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A Solid Choice ... Just Waiting for More Features
August 14, 2018

A Solid Choice ... Just Waiting for More Features

Joshua Weaver | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Mailgun

We used Mailgun in a pair of web applications and also in a database-driven software package. It was the sold provider of sending transactional emails for these three pieces of software for our company. Sign up emails and even bulk sends on behalf of our customers were handled by Mailgun.

It takes the pain and hassle out of developing a sending service for your transactional and bulk emails. You can get things going rather quickly with Mailgun.
  • Good API that is easy to implement
  • Good Documentation of the API and its features
  • Fast Development
  • Pricing is straightforward and relatively inexpensive
  • Dashboard UI is easy to use
  • 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)
  • Helped us get integrated outgoing email into our desktop software quickly
  • Helped us get to market faster because we didn't have to overthink email sending with our web apps
I've tried SES. It had spotty deliverability and AWS has fiddly docs and apis. I tried a few others and while some worked well, they had neither the exposure or maturity to make me confident in using them in a production app. Out of all the products that I have tried that offer email sending, I prefer the experience of Mandrill the best. It is however, way too expensive now that it is married to MailChimp and hidden inside that service. Mandrill offers the best filters and logs as well as a great API and library support. The killer feature though is it's Templating options borrowed from MailChimp. Mailgun doesn't have quite the breadth of these features but is just as easy to implement and has decent enough logs. The pricing is more than fair and offers a great free tier range. With some improvement to the UI and the logs and the addition of Templating, Mailgun would be the killer solution. As it is right now, it's just a solid choice. It's just not the "no-brainer" that it could be.
Mandrill, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service)
Even with the list of negatives, Mailgun is still a great solution for how easy it is to work with and how ubiquitous it is to find examples and libraries out there on the internet. The company has great support and are usually quick to address and fix things. I do think they have some room for improvement with the lack of templates and the outdated UI log handling/filtering.

Evaluating Mailgun and Competitors

  • Price
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
Mailgun came with a pretty popular reputation in the community I was developing in.

The documentation and the ease of implementation was the primary factor in choosing it. There are many library and language implementations of the SDK and it's very easy to work with in the Nodejs world. The pricing was also a major factor since they have a generous free tier. Their support has been timely as well.
I wouldn't change anything in my selection because it worked well for our needs. But if I had to make a suggestion to Mailgun it would be to add some templating features like Mandrill offers out of the box. The ability to call up a template stored on their server and merge in variables from the request is very useful.

Using Mailgun

It could be more up-to-date and could offer some extra features that other competitors do like templating and better querying and filtering. As it is right now most things are easy to use but seem rather barebones next to Mandrill. The API is easy to implement thanks to the great documentation which is why I recommend Mailgun so often.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • UI is easy
  • Library support for coding languages
  • API and Documentation
  • Filtering and Querying logs
  • Adding new domains that aren't commonly used like .online (requires email to support since they get flagged)