Mailtrap vs Mailpit
Hosted staging inbox versus local-first capture.
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 | Mailtrap | Mailpit |
|---|---|---|
| Scheduling | No | No |
| Event stream | Yes | No |
| Deliverability | Good production sending posture with logs, authentication, suppression handling, and dedicated IP options on higher plans. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| Operating since | 2014 | Not published |
| Suppressions API | Yes | No |
| Best published rate per 1,000 | Tiers not published in comparable form | Tiers not published in comparable form |
| Multi-tenant | Yes | No |
| Free tier | 4,000/mo (sending), free testing tier | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Starts at | $15/mo for 10,000 sending | Free |
For lifecycle and activation work running behavior-triggered journeys, broadcasts, and winback campaigns measured on revenue, Mailtrap takes every priority that separates them here (event stream, the suppressions API, and multi-tenant support), while Mailpit matches it on the rest. On free tier, Mailtrap offers 4,000/mo (sending), free testing tier against Free, MIT-licensed from Mailpit. That ordering reflects this audience. Weigh the same table differently and the answer changes.
Side by side
| Feature | Mailtrap | Mailpit |
|---|---|---|
| Deliverability | Good production sending posture with logs, authentication, suppression handling, and dedicated IP options on higher plans. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| Multi-tenant | Yes | No |
| Free tier | 4,000/mo (sending), free testing tier | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Starts at | $15/mo for 10,000 sending | Free |
| Tagline | Originally a staging inbox, now a sender too. | Modern local SMTP catcher. |
| Pricing model | tiered | self-hosted |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes | Yes |
| SDKs | node, python, go, ruby, php, elixir | None |
| Templates | basic | none |
| React Email | No | No |
| Webhooks | Yes | No |
| Inbound | No | No |
| Idempotency | No | No |
| Dedicated IP | Yes | No |
| DX score | 8/10 | 9/10 |
| Best for | Teams that want one vendor for staging-inbox plus production sending. | Replacing MailHog in any local or CI email-capture setup. |
Mailtrap
- ›Best-in-class staging inbox
- ›Spam, blacklist, and HTML check on captured emails
- ›Single product that covers testing and sending
- ›Generous free tier for both flows
- ›Sending product is younger than Postmark or SendGrid
- ›Reporting is less detailed than dedicated transactional providers
- ›Some testing features locked to higher plans
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