Campaign Monitor vs Mailgun
Trying to choose between Campaign Monitor vs Mailgun as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
- 4.6 TrustPilot
- 4.6 Capterra
- 4.1 G2
Average 4.4 / 5
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is a global technology company that provides an email marketing platform that’s easy to use yet extremely powerful. It powers media moguls, tech giants, nonprofits, and other industries.
Pricing
From $9 to $989 a month depending on the tariff and the contact list size
Key features
- No-code email editor
- Automated sequence builder
- List management and segmentation
- Personalization
- Analytics
- A/B testing
Support
Online support with limited working hours, the Help center on the website, video tutorials, courses
- 4.2 TrustPilot
- 4.3 Capterra
- 4.3 G2
Average 4.3 / 5
Mailgun
An email marketing platform equipped with dedicated delivery and validation tools. Features include transactional emails, email APIs, and SMTP relays.
Pricing
Starts at $35 a month for 50,000 emails/month
Key features
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Personalization
- Analytics
- Email validations
- Transactional emails
- Integrations with various services via APIs
Support
Ticket support on all plans, chat and phone on weekdays for higher plans.
General info about company
Campaign Monitor
Founded in 2004 by Ben Richardson, based in Nashville. Belongs to CM Group, along with other marketing software companies like Sailthru and LiveClicker.
Mailgun
Founded in 2010 by Ev Kontsevoy and Taylor Wakefield. In 2021, Mailgun was acquired by Sinch. Company headquarters are in San Antonio, Texas.
Difficulty
Campaign Monitor
The email editor is WYSIWYG and the platform provides users with a great choice of templates and an automated email builder for your brand — no coding or design skills are required. Campaign analytics come in the form of digestible graphs that are easy to interpret for junior marketers.
Mailgun
The service is aimed at developers and people with advanced coding knowledge, so it’s not easy to use for the general public.
Best for
Campaign Monitor
Marketing agencies, small organizations, publishers
Mailgun
Large companies with extensive mailing lists that require both marketing and transactional emails, deliverability monitoring, and a stable technological solution.
Free plan
Campaign Monitor
No free plan, free trial only.
The free trial only allows sending test campaigns to 5 people or less, importing contact lists, and creating customer journeys without sending them
Mailgun
No free plan, only a 30-day free trial paid plans.
Pricing
Campaign Monitor
Dynamic, depends on the contact list size and the tariff type:
- Basic: $9–$299/month
- Unlimited: $30–$699/month
- Premier: $158–$989/month
All tariffs are limited to 50000 contacts.
Mailgun
Billed monthly:
- Foundation starting at $35 for 50,000 emails a month. Includes APIs, webhooks, ticket support.
- Scale starting at $90 for 100,000 emails a month. Includes everything from the previous plan and 5,000 email validations, live chat and phone support, dedicated IP pools.
- Enterprise with custom pricing. Includes everything from the other plans and dedicated support, comprehensive onboarding, early access to new features.
Extra emails and email validations available for additional price
Support
Campaign Monitor
An in-app Digital Assistant tool. Support agents around the world are available in the following hours:
- America: Mon to Fri 6 am to 5 pm PST/PDT
- Australia and Asia: Mon to Fri 9 am to 5 pm AEST/AEDT
- Europe: Mon to Fri 9 am to 5 pm BST/GMT
Limited support (unspecified working hours) is available on weekends and during holidays. Support phone numbers are only available for Premier users.
Aside from online support, Campaign Monitor offers:
- Video tutorials for newbies and experienced users
- A 30-minute Getting Started course
- Email Academy — an email marketing course
- Resources for developers
- The in-app Help Center with documentation
Mailgun
Ticket support with 24-hour response time, Knowledge Center, Comprehensive SDKs, Customer Feedback Forum, and Documentation available on all plans.
Chat and phone support are available on the Scale and Enterprise plans. Chat support is available Monday through Friday from 7 am to 7 pm CST. Phone support is available Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5 pm CST.
On the Enterprise plan, users also have access to managed support.
