Mailgun Review – Everything You Need To Know (2021)

Finding the right email marketing tool for your business is hard enough but finding an email marketing tool specifically for developers is a whole other problem. 

So I made it my mission to find an email marketing software that was engineered for developers. 

That’s when I came across the email service API, Mailgun. 

When I continued to do my research on the transactional email software I knew immediately that I had to do a review on it.

In this Mailgun review, I will be tearing down the email API service to its bare bones and exposing everything about the platform from its best features to its pros and cons. 

So without further ado, let’s dive straight into the article. 

Related: 9 Best Email Marketing Tools

 

Mailgun Review

What is Mailgun?

In a nutshell, Mailgun is an email marketing service that was made for developers. Well, it goes a bit further than that. 

Mailgun allows developers to seamlessly integrate email into their apps. This allows them to give real email mailboxes to their users or their web pages. 

This email integration gives you access to functionality such as private user mailboxes, photo uploads from cell phones, email-driven comments, discussion groups, and more. 

Founded in 2010 by Ev Kontsevoy and Taylor Wakefield, Mailgun quickly grew to become an industry leader. 

Today Mailgun has over 150,000 customers and has even helped some of your favorite brands like Microsoft, Dell, Shopify, WPEngine, and Lyft.

 

What are Mailguns best features? 

Mailgun has a ton of features and products that make it stand out against its competitors. Here’s an overview of the products and features offered at Mailgun.

• Ease of Use
• Email API 
• Email Validation
• Deliverability
• Burst Sending
• Inbox Placement
• Email Analytics

Let’s take a closer look at each of these features.

Ease of Use

Mailgun is extremely easy to use and get the hang of. Once you start navigating the platform I am confident that you find your way around easily. 

The sign-up process is super simple and you can have your Mailgun account up and running in under 2 minutes! 

Moreover, the interface is extremely user-friendly which came as a shock since the platform was designed for developers. 

I guess I expected a more technical and complex appearance but this was a pleasant surprise. 

Moreover, I am yet to find a bad review online about the user-interface at Mailgun. 

All in all, Mailgun receives a 10/10 when it comes to its overall usability. 

 

Email API 

This is the pride and joy of Mailgun. 

It’s no secret that they offer the best email API solution on the market. Not to mention that it was made with developers in mind. 

This flexible solution allows you to send transactional or bulk emails easily with SMTP relay and flexible HTTP API. 

They also offer powerful email parsing and routing features which is a dream come through for any developer.

 

Email Validation 

Now, this is a crucial feature that’s immensely important in every email campaign. 

In a nutshell, it simply validates if an email address from your list actually exists. 

This in itself can help you save a ton of money and get a clearer representation of the quality of your list. 

Needless to say, it’s reported that 25% of email databases go bad every year so having a system in place designed specifically for email validation is critical. 

Mailgun goes a step further to ensure they have top of the line email validation. 

In fact, customers who validate email addresses with Mailgun before they send have a 21% lower bounce rate, dramatically improving their inbox placement.

Mailgun offers the fastest validation I have ever seen on the market and gives you your results in minutes. 

There are two ways that you can go about validating emails, they are through Mailgun’s email validator and the bulk validations tool.  

For more information on how Mailgun conducts validation checks click here.

 

Deliverability 

Deliverability is one of the most important if not the most important aspect of any successful email marketing campaign. 

After all, what good is it having an amazing email if it never reaches your subscriber’s inbox? 

Well, Mailgun believes in exceptional deliverability. 

I will let the numbers do the talking. 

Mailgun has a 97.4% deliverability rate. Amazing right? After all, that is way past the industry average of 85%. 

At Mailgun you are provided with your own personal Technical Account Manager who walks with you step by step to ensure that your emails are fully optimized to increase your deliverability. 

To read the full list of benefits that come with Mailgun’s deliverability service click here.

 

Burst Sending 

Burst Sending guarantees that your time-sensitive emails reach your subscriber’s inbox in record time!

Rapid Fire ensures that your transactional and regular emails are delivered directly to your subscriber’s inbox with no delay. 

For example, when customers are resetting their password they expect the code to reset the password to be delivered directly to their inbox immediately. 

It’s one piece of the puzzle to have an amazing email but another piece of the puzzle to have fast delivery. At Mailgun they focus on the delivery so you can focus on the parts of your business you actually like to do.

 

Inbox Placement 

When I saw this feature my jaw-dropped. 

I was genuinely surprised. 

Imagine knowing exactly where your email will land, whether that be directly in your subscriber’s inbox, spam, or wherever else!

With Mailgun you will be given that insight through Inbox Placement. 

What is Inbox Placement? 

In a nutshell, Inbox Placement allows you to predict the performance of your emails and gives you the ability to spot deliverability issues before they impact your business. (Mailgun) 

This tool gives you the power to make adjustments that will improve the performance of your emails before you even send them out.  

Mailgun built this product by doing a deep dive into the billions of emails they send out every month in order to produce predictive placement!

The best part? 

Mailgun provides you an all in one tool that allows you to send emails as well as to conduct a seed test. 

That being said, this feature is available on all plans except the Flex plan.

 

Email Analytics 

Having a birds-eye view of your analytics is the key to optimizing and improving your email campaigns in the long-run. 

