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Gmail vs Mailgun: What are the differences?
Key Differences Between Gmail and Mailgun
Gmail and Mailgun are both email service providers, but they have some key differences. Here are six specific differences between the two:
Email Management: Gmail is primarily designed for personal email management, providing features like labels, filters, and multiple inboxes to help individuals organize their emails effectively. On the other hand, Mailgun is a transactional email service that provides APIs for developers to send and receive bulk emails programmatically.
Email Sending Limit: Gmail has a daily sending limit of 500 recipients for regular accounts, whereas Mailgun allows sending up to 10,000 emails per month in their free tier. Additionally, Mailgun offers higher sending limits and customizable plans for users with higher email volume requirements.
Email Developer Tools: Mailgun offers a range of developer-focused features, including APIs, webhooks, and comprehensive email analytics. It allows easy integration with other systems and applications, making it ideal for developers who need to automate email sending and monitor delivery.
Email Deliverability: While Gmail ensures high deliverability rates for personal emails, Mailgun is specifically designed for transactional emails, such as order confirmations or password resets. Mailgun has robust systems in place to help ensure that transactional emails reach recipients' inboxes reliably, including advanced bounce management and real-time tracking.
Email Customization: Gmail offers limited customization options for the appearance of emails, allowing only basic formatting and templates. In contrast, Mailgun provides extensive customization capabilities, allowing users to personalize and tailor the look and feel of their transactional emails with HTML, CSS, and variables.
Email Reputation and Compliance: Gmail has strict policies and filters to prevent spam and maintain a good sending reputation. It actively detects and blocks suspicious or potentially harmful emails. Mailgun also implements anti-spam measures but requires users to manage their email reputation and compliance practices to ensure successful email delivery.
In summary, Gmail is a user-friendly email platform focused on personal email management, while Mailgun is a transactional email service geared towards developers, offering higher sending limits, customization options, and advanced email delivery features.
For transactional emails, notifications, reminders, etc, I want to make it so writers/designers can set up the emails and maintain them, and then dynamically insert fields, that I then replace when actually sending the mail from code.
I think the ability to use a basic layout template across individual email templates would make things a lot easier (think header, footer, standard typography, etc).
What is best for this? Why would you prefer Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill or something else?
The only transactional email service that I've been able to stomach is Postmark! It is by far the easiest (and quickest to get feedback from) service that I have come across. While drowning in attempts to debug Mandril, Mailgun and others I get quick feedback from Postmark in what I need to do.
Postmark for the win!
If you need your emails to be sent in a time-sensitive manner, I'd recommend SendGrid. We were using Mailgun and the lag because they aren't "transactional" in nature caused issues for us. SendGrid also has the ability to do dynamic templates and bulk send from their API. I don't know that they have the shared layout ability you mentioned, though.
We are using more extensively Mandrill.
It is a ok tool, which gives you the power for emailing with nice set of features.
The templates editing and management is a bit tricky, but this is mostly related to email templates in general, which are hard to create and maintain.
I do not think you can share the parts of the templates. You can have your predefined templates with possibility to insert dynamic content.
They provide a limited possibility to preview and test your templates.
The template editor is text only. For the better editors checkout http://topol.io or https://mosaico.io
Unfortunately, I do not have experience with the other tools and possibilities to manage templates.
At this stage, all of the tools you mentioned do email delivery pretty well. They all support email templates as well. Here are some considerations:
- Twilio owns SendGrid. If you're an existing Twilio customer, in my opinion that's a good reason to use SendGrid over the other solutions. The APIs are solid, and Twilio has excellent developer tools that allow you to create interesting automations (which is important for scaling).
- Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
- Mailgun is a tool on its own. Like the other two, it supports mail templates and is built to be controlled almost exclusively via APIs.
SendGrid and Mandrill have pretty nice WYSIWIG template editors as part of their platform. Not so sure about Mailgun.
So for me the considerations would be: 1. How easy is it for you to integrate with their API? How complete is their API in terms of your own specific needs? 2. Prices: Which one works best for my budget? 3. Am I OK with editing the templates elsewhere (or even by hand), and then pasting the code into Mailgun? Or do I want the comfort of Mandrill or Sendgrid with their WYSIWYG editors?
Personally I'd go with Twilio, simply because it's such a massive ecosystem they are less likely to go bankrupt, and their APIs are rock solid.
While building our authentication system, we originally picked Mailgun. However, emails took minutes to arrive and some of them didn't get delivered - or got delivered to spam.
We started looking for a new provider, and settled on Postmark. We love that they track time-to-inbox, it makes me feel they really care about going above and beyond to provide a good service.
Pros of Gmail
- Its free21
- User-friendly7
- Nice UI2
- Snooze2
Pros of Mailgun
- Quick email integration178
- Free plan148
- Easy setup91
- Ridiculously reliable67
- Extensive apis53
- Great for parsing inbound emails30
- Nice UI25
- Developer-centric22
- Excellent customer support15
- Heroku Add-on12
- Easy to view logs of sent emails4
- Email mailbox management for developers4
- Great PHP library2
- Great documentation2
- Great customer support, love rackspace2
- Better than sendgrid not ask too many question1
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Cons of Gmail
- Can't unsend, add open trackers or read recipients4
Cons of Mailgun
- Cost2
- No HTTPS tracking links supported2
- Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun1
- Cannot create multiple api keys1
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