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Mailgun - To use it or not to?
February 20, 2017

Mailgun - To use it or not to?

Rahul Chaudhary | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Mailgun

My Business Requirement
My web-product helps users sell digital content to their customers. I need emails for various things:
1. Transaction.
2. in-house messaging.
3. Notices.
4. Birthday greetings.
5. Mass email marketing.
6. Letting users know when their wishlist item is on sale.
Mailgun is required to send thousand of emails in all above scenarios.
  • Mailgun offers 10K emails for free per day, for any small or medium business, which is more than enough. Plus if you have more customers, you can send rest of the emails next day. That is just good decision on mailgun's part.
  • It's easy to use and deploy and have a clean website. What more do you want for free?
  • Time to deliver a mail is super-fast, so you are not compromising on anything really.
  • Mailgun as a standalone service is very good. If you compare with other similar services, mailgun would probably win. But if you compare it with AWS solution, since AWS has other services that my architecture is tightly coupled with, I chose the AWS solution over mailgun.
  • The instructions for deployment seemed a bit difficult given that I did not know a thing about sending emails when I started doing this. There should be a "sending emails for dummies" kind of tutorial. But no issues, I did found several tutorials on YouTube.
  • Moreover, I would like them to create an API to "send more beautiful emails". It is not kind of their domain, but I would love them to take some action on this front.
  • I also think they should support "preview" of emails on different devices and mail clients. If they build this, imagine what the devs can do with it. They will have all the tools to design and send emails, all from one place.
  • Sending mails is necessary. Period. Using mailgun delivers what it promises. It had a positive impact on my application.
  • My business was not using emails to generate revenue. It was more of an information basis type of thing. But indirectly delivering emails with 100% success rate is a good ROI.
  • I never had to send more than 10K emails which is within their free tier. So I saved up there. The only cost for me was my time spent understanding email protocols but once I know it, I can use any email service like mailgun easily.
I previously selected mailgun because of a PHP framework called Laravel. Since I was using that framework, and they had ready examples with mailgun and how to set things up, I went with the flow. It was really easy. Later when I started deploying my services, I was introduced to AWS SES which made me choose the other service. Really, it is not about the mailgun service itself (which is pretty good by the way), it is more about keeping your architecture in one place.

Going forward, I would still go with AWS SES as long as I am tied to Amazon.

I also tried MailChimp for a while, but frankly I liked Mailgun better.
Good scenarios
1. If you just want a mail service, go for mailgun.
2. Mailgun has been around for long, so it has support for all languages.
3. If you have to send emails through multiple accounts, they have a pretty good UI to make it easier.
4. Mailgun is a trusted sender, so your emails won't likely end up in junk section.

Bad scenarios
1. If your other architectural components are in other place, like AWS, there is no reason to chose mailgun because you don't want your application to hop out of your VPC just to send emails. Plus being with same provider means using the same API and getting same service support.
2. Price is not competitive. Other services are more or less same. For me other service made more sense, hence I switched easily. There was nothing really compelling for me to stay.