Best Mailgun Alternatives in 2026: 12 Email API and SMTP Tools Compared

Updated August 2026.

If you're shopping Mailgun alternatives, the short version is this: Postmark is the best swap for a team that needs real message history instead of one day of logs, Amazon SES is the cheapest option once you're sending at genuine volume, Resend is the best developer experience if you're building on modern JavaScript, and Brevo or Mailjet are the ones to look at if you also need marketing campaigns and not just an API.

Worth saying up front, because half the internet has it wrong: Mailgun did not kill its free plan. SendGrid did. Mailgun still publishes a permanent free tier at 100 emails a day, and it's the entry paid tier's one day of log retention, not the pricing model, that pushes most teams to look elsewhere. Every price below was verified against each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026, not a third-party estimate, and where a vendor doesn't publish a figure we say so instead of guessing.

Key Facts

• Twilio retired SendGrid's Free Email API and Free Marketing Campaigns plans effective May 27, 2025, with a 60 day grace period after which sending paused and stored contacts above 100 were permanently deleted (Twilio changelog). Mailgun's free tier survived.
• Since February 1, 2024, any sender pushing more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail must pass SPF, DKIM and DMARC, keep the Postmaster Tools spam rate below 0.30%, and support one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail (Google Workspace Admin Help).
• B2B delivered rates climbed from 90.7% to 95.6% year over year, the sharpest gain of any sector tracked, while global inbox placement sits near 87%, so the gap between "delivered" and "actually in the inbox" is still roughly ten points (Validity's analysis of the 2026 DMA benchmark data).
• 30% of companies report a return of $36 to $50 for every $1 spent on email, and software and technology companies specifically average 36:1 (Litmus State of Email research).
• 74% of consumers say they prefer email for transactional messages from brands, and 71% would go digging through a spam folder to find one that went missing, in a survey of more than 2,000 consumers across five countries (Mailgun consumer research).

What Mailgun Actually Charges, and Where It Pinches

Before comparing anything, it helps to have the incumbent's numbers straight, because two different myths circulate about Mailgun and both are wrong.

Myth one: Mailgun killed its free tier. It didn't. The free plan is still on the pricing page at 100 emails a day, permanently, with one day of log retention. Myth two: Mailgun is expensive. It isn't, at least not at the entry tiers. Basic is $15/mo for 10,000 emails with overage from $1.80 per 1,000. Foundation is $35/mo for 50,000 with overage from $1.30. Scale is $90/mo for 100,000 with overage from $1.10. A dedicated IP is a $59/mo add-on, with one included on Scale and on the higher Foundation volumes. Monthly billing is what the pricing page shows.

The real pinch is retention. On Basic, you get one day of logs. That's fine right up until a customer emails on Monday about a password reset that never arrived on Friday, and there is simply nothing left to look at. Foundation stretches that to five days, Scale to thirty. So the practical upgrade path at Mailgun isn't driven by volume at all, it's driven by how long you need to be able to answer "did we actually send it?" That's the single most common reason a team on Basic starts pricing this list.

If your requirement is really text messaging rather than email, this is the wrong list entirely and the best SMS marketing software roundup is the right one. And if you're weighing Mailgun against its oldest rival head to head, the SendGrid vs Mailgun comparison goes deeper on that specific matchup than a roundup can.

Quick Comparison Table

Free Tier and Entry Price Comparison

Mailgun is listed as a reference row here so you can see exactly what you'd be giving up. Note the retention column in the previous section before reading any of these as like for like.

Log Retention: The Thing Mailgun's Entry Tier Actually Costs You

Retention is the least-compared spec in this category and the one that generates the most support pain. Only a handful of these vendors publish a retention figure at all, so this table covers the ones that do, and says plainly where a number isn't published rather than filling the cell with a guess.

Read that first row against the second and you have the whole argument for Postmark in one line: the same $15 buys you 45 days of history instead of 24 hours. If you support real customers and field "I never got the email" tickets, that difference costs nothing and saves hours.

What It Costs at 10K, 100K and 1M Emails a Month

Every cell below names its basis, because a plan price, a metered rate and an overage calculation are three different things and mixing them is how people end up quoting a "starting price" that nobody actually pays. Where a vendor doesn't publish a figure at that volume, the cell says so.

Two things jump out. Amazon SES is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper than everything else at a million emails, which is exactly why teams tolerate building their own tooling around it. And a lot of this market simply stops publishing above 100,000 emails, so anyone telling you a confident 1M figure for Mailjet or Elastic Email is guessing.

