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  1. Stackups
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  3. Email Services
  4. Transactional Email
  5. Mailgun vs OneSignal

Mailgun vs OneSignal

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Mailgun
Mailgun
Stacks7.8K
Followers4.2K
Votes656
OneSignal
OneSignal
Stacks354
Followers488
Votes127
GitHub Stars0
Forks0

Mailgun vs OneSignal: What are the differences?

Mailgun and OneSignal are two popular communication platforms that provide services for sending emails and push notifications, respectively. While both platforms offer similar functionalities, there are key differences that set them apart.

1. Target Audience: Mailgun is primarily designed for developers and businesses that require a flexible and powerful email infrastructure. It provides features like email validations, email analytics, and SMTP relay services, making it suitable for technical users. On the other hand, OneSignal is focused on app developers and marketers who want to engage with their app users through push notifications. It offers features like audience segmentation, A/B testing, and in-app messaging, making it ideal for targeting specific user groups.

2. Communication Channels: Mailgun is solely focused on email communication and provides robust features for managing and sending email messages. It supports features like email tracking, personalization, and custom email templates. OneSignal, on the other hand, specializes in push notifications and supports various platforms, including web, mobile apps, and desktop browsers. It allows developers to send personalized push notifications to their users, assisting in timely app engagement.

3. Integration Capabilities: Mailgun offers integrations with popular development frameworks and content management systems, making it easier for developers to incorporate email functionality into their applications. It provides plugins for platforms like WordPress, Ruby on Rails, and PHP, allowing seamless integration. OneSignal also provides a wide range of integrations but is more focused on mobile app development frameworks like React Native, Cordova, and Xamarin. It offers SDKs and plugins for these frameworks, simplifying the integration process.

4. Pricing Model: Mailgun follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are charged based on the number of emails sent and received. The pricing plans include different levels of email volume and additional features like dedicated IP addresses. OneSignal, on the other hand, offers a freemium model with a free plan that includes basic features and limited messaging volume. It also provides paid plans with higher messaging volumes and additional advanced features like user segmentation and automation.

5. Automation and Workflow: Mailgun provides features like event webhooks and email parsing that allow developers to automate email workflows and integrate with other systems. It supports advanced automation features like behavioral triggers, drip campaigns, and transactional email templates. In contrast, OneSignal focuses on automation through push notifications and provides features like triggers based on user actions, scheduled notifications, and automated responses. It enables developers to create personalized and timely notifications for their app users.

6. Support and Documentation: Mailgun offers comprehensive documentation, guides, and a developer community that assists users in understanding and using its features effectively. It provides 24/7 live support via email, with priority support options available for higher-tier plans. OneSignal also provides detailed documentation and guides for its functionality, along with an active developer community. It offers support through email and a help center, with priority support available for paid plans.

In Summary, Mailgun is designed for developers and businesses that require powerful email infrastructure, while OneSignal specializes in push notifications for app developers and marketers. Mailgun focuses solely on email communication with extensive integrations, while OneSignal supports push notifications on various platforms. Mailgun follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, while OneSignal offers a freemium model. Mailgun provides advanced automation for email workflows, while OneSignal focuses on automation through push notifications. Both platforms offer comprehensive support and documentation.

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Advice on Mailgun, OneSignal

Klaus
Klaus

Jan 22, 2020

Needs advice

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?

101k views101k
Comments
Ben
Ben

May 18, 2020

Decided

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.

62.8k views62.8k
Comments
RichardsFood
RichardsFood

Sep 19, 2019

Needs advice

The problem I have is we are using mailchimp and not happy. We want to switch to mailster and are curious the easiest and best way to send emails with mailster.

The most important factors for me are ease of use, tracking.

I have only had experience with mailchimp, constant concact and streamsend. So ease of use is important.

30k views30k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Mailgun
Mailgun
OneSignal
OneSignal

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

OneSignal is a high volume push notification service for websites and mobile applications. OneSignal supports all major native and mobile platforms by providing dedicated SDKs for each platform, a RESTful server API, and a dashboard.

Optimized Queue;Scheduled Delivery;MIME Assembly;Test Mode;ESP Feedback Handling;Unsubscribe Handling;Spam Complaint Handling;Bounce Handling;HTTP POST to your App;Routing w RegEx Filters;Parsing to UTF-8;Signature Separation;Quoted Reply Separation;Wildcard Domains;Spam Filtering;Live Logs;Message Tagging;Event Webhooks;Open/Click Tracking;Unsubscribe Tracking;Complaint Tracking;Bounce Tracking;Mailing Lists;Template Variables;A/B Testing;Link Performance;Geo Performance;Recipient Level Data;SMTP or HTTP API;Clean IP Addresses;SPF Authentication;DKIM Authentication;SSL/TLS;Scales on Demand
Multiplatform notifications;Web Push Support; Safari Push Notifications;Localized message support;A/B testing;Real time analytics;Segmentation targeting;Automated marketing tools
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
0
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
0
Stacks
7.8K
Stacks
354
Followers
4.2K
Followers
488
Votes
656
Votes
127
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 178
    Quick email integration
  • 148
    Free plan
  • 91
    Easy setup
  • 67
    Ridiculously reliable
  • 53
    Extensive apis
Cons
  • 2
    No HTTPS tracking links supported
  • 2
    Cost
  • 1
    Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun
  • 1
    Cannot create multiple api keys
Pros
  • 28
    Free of cost
  • 22
    More parametrable
  • 17
    Simple and Easy To Use. Well Documented :)
  • 13
    Device to device
  • 12
    Simple
Integrations
AppFog
AppFog
Magento
Magento
Ghost
Ghost
Heroku
Heroku
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Sendicate
Sendicate
WordPress
WordPress
cloudControl
cloudControl
Parse
Parse
sendwithus
sendwithus
Unity
Unity
Xamarin
Xamarin
Apache Cordova
Apache Cordova
WordPress
WordPress
Zapier
Zapier
Segment
Segment
Google Analytics
Google Analytics
Android SDK
Android SDK
iOS
iOS

What are some alternatives to Mailgun, OneSignal?

Mandrill

Mandrill

Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

Twilio SendGrid

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.

Amazon SES

Amazon SES

Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2.

sendwithus

sendwithus

Send email from your app with a simple API call, Sendwithus manages the rest. Templates, testing, data management, segments, and analytics are all accessible through a friendly dashboard.

Postmark

Postmark

Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.

Urban Airship

Urban Airship

We’ve built the smartest, most aware, precise, easy-to-use, scalable, secure and powerful push messaging platform on the planet. Our Push messaging platform leverages all that is unique about mobile as a channel, and that lights the spark to create meaningful and valuable mobile experiences. We help put your app in front of your users at the right time, and in the right place to drive usage and brand engagement.

Google Cloud Messaging

Google Cloud Messaging

Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a free service that enables developers to send messages between servers and client apps. This includes downstream messages from servers to client apps, and upstream messages from client apps to servers.

Amazon SNS

Amazon SNS

Amazon Simple Notification Service makes it simple and cost-effective to push to mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire, and internet connected smart devices, as well as pushing to other distributed services. Besides pushing cloud notifications directly to mobile devices, SNS can also deliver notifications by SMS text message or email, to Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, or to any HTTP endpoint.

Firebase Cloud Messaging

Firebase Cloud Messaging

It is a cross-platform messaging solution that lets you reliably deliver messages at no cost. You can notify a client app that new email or other data is available to sync. You can send notification messages to drive user re-engagement and retention. For use cases such as instant messaging, a message can transfer a payload of up to 4KB to a client app.

Mailjet

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.

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