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Mailgun vs Mailtrap: What are the differences?
Introduction:
Mailgun and Mailtrap are two popular email testing and development tools. While both services cater to the needs of developers and provide email testing functionalities, there are specific differences between the two that distinguish them from each other.
1. Test Environment: Mailgun is primarily designed as a transactional email service provider, offering a full-featured production environment for sending transactional emails. On the other hand, Mailtrap focuses solely on creating a testing environment for email debugging and testing purposes.
2. Real Emails vs Test Emails: With Mailgun, you can send real emails to actual recipients, allowing you to fully test and integrate email functionality into your application. Mailtrap, however, provides a simulated environment where emails are not delivered to real recipients but are trapped within the system for debugging and testing purposes.
3. Email Storage: Mailgun retains emails only for a limited time, typically a few days, in its logs, after which they are no longer accessible. In contrast, Mailtrap offers long-term email storage, allowing you to access and retrieve any email at any point in the future for debugging or reference purposes.
4. Developer-Friendly API: Mailgun offers a comprehensive RESTful API that allows developers to programmatically send, receive, and manage emails. This API integration allows for seamless integration into existing applications and systems. Mailtrap also provides an API for fetching emails and managing inboxes programmatically, catering to developers' needs.
5. Pricing Model: Mailgun utilizes a pricing model based on the number of emails sent per month, with different tiers for various needs. In contrast, Mailtrap offers a freemium model, allowing a limited number of emails and inboxes for free, and providing additional features and volumes at a cost.
6. Deliverability: Due to its focus on real email delivery, Mailgun is designed to ensure high email deliverability rates, with advanced features such as dedicated IP addresses and deliverability optimization tools. Mailtrap, being a testing environment, does not prioritize deliverability to real recipients and, therefore, may not provide the same level of deliverability as Mailgun.
In summary, Mailgun provides a production-ready environment for sending transactional emails, with a developer-friendly API and high deliverability rates. Mailtrap, on the other hand, offers a testing environment with long-term email storage, a freemium pricing model, and simulated email delivery for debugging and testing purposes.
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 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
Pros of Mailtrap
- Debug emails in development and production10
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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