Stage Fit Matrix

The matrix below keeps the choice anchored to company stage, because the right email stack changes as operating complexity rises.

Sizing and Persona Table

1. Postmark - the swap that fixes the log retention problem for the same money

Postmark exists on one principle: transactional email should never share an IP pool or a sending reputation with marketing blasts. You literally can't send a newsletter through it. That restriction is the product, and it's why Postmark's deliverability record holds up under scrutiny in a way that a general-purpose sender's can't.

For a Mailgun Basic customer, though, the headline isn't deliverability. It's that Postmark ships 45 days of data retention on every plan, including the free one, at the same $15 a month Mailgun charges for a single day. Pro and Platform can extend that up to 365 days as a paid add-on starting at $5/mo. Paid plans also carry no daily sending cap.

The ICP is a backend or platform engineer who owns password resets, receipts and one-time codes, and who gets pulled into "did this actually send?" tickets. If that's you, this is the first vendor to trial.

Pricing: Basic $15/mo from 10,000 emails, overage $1.80 per 1,000. Pro $16.50/mo adds inbound email, overage $1.30. Platform $18/mo, overage $1.20. Retention is 45 days on all plans, with an add-on from $5/mo on Pro and Platform to extend up to 365 days. Free tier: 100 emails a month, no overages. Annual plans are not offered.

Best for: engineering teams whose actual complaint about Mailgun is the one day log window, not the price.

2. Amazon SES - the cheapest per email by a wide margin, if you'll build the rest

SES isn't really a competitor to Mailgun so much as a different category of thing: raw sending infrastructure with an API in front of it. There's no polished dashboard, no friendly log viewer, no plan tiers. There's a per-email rate, and everything else is something you assemble from other AWS services.

At $0.10 per 1,000 emails plus $0.12 per GB of attachment data, it's roughly ten times cheaper than Mailgun's Scale plan at 100,000 emails and stays cheap all the way up. That gap is why almost every high-volume sender eventually evaluates it. The cost you're trading against is engineering time: bounce handling, suppression management, event storage and reporting are yours to build, and retention is whatever you configure and pay to keep.

One correction worth making, because it circulates constantly: the famous 62,000 free emails a month for applications hosted on EC2 is gone. What AWS offers new accounts now is up to $200 in Free Tier credits, which are not email-specific.

Pricing: $0.10 per 1,000 emails, plus $0.12 per GB of attachment data. Dedicated IP $24.95/mo per IP. Managed dedicated IPs $15/mo per account plus a per-email fee. Virtual Deliverability Manager $1,250/mo. New accounts get up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits; there is no ongoing free monthly allowance.

Best for: teams sending hundreds of thousands of emails a month who already run on AWS and have the engineering capacity to build the tooling around it.

3. Resend - the modern developer experience Mailgun's console doesn't have

Resend is what happens when someone rebuilds an email API with 2020s developer expectations baked in: typed SDKs for every major language, a React Email component library so templates live in JSX instead of nested tables, and a console that feels closer to Vercel or Stripe than to a legacy ESP.

The ICP is a frontend or full-stack developer at a startup or growth-stage company who owns both the app and the emails it sends, and wants both in the same repo with the same tooling. Retention on Pro is 30 days, which matches what Mailgun only gives you at the $90 Scale tier.

The honest limitation is scope. Resend's Pro plan is transactional sending; campaigns and contact lists are a separate Marketing plan running $40 to $650/mo for 5,000 to 150,000 contacts. If you need both, budget for both.

Pricing: Pro $20/mo for 50,000 emails, 10 domains, 30 day retention; $35/mo at 100,000. Scale runs $90 to $1,150/mo covering 100,000 to 2.5 million emails. Marketing plans are separate at $40 to $650/mo for 5,000 to 150,000 contacts. Free tier: 3,000 emails a month capped at 100 a day, 3 domains.

Best for: JavaScript and TypeScript teams who want email to feel like the rest of their stack, with retention that beats Mailgun's entry tier by a month.

4. SendGrid Email API - the biggest name here, and the one that lost its free plan

SendGrid is the obvious like-for-like alternative and the one most Mailgun customers have already used at some point. It scales to genuinely enormous volume, its deliverability tooling and analytics are mature after more than a decade, and being part of Twilio means shared auth and billing if you're already sending SMS or voice through the same account.