Features
Campaign Monitor
- Supports SMS notifications
- Advanced segmentation — available for Premier users
- Link Review — checks for broken links
- Free email template builder
- Campaign analytics
- CAN-SPAM compliance checker
- Integrations with CRM systems and more
Mailgun
- Drag-and-drop email builder and templates
- SMTP services for sending transactional emails
- Email validations
- Email previews on 100+ devices and clients
- Inbox placement testing
- Send time optimization
- Email analytics
- Integrations with various services via APIs
- Additional email optimization services for monitoring
Templates
Campaign Monitor
108 free mobile-friendly templates available without signing up, templates sorted by email types from announcements to transactional.
If you don’t like templates, you can build emails from scratch using blocks in the email builder.
Recently launched their own stock with free images.
Campaign Monitor also has an automated custom template builder where you fill in the questionnaire and get a bunch of email templates with the logo of your business and custom design.
Mailgun
- Basic 7 templates with different layouts.
- Mailgun Templates API allows to integrate other templates into the service and manage the existing ones.
Video/screenshots
Campaign Monitor
Mailgun
Integrations
Campaign Monitor
- Data for marketing: Salesforce, WordPress, Shopify +
- List growth: Intercom, OptinMonster, Unbounce +
- CRM: Raiser’s Edge NXT, Lexer, Qgiv +
- Advertising: AdRoll, Facebook Lead Ads, Rungopher+
More than 100 integrations are available for CRM, list management, surveys, and more
Mailgun
64 integrations including WordPress, Zendesk, Webflow, Airtable, Google Sheets, Jotform, and more.
Devices
Campaign Monitor
- A web app accessible from phones
- No mobile app
Mailgun
- Available only on the web.
- No installable solution.
Languages
Campaign Monitor
English
Mailgun
English
Automation
Campaign Monitor
The drag-and-drop interface for creating automated email sequences that includes:
- Triggers — subscribers’ actions that start or continue the sequenc
- Yes/No rules for personalization
- Timers — for example, you can send emails 3 or more days after a certain subscriber’s action or the previous email in the sequence
The sequence is visualized like an activity diagram where every element is customizable.
Mailgun
Basic automations using API (requires coding)
Pros
Campaign Monitor
- Good WYSIWYG email editor interface
- Easy and simple email automation
- Easy-to-understand campaign reports with good infographics
Mailgun
- Useful API that easily integrates into other services
- Deliverability features
- Reliability and data protection
- Helpful support
Cons
Campaign Monitor
- No live chat support + no 24/7 support
- All of the tariffs are limited to 50000 contacts
- No functional free trial you can actually use for work
- Contact importing is difficult when matching custom fields
- Split testing only allows 2 email versions
- No landing page builder
Mailgun
- Learning curve for beginners
- Interface is not very intuitive
- Stiff pricing structure
Reviews from experts
Campaign Monitor
“Feature-wise, there’s not really much to fault it on, but ‘power’ email marketing users will find the A/B testing feature a bit basic and will notice the absence of a fully fledged landing page creator.”
“It’s easy to find all features, which means you can get up and running quickly and get the most out of the solution without having to spend days playing around with it. If you sell products online, you’ll love the focus on optimizing transactional emails and tracking their performance so you can understand what works in terms of customer engagement.”
Mailgun
What do you like best about Mailgun?
Easy to use and reliable. The reporting features are very helpful too. The option for dedicated IP is great for businesses sending lots of emails. The email verification API also helps us protect our domain reputation.
What do you dislike about Mailgun?
Only one API key. I wish we could generate multiple ones with different access levels so we could easily revoke them if anything goes wrong. I wanted to have one key for email verification only, and one key for each application that uses the email API.
What do you like best about Mailgun?
You can integrate it to almost anything. The way that it manages the stream of emails it must send out is what makes this tool almost irreplaceable.
What do you dislike about Mailgun?
Hard to find something to not like about this. It is a very useful tool, it's not for novices. You need to know about email campaigns to know how to make best of it.
What problems is Mailgun solving and how is that benefiting you?
Keeping me out of spam list for the most part. Keeping our email in the green zone when it comes to spam detectors. It makes it easy to remove any bad emails, dnc's, and gauge things correctly.
*This information is current as of 02/13/2024. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
