7 Best Mailgun Alternatives to Level Up Your Email Performance in 2026

We’ll cover both developer-focused transactional email services and marketer-friendly platforms that combine transactional and marketing emails, so you can pick the best Mailgun alternative for your stack and your team.

This article contains a lot of technical terms, so we thought we’d define them all before diving in.

A quick overview of Mailgun

Mailgun (G2 rating: 4.2/5) is an API-first email delivery platform. It’s built to send emails automatically, plugging into your app or website to trigger messages without manual work. Originally created by developers for developers, it’s widely used for transactional emails such as sign-ups, receipts, and password resets. Mailgun also includes tools for deliverability, email validation, and email previews.

Pricing and features

Mailgun offers two separate products with different pricing plans:

• Mailgun Send is the tool we described above. Pricing is volume-based. There’s a 30-day free trial, a free plan with 100 emails per day, and the Basic plan starts at $15/month with 10,000 emails per month included.
• Mailgun Optimize is not the focus of this article, but it’s worth mentioning. It provides deliverability tools, optimization features, validation, and email previews. Mailgun Optimize has a 30-day free trial, no free plan, and the Pilot plan starts at $49/month, with the Starter plan at $99/month after the first free month.

Pros

• Deliverability reliability. Mailgun is known for consistently landing transactional emails in the inbox.
• API performance. Its API and SMTP are fast, stable, and built specifically for automated sending.
• Validation accuracy. The email validation tools catch bad emails quickly and help keep email lists clean.
• Preview tools. Built-in inbox previews and testing make it easier to spot issues before sending.
• Easy scaling. The system handles huge sending volumes without slowing down.

Cons

• Developer focus. Mailgun is designed mainly for developers, so marketers may find it quite tricky to use.
• Split features. Key tools are divided between Mailgun Send and Mailgun Optimize.
• Limited marketing tools. It isn’t built for designing or running email campaigns.

Why look for Mailgun alternatives

Mailgun is a great tool, but it’s mainly built for developers, and it’s not the best fit for marketers who need visual editors or ready-made automations. If you want to access all Mailgun’s features, you often need both Mailgun Send and Mailgun Optimize, which can make things more complicated and also expensive. 

If your team doesn’t have backend support, setting up and maintaining Mailgun might be difficult. 

Lastly, many businesses prefer one platform that can handle both transactional and marketing email in one place.

7 best Mailgun alternatives

Selzy — Best for marketers who want campaigns and transactional in one simple tool

Selzy is originally a marketing-first ESP that now also supports transactional campaigns. With Selzy, you’re getting strong support for email marketing campaigns, segmentation, personalization, A/B testing, and analytics. 

You get a drag-and-drop email template builder (plus HTML and AI features), behavior-based automation workflows, affordable pricing compared to big all-in-one suites, and 24/7 human support on every plan.

On the transactional side, Selzy fully supports API-triggered messaging with a simple setup. Most cases don’t require heavy development, but you may still need a developer to connect the trigger the first time.. You can send transactional emails for a variety of events, including signups, password resets, purchases, shipping, and account events. The delivery itself is fast, and the delivery rate is high (99.8%). You can even build transactional workflows through the same visual automation builder used for marketing campaigns. Dedicated IP options are also available.

Overall, Selzy is a simpler, marketer-friendly alternative to Mailgun. It combines email marketing and transactional sending in a single platform without requiring developer setup.

The price depends on the size of your contact list (plans go up as contacts scale). 

For 100 contacts: free plan up to 1,000 emails per month. 

The next paid tier: Lite starts at $5.25/month (if billed yearly), and includes more features. 

There’s also a free trial that lets you test out all the features before you commit financially.

Brevo — Best for teams that need email, SMS, and CRM in one platform

Brevo is also a marketer-first platform, but it focuses heavily on multichannel features that cover email marketing, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and live chat. It also includes a basic CRM for managing contacts and tracking interactions. There are email tools like an easy drag-and-drop email editor, a visual automation builder available on all plans, and strong tools for segmentation and personalization.

Brevo also supports transactional sending. You can send them via API, SMTP relay, or webhooks, using templates and dynamic data to personalize messages like order confirmations, password resets, and account alerts.

Now, how does Brevo compare to Mailgun? Like Selzy, it’s more accessible and marketer-friendly. Mailgun, by contrast, is infrastructure-first and built primarily for developers, without marketing features.

The great news about Brevo is that all transactional features, including sending email via API, SMTP, or webhooks, are included in all plans, including the free one (up to 300 emails a day). Paid plans start at $10.17month with pricing based on monthly email volume. There’s also a free trial.

Mailjet — Best for marketers who prioritize an easy editor and team collaboration

Mailjet is a marketer-friendly ESP, originally from Europe and now owned by Mailgun. It’s best known for its user-friendly drag-and-drop email builder, and also strong collaboration features that let teams design emails together in real time.

Mailjet has a large template library, dynamic content personalization, automation workflows, real-time campaign analytics, and A/B testing. The editor is the standout feature.

As far as transactional sending is concerned, Mailjet supports transactional sending through both API and SMTP. It’s developer-friendly, with libraries for all major programming languages, and offers webhooks. You can also create a single transactional template and reuse it with dynamic data for each user.