What changed is the entry point. Twilio retired the Free Email API and Free Marketing Campaigns plans effective May 27, 2025. Free accounts kept access for 60 days, then sending paused and any stored contacts above 100 were permanently deleted. What's there now is a 60 day trial capped at 100 emails a day and 100 contacts, not a permanent free tier. So the one thing Mailgun still has that SendGrid doesn't is exactly the thing SendGrid used to be known for.

Pricing: Essentials from $19.95/mo for 50,000 to 100,000 emails with 1 teammate seat. Pro from $89.95/mo for 100,000 to 2.5 million emails, 1,000 seats and a dedicated IP. Premier is custom. Marketing Campaigns is a separate product: Basic from $15/mo (5,000 to 100,000 contacts), Advanced from $60/mo (10,000 to 200,000 contacts). No free plan; a 60 day trial covers 100 emails a day and 100 contacts.

Best for: large senders who need mature deliverability infrastructure and are already inside the Twilio ecosystem. If you're evaluating both incumbents at once, the SendGrid vs Mailgun breakdown covers the matchup in detail, and the best SendGrid alternatives roundup is the mirror image of this page.

5. SMTP2GO - the least disruptive migration on this list

SMTP2GO does one thing and does it without drama: it's an SMTP relay. If your application already sends through SMTP rather than a vendor-specific SDK, switching is close to changing four config values, and you're done. No rewrite, no new client library, no template migration.

The ICP is an IT admin or ops generalist rather than a platform engineer, or a small team that inherited an application nobody wants to touch. It's also the cheapest way to get a real free tier with multiple verified senders: 1,000 emails a month across 5 senders, which is more useful for a small internal tool than Mailgun's 100 a day from one domain.

The tradeoff is surface area. You won't find Mailgun's inbound routing, email validation API or deep event webhooks here, and the pricing page doesn't publish a retention figure.

Pricing: Starter $10/mo or $100/yr for 10,000 emails, overage $1 per 1,000. Professional $75/mo or $750/yr for 100,000 emails, overage $0.85 per 1,000. Premier is custom, from $75/mo. Free tier: 1,000 emails a month capped at 200 a day, 5 verified senders.

Best for: teams who want to stop paying Mailgun this week without opening the application code.

6. Brevo - one account for the API and the campaign builder

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is the tool to look at if the real reason you're leaving Mailgun is that you've bolted a separate marketing platform onto it and now pay two bills. Brevo covers a transactional email API with SMTP relay and a visual campaign builder with contact segmentation, in one account.

The ICP is a founder or marketing manager at a small company, usually with one developer nearby, who wants receipts and newsletters coming from the same place. The free plan is genuinely free forever at 300 emails a day with no card required, which is triple Mailgun's daily allowance, though Mailgun's is aimed at a developer and Brevo's at a marketer.

The honest limitation is the shape of the pricing ladder. Starter and Standard are cheap, then Professional jumps to $499/mo. Model your twelve month volume before you commit, because the middle of that curve is where teams get surprised.

Pricing: Free forever, 300 emails a day, no card. Starter $9/mo monthly or $8.08/mo billed yearly, from 5,000 emails a month and 500 contacts, with SMS credits sold separately. Standard $18/mo monthly or $16.17/mo yearly. Professional $499/mo monthly or $449.08/mo yearly, from 150,000 emails a month with 10 seats, WhatsApp, popups and push. Enterprise is custom. Add-ons: branding removal $10.80/mo, Sales Essentials $27.92/mo, Sales Advanced $58.50/mo per user.

Best for: small teams consolidating a transactional API and a marketing tool into one vendor. For where teams tend to outgrow it, see the best Brevo alternatives guide.

7. Mailjet - the biggest free tier for teams still sizing their volume

Mailjet's free plan is the widest net here for anyone who genuinely doesn't know yet how much they'll send: 6,000 emails a month, capped at 200 a day, with transactional and marketing sending on the same account from day one. Compared with Mailgun's 100 a day, that's twice the monthly headroom and a lot more room to test a real workload before paying anyone.

The ICP is a marketing ops lead or a developer at a small-to-mid company who wants both send types under one login without committing to a heavier platform. Paid tiers step up gently: Starter $9/mo for 8,000 emails, Essential $17/mo for 15,000, Premium $27/mo for 15,000 plus advanced features, with annual billing saving 10% across the board.

