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
Mailtrap
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Mailtrap is a modern email platform for developer and product teams that send emails at scale. It is designed to send emails with a focus on high deliverability rates, fast delivery, and protecting sender reputation. The service includes 24/7 technical support. The benefits of using Mailtrap, as described by the vendor include: High deliverability & fast delivery: 99.99% platform uptime, dedicated IPs, auto warm-up, and throttling. Multi-tenant accounts…
$15
per month
Pricing
Sinch Mailgun
Mailtrap
Editions & Modules
Foundation
$35
per month
Growth
$80
per month
Scale
$90
per month
Flex
Free
Email API/SMTP Basic
$15
per month
Email Sandbox Basic
$17
per month
Email Sandbox Team
$42
per month
Email API/SMTP Business
$85
per month
Email Sandbox Business
$123
per month
Email Sandbox Enterprise
$498
per month
Email API/MTP Enterprise
$750
per month
Email API/SMTP Custom
By request
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Sinch Mailgun
Mailtrap
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Each tier's price mentioned in the table is its starting point - they vary based on the amount of emails per month. Also, Email Sandbox has an annual pricing option.
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 I do think they have some room for improvement with the lack of templates and the outdated UI log handling/filtering.
As I said, Mailtrap is particularly well-suited for software development teams working on email functionality within their applications. All the automation and intuitive environment helped us create a workflow that's almost set and forget.
Flexible for engineering teams. Mailtrap works well in environments where multiple developers are responsible for email functionality.
We're on the Enterprise plan which allows for customizations for our needs. For example, we had a request not to record email bodies for privacy reasons, and Mailtrap enabled that pretty fast.
The user experience is awesome. The platform is easy to use and the support team responds fast and helps us out with any questions.
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.
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.
sendgrid is powerful for email delivery, but Mailtrap's dedicated testing environment and focus on development teams made it the clear choice for our needs. Its ability to simulate various email scenarios without affecting real users is unmatched. Plus, their sending is reliable, regardless of your volume.
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.
