Mailpit vs MailHog
Active maintenance versus a popular tool that stopped getting updates.
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 | Mailpit | MailHog |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduling | No | No |
| Event stream | No | No |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| 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, Mailpit offers Free, MIT-licensed against Free, MIT-licensed from MailHog. That ordering reflects this audience. Weigh the same table differently and the answer changes.
Side by side
| Feature | Mailpit | MailHog |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| Multi-tenant | No | No |
| Free tier | Free, MIT-licensed | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Starts at | Free | Free |
| Tagline | Modern local SMTP catcher. | Classic local SMTP catcher (unmaintained since 2020). |
| 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 | 9/10 | 5/10 |
| Best for | Replacing MailHog in any local or CI email-capture setup. | Legacy projects already wired to it. |
Mailpit
- ›Single Go binary or small Docker image with no runtime dependencies
- ›Reuses MailHog's 1025 and 8025 ports, so most existing configs work unchanged
- ›Views for rendered HTML, plain text, raw source, headers, and attachments
- ›Built-in HTML-compatibility check, link check, and spam-score view
- ›REST API and real-time inbox updates for automated tests
- ›Local development and staging only, not a production sender
- ›No hosted or shared team-inbox mode
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