The limitation is the ceiling. Mailjet's published tiers stop at 15,000 emails a month, so if your trajectory runs past that quickly you'll be talking to sales sooner than you'd like.

Pricing: Free: 6,000 emails a month capped at 200 a day. Starter $9/mo for 8,000 emails. Essential $17/mo for 15,000. Premium $27/mo for 15,000 plus advanced features. Annual billing saves 10%.

Best for: small teams that want a real free tier covering both send types while they work out their actual volume. The best email marketing software guide goes deeper on the campaign side of that decision.

8. MailerSend - email plus SMS from one API, at the lowest entry price here

MailerSend is built by the Mailerlite team and aimed squarely at product teams who want transactional email and a bit of SMS from a single vendor without an enterprise conversation. At $5.60/mo, Hobby is the cheapest paid entry point on this list, and Starter and Professional both bundle 100 SMS a month alongside 50,000 emails.

One thing to correct before you plan around it: MailerSend's free tier is 500 emails a month. The 12,000 emails a month figure that made it briefly famous is not what the pricing page shows today, and a lot of comparison content still repeats it.

The other honest caveat is that the Starter and Professional dollar figures don't render properly on MailerSend's own pricing page, so the only prices we can state are Hobby's and the published overage rates. Treat the middle tiers as "confirm your quote" rather than a known number.

Pricing: Hobby $5.60/mo or $67.20/yr for 5,000 emails, overage $1.50 per 1,000. Starter and Professional each include 50,000 emails a month plus 100 SMS, with overage at $0.90 per 1,000; their dollar figures do not render on the pricing page, so confirm them directly. Free tier: 500 emails a month.

Best for: small product teams that want cheap transactional email with a little SMS attached, and will confirm the mid-tier pricing before committing.

9. Elastic Email - the budget option at the 50,000 email mark

Elastic Email competes on one axis: price at volume. Starter is $19/mo at 50,000 emails a month, against Mailgun's $35 Foundation plan for the same volume, and Pro is $49/mo at the same tier with more features layered on. If your only complaint about Mailgun is the invoice, this is the most direct answer on the list.

The ICP is a growth engineer or a cost-conscious ops lead at a company sending real volume on a thin budget, who can live without a large support relationship. It also carries a 3,000 emails a month free tier with up to 1,000 contacts, which is more generous than Mailgun's daily cap for anyone with bursty sending.

Two caveats worth stating plainly. Elastic Email's volume slider goes up to 10 million emails a month, but the figures above the 50,000 tier don't render on the pricing page, so nobody quoting you a number for 500,000 is reading it off the vendor. And overage rates aren't published at all, which matters more than it sounds if your volume spikes.

Pricing: Starter $19/mo at 50,000 emails a month. Pro $49/mo at the same 50,000 tier. The volume slider runs to 10 million a month, but higher-tier figures don't render on the page. Overage rates are not published. Monthly pricing only. Free tier: 3,000 emails a month, up to 1,000 contacts.

Best for: budget-driven teams sending around 50,000 emails a month who will confirm higher-volume pricing with sales before scaling into it.

10. Mailchimp Transactional - only worth it if you're already paying Mailchimp

Mailchimp Transactional is the product formerly known as Mandrill, and the most important thing to understand is that it is not a standalone service. You cannot buy it on its own. It's an add-on that requires an active legacy, Standard or Premium Mailchimp plan underneath it, which means the real cost is the add-on plus whatever your Mailchimp bill already is.

Given that, it makes sense in exactly one situation: your marketing team already runs Mailchimp, and you'd rather have transactional sending share the same audience data, templates and reporting than run a second vendor. The block pricing is refreshingly predictable, $20 per block of 25,000 emails, which makes budgeting easy compared with overage-based models.

The ceiling is real, though. The add-on tops out at 20 blocks, or 500,000 emails a month. Past that, this isn't your tool.

Pricing: $20 per block, each block covering 25,000 emails, up to 20 blocks (500,000 emails a month). Requires an active legacy, Standard or Premium Mailchimp plan, so budget the underlying subscription too. New users get 500 free test emails to their own verified domain.

Best for: teams already committed to Mailchimp for marketing who want transactional sending on the same data. If you're reconsidering that commitment, the best Mailchimp alternatives guide covers the marketing side.

