Mailgun vs SendGrid

Reachkit makes a cold email tool, which does a different job from both of these. Every price here was checked in October 2026 on Mailgun’s and Twilio’s own pricing pages.

My verdict: the two are closer than their marketing suggests, and the choice comes down to volume, IPs and support. Both send app email through an API or SMTP relay, both warm dedicated IPs for you on their middle plans, and both require opt-in consent. Mailgun keeps a free plan, includes a dedicated IP at 100,000 emails for $75 and gives unlimited users from $35 a month. SendGrid charges less per email on shared IPs, $19.95 for 50,000, and Twilio sells a newsletter product next to it.

Pick Mailgun if:

• You want a free plan with no end date for a side project or a test environment, at 100 emails a day.
• You want your own IP at 100,000 to 250,000 or around 1 million emails a month, where Mailgun’s plans include one for less.
• Several developers need their own logins on a small plan.

Pick SendGrid if:

• You send roughly 13,000 to 100,000 emails a month and shared IPs are fine.
• You want live chat on an entry plan (Twilio’s 2025 pricing sheet lists it on Essentials).
• You want your own IP at around 300,000, 700,000 or 1.5 to 2.5 million a month, where SendGrid Pro costs less than Mailgun Scale.

Checked October 2026. Prices in USD, billed monthly, from each vendor’s own pages.

Mailgun and SendGrid start the same way: you sign up, verify your own sending domain with DNS records, and point your app at an API or SMTP relay. Mailgun supports SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI on every plan. SendGrid authenticates your domain with SPF and DKIM, and Pro adds reverse DNS.

The real setup difference is what you can do for free. Mailgun’s free plan sends 100 emails a day with no end date, on one custom domain, with one user and a day of logs, and it needs no card. Twilio retired SendGrid’s free plans in 2025, so new accounts get a 60-day trial at 100 a day, no card, though Twilio’s pricing pages still say “free plan” in places.

• Paid trials: Mailgun’s Foundation and Scale plans start with a free month.
• Regions: one Mailgun account can send from US or EU data centers. SendGrid’s API docs list a separate EU address for EU regional subusers.
• API or SMTP: both offer either. Mailgun’s own FAQ recommends the HTTP API for apps because it’s “much more reliable at scale”.

Both companies can pause or suspend an account under their policies, so I’d open the account and send real traffic through it well before launch day.

Mailgun and SendGrid both start you on shared IP addresses and move you to your own IP as you grow, and the price of that step is where they differ most. Mailgun includes one dedicated IP from Foundation 100k ($75) and on every Scale tier, with automated IP warmup from Foundation. SendGrid includes one from Pro ($89.95 for 100,000), with automated warmup and IP pools.

Extra IPs cost $59 a month at Mailgun and $30 at SendGrid. Twilio’s help center advises at least two dedicated IPs once you reach 200,000 to 300,000 emails a month, which narrows Mailgun’s lead at that volume.

The monitoring tools are packaged differently:

• SendGrid gives every plan an Engagement Quality score from 1 to 5 through its API, built from bounces, spam rate, opens and how recently people engaged. You need open tracking on and 1,000 messages sent in the last 30 days. Pro adds 2,500 address validations and 60 email testing credits a month.
• Mailgun sells monitoring as Optimize: $49 a month for 25 placement tests and 2,500 validations, or $99 adding spam trap and blocklist monitoring plus Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS data. Scale includes 5,000 validations.

The rules differ in detail too. Mailgun’s acceptable use policy publishes limits: bounces at or under 5%, unsubscribes at or under 1.4% and spam complaints at or under 0.08%. Twilio’s Email Policy sets no numeric limits, but it requires you to keep proof of every consent.

Mailgun gives more seats for less, and SendGrid keeps logs longer on its entry plan. On Mailgun, Free and Basic allow one user and one day of logs, and Foundation ($35) opens unlimited users and five days. On SendGrid, Essentials allows one teammate with three days of searchable activity, and Pro allows up to 1,000 teammates with seven days. Mailgun Scale keeps 30.

Neither is a mailbox. Mailgun’s inbound routes forward incoming mail or post it to your app, with one route on Free, five on Basic and full routing from Foundation. SendGrid’s Inbound Parse webhook posts incoming mail to your app. Neither gives you a shared inbox to read replies in.

Support is where the plans split:

• Mailgun: tickets on Free, Basic and Foundation. Live phone and chat start on Scale, at $90 a month.
• SendGrid: Twilio’s 2025 pricing sheet lists ticket and chat support on Essentials, phone from Pro and prioritized support on Premier.

For a SaaS that sends for many customers, SendGrid’s subusers on Pro keep each customer’s sending apart. Mailgun reserves subaccounts for contract plans, but allows 1,000 sending domains on one account from Foundation.

Mailgun has more AI tooling than SendGrid, though neither writes your emails. Mailgun’s Scale plan includes send time optimization, which Mailgun describes as AI-driven: it picks when to deliver each email based on how that recipient engages. Twilio wrote in March 2026 that “SendGrid doesn’t offer native AI tools”.

