not a CRM.
Mailgun is used by spammers, and sometimes your assigned mail server will get blacklisted because of other users on it.
If you end up with a mail server that is blacklisted, your mail will go nowhere. And, below the $300 and up pricing tiers, there is no one at Mailgun to help you get this problem resolved. You are just stuck.
In other words, Mailgun is unreliable as a mission-critical service. I would strongly recommend using a service with better processes in place.
The time for the initial setup is very quick, since you can start sending (thus developing) from their sandbox in no time. The actual configuration involves, as usual, some DNS changes that may require time but are well explained and documented. Once everything is set up, there are a lot of monitoring tools that you can use to optimize your lists.
There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.
The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.
MailGun's support staff is both friendly and helpful. They were very instrumental early on with helping out during the setup process by answering questions, providing documentation on best sending practices, detailing information about the advantages of sending from a dedicated IP rather than an IP pool, and helping us to remove ourselves from blacklists.
Would give it a zero if I could. Their customer service used to be incredible; fast response times, really hands-on with their users, and a pretty regular feedback process. They sent me an awesome t-shirt that became part of my go-to climbing gear. But for the past year, their response times went way down, their customer service was less helpful and generally a lot more rude, and they haven't asked for customer input once since their leadership change
Not really a con but I typically choose SendGrid over Mailgun simply because I've been using SendGrid for so long. Overall, SendGrid and Mailgun are both rock solid and very affordable. You could probably flip a coin on which one to use. I would definitely look into SendGrid's Accelerate Program too.
I'd say SparkPost is probably the worst option of the three email API products I've used. It has the worst customer service, the fewest features, and costs significantly more than SendGrid, even though SendGrid lets you integrate all of Twilio's other features into a broader set of communications media. In addition, the API and documentation were easy enough to use and integrate, but the templating system has also caused a lot of headaches for us.
Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.
