HubSpot vs Mailgun
Trying to choose between HubSpot vs Mailgun as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
- 3.4 TrustPilot
- 4.5 Capterra
- 4.4 G2
Average 4.1 / 5
HubSpot
A CRM platform that offers email marketing, content management, marketing automation, and customer service capabilities.
Pricing
Marketing tools only start at $18 a month for 1,000 marketing contacts
Key features
- Email automation, reporting, etc.
- Landing pages and forms
- Marketing automation
- Website builder and hosting
- CRM platform
- B2B commerce tools
- Customer service software
- Sales and operations software
- Integrations with various services
Support
24/7 support via email and chat on paid plans, phone support on professional and Enterprise plans. Community support only on the Free plan.
- 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
HubSpot
HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006. Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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
HubSpot
The software may seem complex and even overwhelming. However, newcomers get service demos and tutorials for a smooth start. Overall, the interface is user-friendly and approachable.
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
HubSpot
Medium to big e-commerce companies that want an integrated software package with marketing, CRM, customer service, and website hosting all in one.
Mailgun
Large companies with extensive mailing lists that require both marketing and transactional emails, deliverability monitoring, and a stable technological solution.
Free plan
HubSpot
A free plan for 2,000 email sends per month. Available email templates and features are limited. No customer support, only the access to HubSpot Community.
Mailgun
No free plan, only a 30-day free trial paid plans.
Pricing
HubSpot
Billed monthly:
- Starter: $20 for up to 1,000 marketing contacts
- Professional: $890 for up to 2,000 marketing contacts (the starting price is $3,890 with a mandatory paid onboarding)
- Enterprise: $3,600 for up to 10,000 marketing contacts (the starting price is $6,000 with a mandatory paid onboarding)
Other pricing features:
- Users are only billed for their “marketing” contacts (actively in use) and can have many more inactive contacts
- Even if a user cancels the subscriptions, they will be billed for the rest of their commitment period duration
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
HubSpot
- Service demo for new users
- Technical support is available on paid plans only
- Access to the HubSpot Community on the Free plan
- Chat and email support on all paid plans
- Phone support only on Professional and Enterprise plans
- Mandatory paid assisted onboarding on Professional and Enterprise plans
- Advanced and Premier additional onboarding options
- Customer training
- Various courses with certifications
- HubSpot user groups
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
HubSpot
- Email automation
- Dynamic list segmentation based on various criteria
- Email reputation reporting and tracking
- Custom reporting dashboards
- Integrations with popular services
- Drag-and-drop email builder and pre-made templates
- Landing pages
- Live chat with website visitors
- A CRM app for iOS and Android
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
HubSpot
15+ email templates
Only 5 email templates on the free plan
Templates for:
- Welcome messages
- Sales
- Newsletter
- Event invitations
- Announcements
- Ebook emails
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
HubSpot
Mailgun
Integrations
HubSpot
1,495 integrations including WordPress, Zapier, Canva, Facebook, Salesforce, Shopify, Stripe, and more.
Mailgun
64 integrations including WordPress, Zendesk, Webflow, Airtable, Google Sheets, Jotform, and more.
Devices
HubSpot
- Website
- A mobile app for iOS and Android to manage the CRM
- Chrome extension for Gmail or G Suite
- Office 365 add-in and desktop add-in for Office 365
- No installable solution.
Mailgun
- Available only on the web.
- No installable solution.
Languages
HubSpot
English
Chinese (traditional)
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
French
German
Italian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Spanish
Swedish
Mailgun
English
Automation
HubSpot
Many pre-built automations (called workflows) triggered by:
- Contacts
- Companies
- Deals
- Tickets (for support purposes)
- Quotes
- Conversations
- Feedback submissions
Mailgun
Basic automations using API (requires coding)
Pros
HubSpot
- An all-in-one solution for e-commerce businesses: email marketing, CRM, CMS, and more
- 1,482 integrations
- Thorough onboarding and courses
- A strong global community
- Ability to store many contacts for free
Mailgun
- Useful API that easily integrates into other services
- Deliverability features
- Reliability and data protection
- Helpful support
Cons
HubSpot
- Steep prices
- Complicated feature system may cause additional spendings
- Overwhelming amount of functions
- Support isn’t accessible enough
- Email templates aren’t sophisticated
Mailgun
- Learning curve for beginners
- Interface is not very intuitive
- Stiff pricing structure
Reviews from experts
HubSpot
The fact that it’s so user-friendly is a big advantage to using HubSpot’s CRM platform. Its guided set-up wizard, demos and intuitive interface make it a great tool for all levels of experience. It’s still a huge software with a lot of bells and whistles, but taking all that into account, its usability is still outstanding. You’ll be particularly impressed with its lead management features.
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Anything above Starter gets very expensive and requires you to pay a high onboarding fee. In the case of the HubSpot Marketing Professional plan, this is $3,000 on top of the $890/month.
Surprisingly, HubSpot’s templates aren’t quite what you’d expect from such a popular, modern tool. I’d like to see some more design options for email and landing pages.
Overall: I'm 50-50 with HubSpot. I see it as a compromise and middle step until we are able to get more specialized solutions for each one of their offerings.
Pros: HubSpot is a good solution for organizations at their early steps. It provides all the necessary tools for website management and marketing activities. The contacts' management is good too.
Cons: It doesn't go in-depth on anything. For everything that HubSpot does there is a platform that does it better. But we would need many different tools so we stay with all in one but shallow approach (for now). It is also very expensive for what it is.
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.
