MailerLite is an email marketing platform for small businesses, creators, and ecommerce brands, used to automate the customer journey and grow a customer list. Users can send unlimited emails with every plan. Pricing starts at $10/month. MailerLite enables users to: Grow and engage their audience - Build newsletters, forms, pop-ups, landing pages, and even full websites with a Drag and drop builder that offers total creative control over designs. 150 customizable…
$10
per month
Sinch Mailgun
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Mailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.
$35
per month
Pricing
MailerLite
Sinch Mailgun
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
per month 1 user
Growing
$10
per month 3 users
Advanced
$20
per month Unlimited users
Enterprise
Custom pricing
per month
Foundation
$35
per month
Growth
$80
per month
Scale
$90
per month
Flex
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MailerLite
Sinch Mailgun
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Additional 30% discount available to Non-profit organizations. Up to a 10% for paying yearly.
I didn't have much luck when testing other similar tools and since we tested with free plan, we couldn't commit to something else if we couldn't get basic stuff fixed. That's when we switched to MailerLite, and their support was great and super helpful all the way (during our free plan, especially). Plus, they're super budget-friendly for startups, so I highly recommend.
Mailgun's pay-as-you-go pricing structure is fantastic, especially if you don't need to send that much email. The pricing, including the free tier, is much more generous than what you can get with some pricier providers, like SendGrid. I mainly just use Mailgun as an SMTP server for web services, and the service has been set-up-and-forget, which is great because I never even have to log onto the Mailgun website and do any work. Mailing list support also looks great for rolling-your-own and not relying on more expensive mailing list services.
Offers a user-friendly interface, making it simple to create beautiful forms, group subscribers, and automate emails.
Includes email automation workflows in their free plan - the only provider I know of that doesn't charge you after one month or hit you with "transaction fees".
Excellent video tutorial library so you can learn email marketing as a beginner without feeling overwhelmed.
EVERYONE should be allowed to at least use the AI bot chat feature. This doesn't take a person and is such basic customer service that it should be offered at all levels.
It would be nice if MailerLite worked better with AddEvent icons
When emailing support it took days to get a response (after an agent escalated the issue). Some concerns are more urgent and email support shouldn't mean bad support.
No built-in templating features (This was a bit sad after coming from Mandrill which excelled at this)
Dashboard UI (although easy to use) is a bit dated in appearance
Logs are cumbersome compared to Mandrill
Setting up TLD (top level domain) names (things like .online or .church) that are not common require an email to tech support (this is annoying)
Sometimes can be slow in delivery
Shared IP addresses can be SPAM filtered or delayed (requires an email to support to have a new one assigned - Note: this can be mitigated by buying a dedicated one for a monthly fee)
Mailerlite is awesome and it does everything I need and then some. They're always innovating and adding new features, and their team is flippin' amazing. Can't see myself ever switching. They may not have everything, but looking at how well their team works, they'll get there for sure and I'm willing to wait.
I find it very easy to use, intuitive with a clean interface and drag and drop functionality where that adds value. It's quite configurable for our brand and the template and duplication options are very useful as we reuse a lot of content.
The time for the initial setup is very quick, since you can start sending (thus developing) from their sandbox in no time. The actual configuration involves, as usual, some DNS changes that may require time but are well explained and documented. Once everything is set up, there are a lot of monitoring tools that you can use to optimize your lists.
There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.
The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.
Whenever I contact Support, either via email or through online chat, I always get a speedy response that gives me the answer I need. The AI Agent on the online chat is excellent and has helped me so much on numerous occasions.
You can't seem to get ANY support until you shell out hundreds of dollars per month. I even did this when we could not deliver mail with Mailgun, and the response was slow and inadequate. Nor would they refund my money. I'll never be a customer of Mailgun again.
MailerLite has similar features to the tools mentioned above. The main advantage is that it is very complete in its free version. This is ideal for those who are starting out and want to try a complete email marketing platform.
To be honest, the tools are quite similar and again I dont recommend using them as a standalone products, but they power the work we do via CRMs and our marketing campaigns. Mailgun integrates slightly better which it is why it is the preferred choice for our agency, as it integrations options seem to be better
Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.
Gives us the ability to track the popularity of content in our email as well as who has read the content.
The customizable layout gives us the opportunity to be creative and have our culture shine through our company communication.
The ability to see who has un-subscribed helps our HR department to see who isn't receiving important company information so we can ask them to re-subscribe.
Helps our company to be more transparent and communicate more effectively.
By not investing in our mail server, we have saved huge amount of money and time. For configuration and installation of an email server on Linux-based server, we would have to hire a network administrator.
If email delivery is an issue in a hosting provider, another solution is to switch the hosting. Fortunately with Mailgun, we didn't need to try different hosts and experiment which one works best for emails. We can stick to our existing web hosting provider and would not need to change it just for the sake of improving email deliverability.
The pricing of Mailgun is very cheap and straightforward. First 10K emails are free every month and that's a big advantage for our organization because our volume of emails is rarely more than 10K per month.
