Overview

MailKit

Stacks30

Followers16

Votes0

GitHub Stars6.6K

Forks859

PHPMailer

Stacks51

Followers78

Votes6

GitHub Stars21.9K

Forks9.9K

MailKit vs PHPMailer: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between MailKit and PHPMailer, two popular email sending libraries. While both libraries serve the purpose of sending emails, they have some notable differences that set them apart from each other. Below are the key differences between MailKit and PHPMailer.

Protocols Support: MailKit is primarily designed for .NET applications and provides support for various email protocols like SMTP, POP3, IMAP, and Exchange Web Services. On the other hand, PHPMailer is specifically designed for PHP applications and primarily focuses on the SMTP protocol for sending emails.
Complexity: MailKit is a comprehensive and feature-rich library that provides a wide range of functionalities for email manipulation, such as message creation, sending, receipt handling, etc. It offers a more complex API, which may require a steeper learning curve for developers. In contrast, PHPMailer is relatively simpler and offers a more straightforward API, making it relatively easier and quicker to get started with sending emails.
Platform Compatibility: MailKit is primarily designed for .NET applications and is compatible with various platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux. PHPMailer, on the other hand, is specifically designed for PHP applications and is compatible with all major PHP platforms, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Dependency Management: MailKit requires the use of the NuGet package manager for managing its dependencies. This means that additional steps need to be taken to install and manage the required dependencies. PHPMailer, on the other hand, can be easily managed using Composer, a dependency management tool for PHP.
Code Examples and Community Support: PHPMailer has been around for a longer time and has a larger userbase, resulting in a wealth of code examples, tutorials, and community support. This makes it easier for developers to find resources and get help when using PHPMailer. MailKit, being relatively newer, may have a smaller community and fewer readily available resources.
Language Compatibility: MailKit is primarily used with .NET languages like C#, VB.NET, etc. It leverages the features and functionalities provided by .NET framework. PHPMailer, on the other hand, is specifically designed for PHP and can be used with any PHP version, making it more versatile in terms of language compatibility.

In summary, MailKit and PHPMailer differ in terms of the protocols they support, complexity, platform compatibility, dependency management, available resources and community support, and language compatibility. Developers should consider these differences when choosing between the two libraries based on their specific requirements and familiarity with the respective languages and platforms.

Detailed Comparison

MailKit	PHPMailer
It is a cross-platform mail client library built on top of MimeKit. The main goal of this project is to provide the .NET world with robust, fully featured and RFC-compliant SMTP, POP3, and IMAP client implementations.	A full-featured email creation and transfer class for PHP. It is a class library for PHP that provides a collection of functions to build and send email messages. PHPMailer supports several ways of sending email: mail() , Sendmail, qmail & direct to SMTP servers.
SASL Authentication; Supports S/MIME v3.2; Supports OpenPGP; Supports DKIM-Signatures; Supports ARC signatures; All API's that might block allow canellation via CancellationToken; All API's that perform I/O have async variants; Client-side sorting and threading of messages; Supports .NET 4.5, .NETStandard 1.3, .NETStandard 1.6, .NETStandard 2.0, Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.iOS, Windows Phone 8.1, and more	Integrated SMTP support - send without a local mail server; Send emails with multiple To, CC, BCC and Reply-to addresses; Multipart/alternative emails for mail clients that do not read HTML email; Add attachments, including inline; Support for UTF-8 content and 8bit, base64, binary, and quoted-printable encodings; SMTP authentication with LOGIN, PLAIN, CRAM-MD5 and XOAUTH2 mechanisms over SSL and SMTP+STARTTLS transports; Validates email addresses automatically
Statistics
GitHub Stars 6.6K	GitHub Stars 21.9K
GitHub Forks 859	GitHub Forks 9.9K
Stacks 30	Stacks 51
Followers 16	Followers 78
Votes 0	Votes 6
Pros & Cons
No community feedback yet	Pros 2 Widely used 2 Integrations for PHP based platforms 2 Easy configuration
Integrations
.NET Xamarin Visual Studio	WordPress Drupal SugarCRM PHP Joomla! Yii

What are some alternatives to MailKit, PHPMailer?

mailparser.io

mailparser.io is a web-based email processing software which allows you to pull any kind of data from incoming e-mails based on custom parsing rules. The parsed data can be sent to any API with webhooks.

Context.IO

As soon as a mailbox is connected, we create a metadata index of its content starting from the most recent emails which become available from the API within seconds. Context.IO takes care of synching email data for your app so you don't have to build, scale and maintain this infrastructure yourself. Focus on what's unique to your business, we'll manage the technical details of integrating with arcane email server protocols.

EmailJS

It allows sending email directly from Javascript, with no backend development. The developers create one or more email templates (dynamic content supported) and then trigger an email using our Javascript SDK, specifying the template, and the dynamic parameters for rendering the email.

Mailcheap

It is an API-first email hosting service with a user-friendly interface. It provides affordable scalability for small & large businesses using dedicated email servers without any per-user/per-domain limits. Furthermore, the powerful API enables you to meet your changing business requirements with ease.

AwardWallet Email Parsing API

It can parse emails which contain travel reservations and return those reservations in a structured format (JSON). We can extract travel itineraries from virtually any travel provider. We support thousands of email formats and we have a dedicated team of developers who constantly work on improving the API by adding new parsers to support new email formats.