Mailgun and Twilio SendGrid are services that deliver the automated email an application sends, built for developers and the teams around them. One is built for sending, with inbox placement tests and blocklist watching sold as add-ons to the same account. The other is built for application mail and marketing sends from the same sender reputation. Mailgun suits engineering-led teams, while Twilio SendGrid suits teams that mix product email with newsletters.
Pricing: Free for 100 emails/day; Send from $15/mo for 10,000 emails; Optimize add-on from $49/mo; Inspect add-on from $99/mo. Billed monthly only.
Mailgun is a transactional email API and SMTP relay for developers, with paid add-ons for deliverability monitoring, pre-send QA and email validation.
Pricing: Email API Essentials $19.95/mo for 50,000 emails, Pro $89.95 for 100,000 with a dedicated IP; Marketing Campaigns Basic $15/mo for 5,000 contacts, Advanced $60 for 10,000. 60-day trial.
Twilio SendGrid sends transactional email through an API and SMTP relay with dedicated IPs, plus Marketing Campaigns for newsletters and drip automation.
Transactional Email Services features side-by-side
Free for 100 emails/day; Send from $15/mo for 10,000 emails; Optimize add-on from $49/mo; Inspect add-on from $99/mo. Billed monthly only.
Email API Essentials $19.95/mo for 50,000 emails, Pro $89.95 for 100,000 with a dedicated IP; Marketing Campaigns Basic $15/mo for 5,000 contacts, Advanced $60 for 10,000. 60-day trial.
Choose Mailgun if you want whole sent messages kept for inspection and want DMARC reports and blocklists watched beside the sending. Choose Twilio SendGrid if you want application email and marketing campaigns on one sender. Both start on a free plan and move to paid plans billed by the month. Twilio SendGrid also sells its higher plans by quote.
A developer who must explain why a message went missing will value Mailgun. Beyond the event log, Mailgun keeps whole sent messages for a stated number of days. It also tests inbox placement before a send and adds DMARC report analytics and blocklist monitoring as a paid extra. One limit is that separate sending domains and keys per stream sit behind a contract plan for the largest senders.
Marketing and product teams that share one sender reputation are the natural fit for Twilio SendGrid. Beside the transactional API it offers a campaign product with design editors and contact segmentation for newsletters. Product mail and marketing mail then build the same standing with mailbox providers. One limit is that welcome and drip automation arrives only on a higher marketing tier.
Mailgun's users praise support that answers fast and fixes the problem, even on the free plan. They also like how easily it integrates and how well mail is delivered. Complaints centre on accounts or domains that are disabled with little explanation, and on support that is slow for some. Reviewers of Twilio SendGrid like inbox delivery and a friendly interface. They report slow support, suspended accounts, and billing or cancellation problems.
In a Mailgun customer story, an ecommerce marketing platform hands the vendor its large-scale sending and the checks on its customers' sender domains. The customer dropped its separate verification email flow entirely. One Twilio SendGrid customer, a large neighborhood social network, began with notification and digest email, then added marketing email. The customer now needs fewer clicks to build the same email than with its previous enterprise tool.
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