StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Email Services
  4. Email Testing
  5. MailCatcher vs Premailer

MailCatcher vs Premailer

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Premailer
Premailer
Stacks19
Followers24
Votes0
GitHub Stars2.4K
Forks364
MailCatcher
MailCatcher
Stacks19
Followers41
Votes0
GitHub Stars6.7K
Forks596

MailCatcher vs Premailer: What are the differences?

What is MailCatcher? An email testing tool. It runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. It catches all mail and stores it for display. It shows HTML, Plain Text and Source version of messages, as applicable.

What is Premailer? Pre-flight for HTML email. For the best HTML e-mail delivery results, CSS should be inline. This is a huge pain and a simple newsletter becomes un-managable very quickly. This script is the solution.

MailCatcher and Premailer belong to "Email Testing" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by MailCatcher are:

  • Runs as a daemon in the background, optionally in foreground. Sendmail-analogue command
  • catchmail, makes using mailcatcher from PHP a lot easier
  • Keyboard navigation between messages

On the other hand, Premailer provides the following key features:

  • CSS styles are converted to inline style attributes
  • Relative paths are converted to absolute paths
  • CSS properties are checked against e-mail client capabilities

MailCatcher and Premailer are both open source tools. MailCatcher with 4.74K GitHub stars and 457 forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Premailer with 2.02K GitHub stars and 336 GitHub forks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Detailed Comparison

Premailer
Premailer
MailCatcher
MailCatcher

For the best HTML e-mail delivery results, CSS should be inline. This is a huge pain and a simple newsletter becomes un-managable very quickly. This script is the solution.

It runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. It catches all mail and stores it for display. It shows HTML, Plain Text and Source version of messages, as applicable.

CSS styles are converted to inline style attributes;Relative paths are converted to absolute paths;CSS properties are checked against e-mail client capabilities;A plain text version is created (optional)
Runs as a daemon in the background, optionally in foreground. Sendmail-analogue command; catchmail, makes using mailcatcher from PHP a lot easier; Keyboard navigation between messages
Statistics
GitHub Stars
2.4K
GitHub Stars
6.7K
GitHub Forks
364
GitHub Forks
596
Stacks
19
Stacks
19
Followers
24
Followers
41
Votes
0
Votes
0
Integrations
No integrations available
Laravel
Laravel
PHP
PHP

What are some alternatives to Premailer, MailCatcher?

Litmus

Litmus

Litmus is a testing service for web and marketing professionals. It allows people to cross-browser test their websites, and test their email newsletters across a range of email clients and spam filters.

Email on Acid

Email on Acid

Email on Acid is the most affordable, self-serve email testing platform in the world. We can help you maximize the success of your email marketing efforts by diagnosing and improving your renderability, deliverability, click-throughs and conversions.

Mailtrap

Mailtrap

We offer one platform that covers all email-related needs in one place: testing, sending, and in-depth tracking to control how email infrastructure works and performs.

Mailsac

Mailsac

Disposable email and fake email capture for QA and development teams

Mailinator

Mailinator

Mailinator is a disposable email service that allows QA departments to test with 1000's of inboxes.

MTN Email Verifier

MTN Email Verifier

MTN Email Verifier is a high-performance tool for ensuring that your email communications reach the right inboxes every time. With the rise of email marketing and automated outreach, maintaining a clean list of deliverable email addresses is crucial. MTN Email Verifier combines syntax validation, domain checks, and server-level SMTP verification to deliver a reliable, real-time solution.

MailHog

MailHog

It is an email testing tool for developers. You can configure your application to use MailHog for SMTP delivery. You can view messages in the web UI, or retrieve them with the JSON API.

Mailosaur

Mailosaur

Automate email and SMS tests, like account verification and password resets, using any language or testing framework using the Mailosaur API. Stop email being delivered to customers using fake SMTP servers.

MailSlurp

MailSlurp

MailSlurp is an end-to-end email testing service. It has a web-app for managing your account and a REST API for sending and receiving emails from randomly generated email addresses.

testmail.app

testmail.app

It automates end-to-end email tests with a powerful GraphQL API and unlimited private email addresses and inboxes, test new user signups, transactional emails, drip campaigns, deliverability, spam scores, etc.

Related Comparisons

HipChat
Slack

HipChat vs Mattermost vs Slack

Litmus
Email on Acid

Email on Acid vs Litmus

InVision
Proto.io

InVision vs Marvel vs Proto.io

Webex
Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams vs Webex

Slack
RocketChat

Mattermost vs RocketChat vs Slack