Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Mailgun

7.9K
4.2K
+ 1
656
Mailtrap

123
123
+ 1
10
Add tool

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Advice on Mailgun and Mailtrap

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?

See more
Replies (4)
Justini Powell
Lead Developer at Watermark Community Church · | 4 upvotes · 85.7K views
Recommends
on
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

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.

See more
Mika Henriksson
Coder at mhenrixon Consulting · | 4 upvotes · 85.7K views
Recommends
on
PostmarkPostmark

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!

See more
Vit Ulicny
Recommends
on
MandrillMandrill

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.

See more
Aric Fedida
Founder, CTO at ASK Technologies Inc · | 1 upvotes · 85.1K views
Recommends
on
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

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:

  1. 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).
  2. Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
  3. 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.

See more
Decisions about Mailgun and Mailtrap
Migrated
from
MailgunMailgun
to
PostmarkPostmark
at

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.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Mailgun
Pros of Mailtrap
  • 178
    Quick email integration
  • 148
    Free plan
  • 91
    Easy setup
  • 67
    Ridiculously reliable
  • 53
    Extensive apis
  • 30
    Great for parsing inbound emails
  • 25
    Nice UI
  • 22
    Developer-centric
  • 15
    Excellent customer support
  • 12
    Heroku Add-on
  • 4
    Easy to view logs of sent emails
  • 4
    Email mailbox management for developers
  • 2
    Great PHP library
  • 2
    Great documentation
  • 2
    Great customer support, love rackspace
  • 1
    Better than sendgrid not ask too many question
  • 10
    Debug emails in development and production

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Mailgun
Cons of Mailtrap
  • 2
    Cost
  • 2
    No HTTPS tracking links supported
  • 1
    Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun
  • 1
    Cannot create multiple api keys
    Be the first to leave a con

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Mailgun?

    Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.

    What is 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.

    Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

    What companies use Mailgun?
    What companies use Mailtrap?
    See which teams inside your own company are using Mailgun or Mailtrap.
    Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

    Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

    What tools integrate with Mailgun?
    What tools integrate with Mailtrap?

    Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

    Blog Posts

    GitHubPythonReact+42
    49
    40682
    JavaScriptGitHubPython+42
    53
    21787
    Jun 19 2015 at 6:37AM

    ReadMe.io

    JavaScriptGitHubNode.js+25
    12
    2343
    What are some alternatives to Mailgun and Mailtrap?
    Twilio SendGrid
    Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.
    Postmark
    Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.
    Mailchimp
    MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It's like your own personal publishing platform.
    Mailjet
    Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: scalable, agile and flexible. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.
    SparkPost
    SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.
    See all alternatives