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Mailgun vs Mailtrap: What are the differences?

Developers describe Mailgun as "The Email Service for Developers". Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly. On the other hand, Mailtrap is detailed as "Send emails from your development and staging environments without spamming real customers". Fake SMTP server for development teams to test, view and share emails sent from the development and staging environments without spamming real customers.

Mailgun and Mailtrap are primarily classified as "Transactional Email" and "Email Testing" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Mailgun are:

  • Optimized Queue
  • Scheduled Delivery
  • MIME Assembly

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

  • All emails in one place
  • Multiple inboxes
  • Shared access

"Quick email integration" is the top reason why over 177 developers like Mailgun, while over 7 developers mention "Debug emails in development and production" as the leading cause for choosing Mailtrap.

reddit, Slack, and Lyft are some of the popular companies that use Mailgun, whereas Mailtrap is used by FAMICITY, The Participation Agency, and SupplyAI. Mailgun has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1490 company stacks & 269 developers stacks; compared to Mailtrap, which is listed in 20 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.

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?

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Replies (4)
Justini Powell
Lead Developer at Watermark Community Church · | 4 upvotes · 78.8K 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.

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Mika Henriksson
Coder at mhenrixon Consulting · | 4 upvotes · 78.8K 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!

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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.

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Aric Fedida
Founder, CTO at ASK Technologies Inc · | 1 upvotes · 78.2K 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.

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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.

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Pros of Mailgun
Pros of Mailtrap
  • 178
    Quick email integration
  • 147
    Free plan
  • 91
    Easy setup
  • 67
    Ridiculously reliable
  • 54
    Extensive apis
  • 29
    Great for parsing inbound emails
  • 25
    Nice UI
  • 23
    Developer-centric
  • 15
    Excellent customer support
  • 12
    Heroku Add-on
  • 4
    Easy to view logs of sent emails
  • 3
    Email mailbox management for developers
  • 2
    Great customer support, love rackspace
  • 2
    Great documentation
  • 1
    Great PHP library
  • 1
    Better than sendgrid not ask too many question
  • 10
    Debug emails in development and production

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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
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    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.
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    What tools integrate with Mailtrap?

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    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