MailgunvsSendinblue

Overview

Mailgun is a transactional email API for developers. Engineering teams use it to send password resets, order confirmations, and application notifications via SMTP or REST API, with delivery logs, bounce handling, and email validation tools built for technical operations.

Sendinblue, now rebranded as Brevo, is an all-in-one email marketing and CRM platform. Small businesses and marketing teams use it for newsletter campaigns, transactional emails, SMS marketing, chat, and basic CRM — in a single platform accessible without engineering involvement.

These tools can overlap — both send transactional email — but they are designed for fundamentally different users. Mailgun is built for developers integrating email into applications. Brevo is built for marketing teams running campaigns and automations without engineering dependency.

Feature Comparison

Mailgun is API-first. Integration happens in code: you authenticate, construct your API call or SMTP connection, and send. The dashboard shows delivery logs, domain reputation metrics, bounce classification, and engagement data. Mailgun's email validation API lets you check whether an email address is likely deliverable before sending — useful for reducing bounce rates in sign-up flows. Inbound email routing can receive messages on your domain and forward them to a webhook.

Mailgun does not have a visual campaign builder, audience segmentation by non-technical users, SMS marketing, or built-in marketing automation workflows. It is infrastructure for sending email, not a marketing tool.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) has a drag-and-drop email campaign builder, audience segmentation, marketing automation workflows (triggered by user behavior or time-based conditions), transactional email sending via API or SMTP, SMS marketing, and a basic CRM for managing contacts and deals. Non-technical users can build, schedule, and analyze campaigns entirely within the Brevo interface.

Brevo's transactional email feature is capable but its primary identity is the marketing automation platform. The transactional sending quality is generally acceptable for small to mid-volume use cases. Teams with strict transactional deliverability requirements for high-volume SaaS products tend to reach for purpose-built transactional services like Mailgun, Postmark, or Amazon SES rather than marketing platforms.

Pricing Comparison

Brevo's free plan allows 300 emails per day (9,000 per month) with unlimited contacts. Starter at $25 per month covers 20,000 emails per month. Business at $65 per month adds marketing automation, A/B testing, and advanced reporting. Verify current pricing at brevo.com.

Mailgun's free plan allows 100 emails per day. Foundation at $35 per month covers 50,000 emails. Growth at $80 per month covers 100,000 emails with 30-day log storage.

For a small business primarily sending newsletters, Brevo's free and Starter tiers offer significantly more email volume per dollar than Mailgun's pricing, plus the campaign builder and automation included. For a developer needing transactional email API access at high volume, Mailgun's pricing per email becomes competitive.

Best For

Mailgun fits development teams building transactional email into applications: SaaS products, e-commerce platforms, and developer tools where email is a system function rather than a marketing channel. The API-first design, email validation, and inbound routing serve engineering use cases that Brevo does not cover.

Brevo fits small businesses and marketing teams that need to send newsletters, run automated email sequences, and manage a contact list — without needing engineering help for each campaign. The free plan is genuinely useful for early-stage businesses with moderate email volume. If SMS, live chat, and basic CRM are also needed in one tool, Brevo covers the surface area affordably.

Verdict

Winner: Tie — different tools for different teams.

Mailgun is an email infrastructure tool. Brevo is a marketing operations platform. The overlap is that both can send transactional email, but that is not the core value proposition of either.

Choose Mailgun if you are an engineer building email sending into a product and need API-first infrastructure with deliverability tooling. Choose Brevo if you are a marketer or small business owner who wants to run email campaigns, automation, and basic CRM from a single accessible platform without writing code.

For a startup that needs both transactional email for the product and marketing email for campaigns, using both is not uncommon: Mailgun or Postmark for transactional, Brevo or Mailchimp for campaigns.