Mailgun vs MailerLite
Trying to choose between Mailgun vs MailerLite as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
Mailgun
- 4.2/5 on TrustPilot
- 4.3/5 on Capterra
- 4.3/5 on G2
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.
MailerLite
- 4.4/5 on TrustPilot
- 4.7/5 on Capterra
- 4.7/5 on G2
MailerLite is an all-in-one email marketing platform that allows you to create newsletters, landing pages, and even websites using pre-made templates. It has 100+ integrations with other platforms and a recurring payment feature for paid newsletters.
Pricing
Free plan, dynamic paid plans depending on the features and the contact list size start from $9/month billed yearly.
Key features
- Drag-and-drop email editor with an AI writing assistant
- No-code website, blog, and landing page builder
- iPad subscriber app for generating leads on offline events
- Paid newsletter subscription
- Automated sequences
- Integrations with online stores
- Email verifier
Support
24/7 email and live chat support
Founded in 2010 by Ev Kontsevoy and Taylor Wakefield. In 2021, Mailgun was acquired by Sinch. Company headquarters are in San Antonio, Texas.
MailerLite was founded in 2005 as a web design agency but then switched to email marketing. The company is remote-first, with employees in 40 countries.
The service is aimed at developers and people with advanced coding knowledge, so it’s not easy to use for the general public.
No coding or design skills are required to create emails and web pages. The platform also offers an extensive knowledge base with tutorials, which makes it beginner-friendly.
Large companies with extensive mailing lists that require both marketing and transactional emails, deliverability monitoring, and a stable technological solution.
E-commerce, freelancers, small businesses
No free plan, only a 30-day free trial paid plans.
A generous forever free plan with a limit of 1 user, 1,000 contacts, and 12,000 monthly emails. The free plan includes:
- Email editor and automation builder
- Website builder and 10 templates for landing pages
- Sign-up forms and pop-ups
- 24/7 email and chat support for the first 30 days
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
Growing business:
- $9-205/month billed yearly, depending on the number of subscribers, with a limit of 50k contacts at the highest price
- Unlimited emails and 24/7 support
- Includes extra features like dynamic emails, selling digital products, blogs, and an unsubscribe page builder
- 3 users available
Advanced:
- $19-1,600/month billed yearly, with a limit of 500k contacts at the highest price
- An email limit if you have more than 50k subscribers, up to 6 million, depending on the number
- Includes features like custom HTML editor, AI writing assistant, Facebook integration, promotion pop-ups, and more
- Unlimited users
Entreprise:
- Depends on the scope of work
- Only available for businesses with 100k and more subscribers
- Includes the services of a dedicated success manager, onboarding, account audit, and dedicated IP and deliverability consultation
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.
Customer support is available 24/7 via email and live chat — however, it’s only available for 30 days on the free plan. Users can also hire experts in email marketing, copywriting, no code development, and more.
MailerLite also offers an extensive Customer Self-Service Center. It includes:
- A large categorized knowledge base, that includes articles about troubleshooting most common issues
- Video tutorials
- A Circle community where users can communicate with each other
- A free ML Academy with 5 free online courses about MailerLite and email marketing
- 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
- Email marketing automation
- Sign-up forms
- Landing pages
- Website builder
- Blog builder
- Email verifier
- Transactional emails
- Click maps
- The ability to sell digital products like e-books and online courses
- Setting up a paid subscription for emails
- Basic 7 templates with different layouts.
- Mailgun Templates API allows to integrate other templates into the service and manage the existing ones.
70+ templates for newsletters:
- Blog digests
- Events
- Holiday emails
- Featured product
- Notifications
- Surveys and quizzes
- Deals and offers
- Emails for creative professionals
40+ templates for landing pages:
- For bloggers
- For creative professionals
- Events
- Surveys and quizzes
- Coming soon
- Celebrations
- Books
- Non-profits
18 website templates for different industries and purposes:
- Business
- E-commerce
- Education
- Events
- Food and drinks
- Portfolio
- Wellness
64 integrations including WordPress, Zendesk, Webflow, Airtable, Google Sheets, Jotform, and more.
139 integrations with services for CRM, loyalty programs, e-commerce, project management, surveys, and more.
- Available only on the web.
- No installable solution.
- MailerLite has a web app, an iOS app, and an iPad app only for subscribing leads on offline events.
English
English
Basic automations using API (requires coding)
- 15 automation recipes for welcome emails, abandoned cart, membership renewal, online courses, and more.
- Paid versions include an AI writing assistant powered by OpenAI that allows users to write marketing copies faster.
- Automated A/B testing for up to 3 workflow variations.
- Useful API that easily integrates into other services
- Deliverability features
- Reliability and data protection
- Helpful support
- A very simple and minimalist product that is good for beginners
- Many unique features like paid newsletters and selling digital goods
- Great customer support
- A lot of integrations available
- Easy migrations from other services
- Extensive video tutorial library for new users
- Learning curve for beginners
- Interface is not very intuitive
- Stiff pricing structure
- May come off as too simple for experienced marketers
- You need to get approval to start working with the service
- 2FA requires a third-party app instead of a phone number
- Stripe integration can be troublesome
- Confusing categories in the interface
- Outdated documentation at times
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.
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.
MailerLite is great, and I’m sure it will only get better with time. It just fails to deliver an exceptional email marketing experience right now
*This information is current as of 01/20/2025. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