11. Bird - usage-priced email carrying a reputation it hasn't earned back yet

Bird is the rebranded MessageBird, and the reputation attached to that old name is the reason it belongs on this list and also the reason to read carefully. MessageBird was known as a mature omnichannel provider covering SMS, WhatsApp, voice and email under one roof. Bird's own pricing page today prices email only. SMS, WhatsApp, Voice, RCS and Push are all marked "Coming soon," each described as shipping as a new API.

Judge it on the email product actually in front of you. That product is fine: a free tier of 1,000 emails a month on a shared IP with no card required, Startup running from $15/mo at 50,000 emails to $30/mo at 100,000 (an effective $0.30 per 1,000 at the entry point, with overage charged at $0.90 per 1,000), and Growth from $80/mo at 100,000 up to $1,039/mo at 2.5 million. Usage-based, no per-seat charges, straightforward to model.

The ICP is a team that needs email now, likes usage-based pricing, and would find it convenient to add other channels from the same vendor later without needing them today.

Pricing: Free: 1,000 emails a month, shared IP, no card. Startup from $15/mo at 50,000 emails up to $30/mo at 100,000, which works out at $0.30 per 1,000 at the entry point, with overage at $0.90 per 1,000. Growth from $80/mo at 100,000 up to $1,039/mo at 2.5 million. Enterprise is custom.

Best for: teams that want simple usage-priced email today and are genuinely fine waiting on the other channels. For the fuller picture on that transition, see the best MessageBird alternatives roundup.

12. Loops - transactional and lifecycle email in one contact-priced tool

Loops is built for SaaS products specifically, and it inverts the pricing model everyone else here uses. Instead of charging per email sent, it charges on subscribed contacts, doesn't meter sends separately on paid plans, and includes seats for free. For a product with a large user base receiving a steady drip of both transactional and lifecycle email, that can work out much simpler to reason about than a send-based bill.

The ICP is a SaaS founder or growth engineer at a small team who wants onboarding sequences, product updates and password resets from one tool rather than an API plus a separate marketing platform. Free seats matter more than they sound when a non-technical teammate needs to write the emails.

The caveat is transparency. Loops prices behind a contact slider and the dollar figures aren't published, so you'll need your own quote. The free Early Stage plan works for a pre-revenue product but ships with a "Powered by Loops" footer on every send.

Pricing: Priced on subscribed contacts; sends are not metered separately on paid plans, and seats are free. Dollar figures are not published, so request a quote. Free Early Stage plan: 1,000 contacts, 4,000 sends a month, with a "Powered by Loops" footer.

Best for: early-stage SaaS teams who want transactional and lifecycle email unified under one contact-based price. If you're weighing heavier lifecycle platforms instead, the best Customer.io alternatives guide covers that tier.

Where Mailgun Still Wins

None of this makes Mailgun a bad product, and plenty of teams reading this should stay. Being fair about that matters more than making the list look decisive.

Mailgun still has a permanent free tier, which SendGrid no longer does, and 100 emails a day forever is a genuinely useful allowance for a side project or an internal tool. Its inbound routing and email validation APIs go deeper than most vendors here bother with, and the overage model is transparent all the way up. The upgrade path from $15 to $35 to $90 is predictable, and Foundation at $35 for 50,000 emails is competitive with anything on this list once you factor in what's bundled.

The one thing to be honest about is that the pricing page shows monthly billing, so if you were hoping to prepay a year for a discount the way you can with SMTP2GO or MailerSend, that isn't on offer. And the retention ladder means the plan you need is often set by support requirements rather than send volume, which is an odd way to buy infrastructure. If neither of those bothers you, staying put is a reasonable answer.

How to Choose: Decision Framework

What to Do Next

Start by naming the actual complaint. If it's retention, trial Postmark first, because 45 days at $15 solves it outright. If it's cost at volume, price your real monthly send against Amazon SES and be honest about whether you have the engineering time to build what SES doesn't give you. If it's that you're running a second marketing tool alongside Mailgun, Brevo or Mailjet collapses that into one bill.

Then run a two week parallel send before you cut over. Keep Mailgun live, route a slice of production traffic through the candidate, and compare inbox placement rather than delivery receipts, since the benchmark data puts roughly ten points between "delivered" and "actually in the inbox." Warm the new sending domain and get SPF, DKIM and DMARC passing before you move real volume, not after.

One adjacent decision worth making at the same time: if SMS is anywhere on your roadmap, the vendor economics differ enough that it's worth reading the best Twilio alternatives guide before you commit to an email provider that also promises texting.