Without accurate email analytics, you are essentially running your email marketing campaigns blindly with no direction or vision. 

With Mailgun you can keep track of all of your analytics like opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, spam complaints, and delivery rates. 

You can get access to all of this data via the Control panel or the API. 

It even goes a step further than this by allowing you to see which devices your customers are using to interact with your emails as well as the country they are in so you can make more informed decisions. 

You can also track your email performance based on the Mailbox Provider, i.e Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo. 

Other cool reporting and analytic features offered by Mailgun include: 

• Advanced Delivery Metrics – This shows you not only in which emails were dropped but why. 
• Optimal Time Analytics – This shows you the best time that you should be interacting with your subscribers. 

That being said, you can also create A/B tests so you can determine exactly which emails are high performers and need to be scaled. 

Moreover, thanks to tags and segmentation you can send targeted emails based on specific conditions. 

 

Integrations

Mailgun provides a seamless system that allows you to easily integrate email into your app. 

Needless to say, you can set up the email integration and start tracking your sends via Mailgun’s email api. 

Moreover, they provide API Documentation that consists of libraries of popular coding languages such as Python, Ruby, Java, C#, and PHP.f

 

Mailgun Pricing 

The pricing at Mailgun is extremely straight-forward and is dependent on the number of emails that you send out every month. 

Mailgun has 4 different plans, the Flex plan, the Foundation plan, the Growth plan, and the Scale plan. 

The following pricing is based on the fact that you send out a maximum of 75,000 emails every single month.

The Flex Plan allows you to send out up to 5000 emails per month for 3 months for FREE! After the 3 months is up you only pay for the number of emails that you send, 

The Flex plan comes with: 

• Email APIs, SMTP Relay and Webhooks 
• Suppression Management 
• Email Tracking & Analytics 
• 99.99% Guaranteed Uptime 
• 5 Days of Log Retention 
• Detailed Documentation 
• Limited 24/7 Ticket support 

The Foundation plan starts at $35 per month and comes with everything in the Flex plan as well as:

• Email address validations 
• Inbound Email Routing 
• 1 Dedicated IP
• Inbox Placement Tests
• 1 Day Message Retention 
• 24/7 ticket support 

The Growth plan starts at $80 per month and comes with everything in the Foundation plan as well as: 

• 1000 email address validations 
• 10 Inbox Placement Tests 
• 15 Days Log Retention 
• 3 Day Message Retention 
• Instant chat support 

The Scale plan starts at $90 per month and comes with everything in the Growth plan as well as: 

• 15 Inbox Placement Tests 
• Send Time Optimisation
• 30 Days of Log Retention
• 7 Day Message Retention
• Live Phone Support

 

Mailgun Customer Support

Customer support plays a HUGE role when it comes to any software product! 

In fact, did you know that 52% of consumers say they have made an additional purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience? 

When it comes to customer support I must say that Mailgun does a pretty solid job. They even have a 74% customer satisfaction rate. 

Moreover, Mailgun provides a wide range of resources that were built in order for you to have a smooth journey with the email service platform. 

These resources include blogs, guides, videos, podcasts, events, documentation, and an intuitive help center that has answers to any questions that you may have about the platform. 

When it comes to getting in contact with the customer service you have to submit a ticket and the team at Mailgun will get back to you asap. 

However, if you are on the FREE plan you only get limited 24/7 support. In order to get access to full 24/7 support, you have to be on the Foundation plan. 

That being said, if you want Instant live chat support you need to have the Growth plan and if you want exclusive phone support you need to have the Scale plan. 

This can be seen as a disadvantage if you only want the features of the Foundation plan but you also prefer to have phone support. 

 

Mailgun Pros and Cons 

Like every other software product out there Mailgun has its fair share of pros and cons. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of Mailgun. 

Pros

• The entire platform was built with the developers in mind. 
• They have in-depth reporting & analytic features 
• They have a generous free trial that gives you enough time to make a decision 
• It has a clean user interface and signing up is seamless and easy

 

Cons

• You have to be on Scale plan to get access to live support and support can tend to be slow if you aren’t on any of the paying plans.

 

Verdict: Who is it for and is it worth it? 

If you are a developer looking for a simple email API integration to send, receive, and track email with your app then Mailgun will be perfect for you. 

Mailgun is NOT for the average small business owner who just wants to send out a few emails per month. 

If you are a complete newbie to email marketing I would suggest that you begin your email journey with MailerLite or Mailchimp. 

That being said. Mailgun is partnered with Mailjet to provide you with all the email marketing services that you need in order to build high-converting email campaigns. 

Related: The full in-depth review of Mailjet 

All in all, Mailgun is perfect for businesses that don’t want the stress of running email servers and managing the entire email system. 

 

Best Mailgun Alternatives

If you are looking for an email marketing tool built specifically for e-commerce then check out our review on Omnisend and our review on Drip.

If you are looking for an advanced email marketing tool that focuses on automation then check out our review on ActiveCampaign. 

Also, check out these email marketing tool comparisons: 

• Mailchimp vs Klaviyo 
• GetResponse vs ActiveCampaign
• GetResponse vs Mailchimp
• ConvertKit vs ActiveCampaign