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
Postmark
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Postmark is a fast, reliable email delivery service designed for transactional emails. It ensures high deliverability, scalability, and real-time email tracking, providing developers with the tools to send critical notifications securely and efficiently.
$15
per month
SMTP2GO
Score 10.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
SMTP2GO is a dedicated outbound email server SMTP2GO is a New Zealand based SMTP/Email API provider with support staff and servers based across the globe. It automatically connects to the closest server to ensure speedy and efficient delivery. The SMTP2GO support team offers 24/7 assistance in multiple languages to make setup simple. We offer support via ticket, chat and phone. GDPR? Inbound servers and data centres in the EU to make sure sending is…
I used Mailgun first, and after they weren't able to fix my problems or offer any support I switched to Postmark with lower bounce rates, higher delivery rates with more detailed reporting. Setup is more of a to-do but it's well worth it once you start seeing your bounce rate …
We chose Mailgun over sendgrid and Postmark because we really like their API. We have stuck with them because they have never given us any reason to switch. Their reliability is superb and their API remains excellent. sendgrid and Postmark are both good in their own rites, …
They have a great free tier for up to some amount of emails a month. Looks attractive when you are a new startup, but once you have customers and they go down, not so much.
We felt Postmark's focus on transactional emails and their use of shared domain reputation made them stand out. We also like their user interface and ability to have many virtual email servers. Pricing was competitive and after a trial we saw a big increase in deliverability …
In terms of UI and deliverability, Postmark really blows other ESPs out of the water. We've seen a huge improvement in delivery rates, especially for Outlook/Live/Hotmail email addresses.
SMTP2GO
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose SMTP2GO
Our goal was to find a product what fit those needs:
Can be use with SMTP protocol to relay emails from our webhosting environment
Have an API to manage the account and offer the ability to also send emails
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose SMTP2GO
Some of the other services are really good but with the ease of setting up sub-accounts, the success in not having bounced emails, or strange receiving issues, the platform being so easy to use, and great support when you need it. They just don't compare.
SMTP2GO was easy to use and set up without ever having to go back and figure out why emails weren't being delivered. When compared to other solutions that had all the features I needed (multiple authentication methods, DKIM setup, reasonable logging), SMTP2GO's pricing was a …
For our specific business needs, SMTP2GO was the choice for us. Having evaluated other services listed here (Mailgun, Amazon SES, JangoSMTP, etc.) we found our unique needs were all addressed with SMTP2GO's service. That said, the other listed solutions are each great and may …
Verified User
Technician
Chose SMTP2GO
SMTP is basic, and basic is all that we needed. Just a simple SMTP relay with DKIM, DMARC, and SPF so we can abide by best email practices this product was exactly what we wanted.
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.
If email deliverability is important, then Postmark is king. I've used all sorts of providers, with dedicated IPs and without. Postmark has always had the best deliverability and has resulted in the least amount of customer service time wasted dealing with users who simply did not receive an important email from us. It is pricier than other options, but it's well worth it if deliverability is at all important to you.
It's great for any application that you need to track email receipt and recipient interaction, or with devices/programs that don't fare well with Exchange based email services. Don't try to set SMTP2GO as your outbound email server if you're using O365, that just isn't a possibility (not that I've looked into that setup).
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)
Might be nice to add a monthly good looking PDF report for subaccount users that can be branded and sent directly to the subaccount contact. A 'client facing' report that we can use to show our customers the email usage history.
Reliability in email delivery is what counts the most. SMTP2GO is undeniably a winner in this category. The price is reasonable, therefore the RoI is excellent.
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.
The only thing that confused me initially was that if you don't put a specific sender email into the Wordpress plugin settings (I use Postmark exclusively with Wordpress site), it won't send emails. I thought that having selected the option to send via any @domain.com email, I wouldn't need to fill out a specific email to send from, but that isn't the case. I sorted that out quickly with support.
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.
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.
Postmark has been an excellent solution for our business needs. We have been with them for years and have no intention of changing providers anytime soon. Support was excellent as we were getting started and their API documentation made implementation quick and easy
When I first contacted SMTP2GO while searching for a solution, they were extremely helpful and attentive. I think it only took two email messages to answer all my questions and make a decision. I don't think I've ever needed any support to implement and operate the several solutions I currently use with the SMTP2GO service. It just works intuitively and flawlessly.
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
We felt Postmark's focus on transactional emails and their use of shared domain reputation made them stand out. We also like their user interface and ability to have many virtual email servers. Pricing was competitive and after a trial we saw a big increase in deliverability rates. Therefore it was an easy decision to use Postmark over other providers.
It has been so long since I did my comparison with other products that no comparison would be valid today. It has worked so well at a price point that is so acceptable that I don't feel an urge to do the evaluation again.
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.
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.
Allowed us to use the same SMTP information across the board for all customers instead of having them split between several accounts.
More cost efficient than paying for several different email accounts.
Created an additional layer of great customer service for us since SMTP information is able to be preprogrammed into the equipment before ever leaving our facility.