MailHog vs MailCatcher
Two older Go and Ruby catchers, both trailing Mailpit on maintenance and HTML rendering.
What matters for growth and lifecycle teams
Growth work lives or dies on targeting and measurement. What matters is whether behavioral triggers can be built without engineering time, whether the event stream supports attribution past the open, and whether deliverability holds when broadcast volume shares a reputation with product email.
| Priority | MailHog | MailCatcher |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduling | No | No |
| Event stream | No | No |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable. |
| Operating since | Not published | Not published |
| Suppressions API | No | No |
| Best published rate per 1,000 | Tiers not published in comparable form | Tiers not published in comparable form |
| Multi-tenant | No | No |
| Free tier | Free, MIT-licensed | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Starts at | Free | Free |
For lifecycle and activation work running behavior-triggered journeys, broadcasts, and winback campaigns measured on revenue, the two are level on every priority that can be scored here, so the choice comes down to price and to which product your team would rather operate. On free tier, MailHog offers Free, MIT-licensed against Free, MIT-licensed from MailCatcher. That ordering reflects this audience. Weigh the same table differently and the answer changes.
Side by side
| Feature | MailHog | MailCatcher |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable. |
| Multi-tenant | No | No |
| Free tier | Free, MIT-licensed | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Starts at | Free | Free |
| Tagline | Classic local SMTP catcher (unmaintained since 2020). | Tiny Ruby-based local SMTP catcher. |
| Pricing model | self-hosted | self-hosted |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes | Yes |
| SDKs | None | None |
| Templates | none | none |
| React Email | No | No |
| Webhooks | No | No |
| Inbound | No | No |
| Idempotency | No | No |
| Dedicated IP | No | No |
| DX score | 5/10 | 6/10 |
| Best for | Legacy projects already wired to it. | Rails teams already running it in development. |
MailHog
- ›Familiar from years of tutorials and boilerplates
- ›Single Go binary with a Docker image and a chaos-testing mode
- ›No meaningful releases since 2020
- ›HTML and modern CSS rendering trails current email clients
- ›Open issues and pull requests are effectively unattended
MailCatcher
- ›Installs as a Ruby gem, familiar in Rails stacks
- ›SMTP on 1025 with a web UI and JSON API on 1080
- ›Shows HTML, plain text, and raw source per message
- ›Release cadence is slow with little active feature work
- ›Needs a Ruby runtime where Mailpit ships a static binary
- ›HTML rendering trails newer catchers