About Mailgun
Mailgun is an email service built for developers. It provides APIs and SMTP services for sending, receiving and tracking transactional email from an application. It is now part of the Sinch Email family along with related products such as Mailjet and Email on Acid.
The offering is grouped into four areas: Send, with an email API and SMTP relay; Optimize, with tools and services to improve deliverability; Validate, which cleans email lists through an API or bulk upload; and Inspect, which previews and tests emails before campaigns go out. Other listed features are an email template builder, inbox placement testing, reputation services and blocklist monitoring.
Mailgun is a proprietary, hosted service with documentation, SDKs, a status page and a pricing page. An enterprise option targets high-volume senders, and solution pages cover martech, fintech and healthcare.
Key features
- Email API for sending and receiving messages
- SMTP relay service
- Delivery tracking
- Email address and list validation
- Deliverability optimization tools
- Template builder and inbox testing
Good fit for
- →Sending transactional email from a web app
- →Cleaning an email list before a campaign
- →Monitoring deliverability and blocklists
- Tags
- email-api
- transactional-email
- smtp
- deliverability
- email-validation
- developer-tools
- saas
Mailgun: questions and answers
- What is Mailgun used for?
- Mailgun is an email API service for developers to send, receive and track transactional email, with deliverability and validation tools. It is a good fit for sending transactional email from a web app, cleaning an email list before a campaign, and monitoring deliverability and blocklists.
- Is Mailgun free?
- Yes. Mailgun has a free plan, and paid plans start at $15 per month. A free trial is also available.
- Is Mailgun open source?
- No. Mailgun is proprietary (closed-source) software and can't be self-hosted. Open-source alternatives to Mailgun include Postal, Plunk and BillionMail.
- What are some alternatives to Mailgun?
- Mailgun competes with SendGrid, Postmark and Amazon SES. For open-source options, see Enlisted's ranked list of open-source Mailgun alternatives.
Open-source alternatives to Mailgun
See all
Postal
Email Marketing
📮 A fully featured open source mail delivery platform for incoming & outgoing e-mail
MITvs SendGrid★ 17k
Plunk
Email Marketing
The Open-Source Email Platform
AGPL-3.0vs SendGrid★ 5.5k
BillionMail
Email Marketing
BillionMail gives you open-source MailServer, NewsLetter, Email Marketing — fully self-ho
AGPL-3.0vs Mailchimp★ 16k
Notifuse
Email Marketing
Open-source, self-hosted newsletter, email marketing and transactional email platform. Vis
OSSvs Mailchimp★ 2.2k
Listmonk
Email Marketing
High performance, self-hosted, newsletter and mailing list manager with a modern dashboard
AGPL-3.0vs Mailchimp★ 24k
Dittofeed
Email Marketing
Open-source customer engagement. Automate transactional and marketing messages across emai
MITvs Customer.io★ 3k
SaaS alternatives to Mailgun
See all
SendGrid
Email Marketing
Cloud email delivery API for transactional and marketing messages, from Twilio
SaaS
Postmark
Email Marketing
Transactional email API and SMTP service for application email
SaaS
Amazon SES
Email Marketing
AWS service for sending transactional and bulk email at per-message pricing
SaaS
Mailjet
Email Marketing
Email marketing and transactional email API service
SaaS
Resend
Email Marketing
Developer-focused email API with React Email templates
SaaS
MailerSend
Email Marketing
Transactional email and SMS API from the MailerLite team
SaaS

