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
ZeroBounce
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
ZeroBounce is an email list validator that removes all invalid email addresses to prevent bounces and preserve the sender's reputation.
$39
one-time fee 2,000 emails
Pricing
Sinch Mailgun
ZeroBounce
Editions & Modules
Foundation
$35
per month
Growth
$80
per month
Scale
$90
per month
Flex
Free
Pay-as-you-Go
$39
one-time fee starting at 2000 credits
ZeroBounce ONE
$99
per month starting with 10000 credits
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Sinch Mailgun
ZeroBounce
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Plans scale to provide additional validations. A discount of ZeroBounce ONE is available for annual billing. Enterprise customers who need to validate more than 1,000,000 email addresses per month should contact the ZeroBounce sales team for a customized quote.
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.
At the outset of my position with my current company, we used a marketing automation system that was known as a swiss army knife: it could do many things, but none of them well. They had no built in functionality for boosting email deliverability. Digging in to find out what we could do to improve our authority, we learned we needed to clean our lists before sending. ZeroBounce does everything we need it to, and at a reasonable price. What more could you want?
Bulk List validation up to 25 IDs per action is useful in some situations, as we don't want to create a CSV file every time, and for this smaller number.
We sometimes use the email Finder option when we can't find an email for a person on any other platform.
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)
Navigating among bulk validation, CSV upload, and single-ID validation is hard, and sometimes finding them or switching between them can be made more user-friendly.
Results: After bulk validation, we receive the results in a Zip file, which is useful sometimes but not every time, as we have to un-zip, and there will be a different CSV file for each result. The final results can be made simple, like email ID in column A, results (valid or Invalid) in column B.
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.
For the large suite of services that they offer their system is pretty easy to understand and navigate. ZeroBonce is also NOT one of those services that is constantly tweaking their UI and making it hard to find tasks that you regularly use. More complex tasks can be more challenging but that's understandable. They also have an extensive restful API that if technical enough allow you to automate some of your most used tasks. They stand behind their product with good documentation as well as high quality customer service.
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.
We have used ZeroBounce for about 18 months and it works flawlessly. We are able to get all of our questions/issues answered immediately. Felt very comfortable with the product immediately - used their web site which walked us through it and were able to get up and running within minutes. I really haven't had any issues that required support.
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 considered AtData since it was recommended by a colleague who has used it in the past. We ultimately ended up going with ZeroBounce based on the cost and documentation/resources available. Email validation tools are probably very similar, but ZeroBounce seemed the simplest for us, and we needed to implement one fast, so activation time was very quick.
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.