Mailgun owns Mailjet, but they target different users: Mailgun for backend engineers, Mailjet for marketers.

Now, on to pricing. 

A free trial is available. The free plan includes up to 1,000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month, plus API, SMTP, and webhook access. 

Paid plans scale by monthly email volume, the Essentials plan starts at $15.30 per month for 15,000 emails.

Mailchimp — Best for brands that want strong marketing tools with optional transactional add-on

Mailchimp is one of the most well-known email marketing platforms, especially popular with beginners and small businesses. It includes a drag-and-drop email builder, basic CRM features, automations, audience tools, and AI writing. It’s easy to start with, but the interface can feel crowded. Another common complaint is Mailchimp’s strict billing.

Mailchimp Transactional is a separate add-on product for sending one-to-one, API-based emails like receipts and password resets. It supports both API and SMTP sending, transactional SMS. You also get real-time webhooks, inbound email processing, and an event-rules engine.

Compared to Mailgun, Mailchimp is a marketing-first platform with a heavy focus on UI, templates, and campaigns. Its transactional product is a completely separate add-on.

The main Mailchimp platform uses contact-based pricing. 

A free plan exists, but it is very limited. Paid plans start with Essentials at about $13/month for 500 contacts, and Standard at around $20/month. 

Transactional email is sold separately as Mailchimp Transactional. It can only be added if you’re on the Standard plan or higher, and it’s billed by sending blocks, roughly $20 per 25,000 emails, with lower rates when buying larger volumes.

Mailtrap — Best for product teams that need sending plus deep logs and diagnostics

Mailtrap is yet another email marketing platform on our list, but this one is actually developer-focused. It’s built around diagnostics and troubleshooting: detailed logs, message history, spam-score previews, mailbox-provider stats, and category-level analytics (password resets, receipts, confirmations). Aside from this, it also has standard marketing-oriented features like a drag-and-drop builder, templates, scheduling, segmentation, and AI-assisted content.

In terms of transactional sending, what makes Mailtrap special is its focus on analytics, like delivery events, bounces, opens, and provider-level performance. It also supports webhooks and domain authentication (DKIM/SPF/DMARC).

Unlike Mailgun, Mailtrap combines both marketing and transactional sending in one unified system. Its core strength is observability: developers get a far more detailed view of how emails behave after sending.

Let’s talk about Mailtrap’s pricing plans. Mailtrap uses a single combined pricing model (no separate add-ons). 

A free plan includes 4,000 emails/month. 

Paid plans start at $15/month for 10,000 emails, covering marketing and transactional stuff together.

SendGrid — Best for SaaS and apps that need a scalable email API plus marketing suite

Twilio SendGrid is a high-deliverability email platform used by large SaaS, marketplaces and apps. Its marketing features include drag-and-drop and HTML editors, a strong template library, simple trigger-based automations, signup forms, list management, segmentation, built-in testing, сampaign analytics and performance dashboards.

For transactional emails, SendGrid offers both a REST Email API and SMTP relay, so developers can integrate it with almost any app or backend. There are also dynamic templates that allow you to personalize transactional messages without coding and real-time validation. There’s also support for dedicated IP addresses, domain authentication, and ISP monitoring. 

Both SendGrid and Mailgun are strong in API-based transactional sending, but SendGrid is a more comprehensive platform. It combines infrastructure with built-in marketing tools, automations, templates, and forms.

With SendGrid, marketing and transactional features are separated into two pricing plans. 

For email API, there’s a free trial that allows you to send 100 emails a day for 60 days. There is no free plan, and for the cheapest plan, Essentials, prices start at $19.95/month for 50,000–100,000 emails. 

SendGrid’s marketing suite doesn’t have a free plan either. There’s a free trial, however, where you can send up to 100 contacts and 100 emails/day for two months. The Basic plan starts at $15/month for up to 100,000 contacts and 300,000 emails monthly.

Postmark — Best for companies that need fast, ultra-reliable transactional email only

Postmark is different from the other entries on this list. It’s a transactional-only email delivery platform.

Instead of a big marketing builder, Postmark gives you polished, ready-made templates for common transactional emails. You can reuse layouts, keep everything consistent, and make sure your messages display correctly everywhere.

Postmark is known for being very fast. It keeps transactional and marketing traffic completely separate through “Message Streams,” which helps inbox placement. You get detailed logs and analytics, strong domain authentication setup, and an API and SMTP relay. They also publish real-time Time-to-Inbox numbers so you can see actual delivery performance.

How does it compare to Mailgun? Mailgun offers a wider set of tools. Postmark, on the other hand, is excellent for when your main priority is getting transactional emails delivered quickly and reliably.

On to pricing: 

There’s a free trial. 

Paid plans start at $15/month for 10,000 emails, and pricing is based on total email volume (sending as well as receiving), which is different from many platforms that charge only for outbound sends.

How to choose the right platform for you?

There’s no right answer to this question. Think about what your team actually needs. 

If you want a developer-focused email API with maximum control, Mailgun, SendGrid, or Postmark are the safest bets. 

If you need marketing campaigns and transactional sending in one place, tools like Selzy, Brevo, or Mailjet will feel easier and more flexible. 

And if you want deep visibility into logs and performance, Mailtrap stands out.