MailCatcher vs MailHog: What are the differences?

Key Differences between MailCatcher and MailHog

1. Installation Process: MailCatcher requires Ruby and a few gem installations, whereas MailHog is written in Go and can be installed as a single binary, making it easier and quicker to set up.

2. Interface Design: MailCatcher has a more simplistic user interface with basic features, whereas MailHog provides a more comprehensive and visually appealing interface, offering advanced features like search, filtering, and JSON API integration.

3. SMTP Support: MailCatcher acts as a full SMTP server, intercepting all outgoing emails, while MailHog acts as a dummy SMTP server, receiving and displaying incoming emails only. This means MailCatcher can catch emails sent through any application, whereas MailHog can only capture those sent to the MailHog server.

4. HTTPS Support: MailCatcher does not support HTTPS out of the box, whereas MailHog has built-in HTTPS support, allowing secure communication between email clients and the server.

5. Email Storage: MailCatcher stores all received emails in memory, which can consume a significant amount of resources if dealing with a large number of emails. On the other hand, MailHog provides various storage options including in-memory, SQLite, or MongoDB, allowing more efficient management of email storage.

6. Integration with External Services: MailCatcher does not have direct integration options with external services like Slack or PagerDuty, whereas MailHog offers integrations with various external services, allowing notifications and alerts to be sent to these platforms when new emails are received.

In summary, while both MailCatcher and MailHog serve the purpose of capturing and displaying emails during development, MailHog offers a more user-friendly interface, HTTPS support, flexible storage options, and integration capabilities with external services, making it a more feature-rich solution compared to MailCatcher.