For AI assistants, the gap is wider. MCP is an open standard that lets Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants work inside other apps.

• Mailgun publishes an official open-source MCP server. It runs on your own machine, exposes 50+ operations including sending, and leaves out delete operations. Its docs connector for Claude needs no account.
• Twilio’s official MCP server is in public beta and read-only: it searches SendGrid docs and support articles but doesn’t call the API for you. Community-built SendGrid servers exist, and Twilio’s developer blog hosts a tutorial for building one.

Both expose REST APIs, SMTP relay, SDKs and event webhooks. SendGrid’s plans set the event webhook count (two on Essentials, five on Pro). Mailgun adds role-based API keys from Foundation and account-level webhooks since February 2026.

Mailgun and SendGrid each sit inside a bigger email lineup, which matters if you send more than app mail. Twilio, which bought SendGrid for about $3 billion in 2019, sells Marketing Campaigns as its own subscription, priced by contacts stored and emails sent: Basic starts at $15 a month for 5,000 contacts and 15,000 sends. Sinch, which has owned Mailgun since 2021, groups it with Mailjet and Email on Acid, and sells Mailgun Optimize, Validate and Inspect as add-ons.

Twilio also launched Twilio Email in May 2026, built on the same infrastructure as SendGrid, at $0.0013 per email with no monthly fee. Twilio calls the two “separate tools for different purposes”. At 3,000 emails a month it costs $3.90, against $19.95 for SendGrid Essentials and $0 on Mailgun’s free plan.

Each vendor publishes a page comparing itself with the other, and both read as sales pages:

• Mailgun’s page rightly points to its free plan against SendGrid’s 60 days. Its ratings table lists Trustpilot at 4.3 for Mailgun and 1.2 for SendGrid, while Trustpilot showed 4.1 and 1.1 in mid-October 2026, and its own price table puts SendGrid lower at 50,000 emails.
• Twilio’s page says Mailgun splits sending and optimization into separate products, which matches Mailgun’s pricing pages. It cites no Mailgun prices, and it claims more than 183 billion emails a month where Twilio’s product page says 205 billion.

Mailgun costs less at the bottom and SendGrid on shared IPs in the middle. With a dedicated IP, the cheaper one changes from tier to tier.

Assumptions: list prices billed monthly, checked October 2026 on each vendor’s public pricing page; the cheapest plan that covers the volume, or a smaller plan plus overage where that costs less; no add-ons. SendGrid’s overage rates come from Twilio’s 2025 pricing sheet.

Three things move these numbers:

• A second IP at 250,000, as Twilio advises, adds $59 at Mailgun ($274) and $30 at SendGrid ($279).
• Shared IPs at 250,000 on SendGrid: Essentials 100k plus overage comes to $166.95, though Twilio itself says upgrading usually beats paying overages.
• Validations: 10,000 checks cost $100 on Mailgun Basic or Foundation. SendGrid includes 2,500 with Pro and Mailgun 5,000 with Scale.

Mailgun’s ratings hold steady across review sites, and SendGrid’s split hard between developer sites and Trustpilot. As of October 2026:

• Mailgun: G2 4.2 (321 reviews), Capterra 4.3 (nearly 200), Trustpilot 4.1 (1,539).
• SendGrid: G2 4.0 for the Email API (368), Capterra 4.2 (755), Trustpilot 1.1 (614).

The praise is about the same things: the API, the docs and mail that arrives. G2’s summary credits Mailgun with dependable delivery and an easy integration, and one Capterra reviewer found setup easy for anyone who knows their DNS records. Capterra’s summary counts 89% positive among 45 reviews that mention SendGrid’s developer-friendly API.

The complaints are about accounts and support on both sides. Several Capterra reviewers say Mailgun shut their account off with no warning, one pinning it on “a flawed automated system”, and one found support “extremely slow”. For SendGrid, Capterra’s summary rates 79% negative among 53 reviews that mention account restrictions, support tops Trustpilot’s list of complaints, and an r/SaaS thread objects that SendGrid’s only offer was an upgrade from $20 to $90 a month. Another r/SaaS user still rates it good value “between 10K-50K emails”.

This is our product, and it isn’t a replacement for either one: Reachkit doesn’t send password resets or receipts. If you’re comparing these two to email prospects who never signed up, both policies rule that out. Mailgun’s bans bought, rented or scraped lists, and Twilio’s requires affirmative consent before any email that isn’t transactional.

Reachkit is built for that job instead. You connect your own Google or Microsoft inboxes at no per-inbox fee, or Reachkit registers separate domains ($15 a year) and creates inboxes on them ($5 a month), with AI-written warmup switched on from the start. Plans start at $39 a month (Growth, October 2026) after a 30-day trial with no card. Keep your app’s mail on Mailgun or SendGrid either way (how a cold email setup works).

Moving from Mailgun to SendGrid, or back, is mostly configuration work, because your domain and your data are yours. What carries over and what doesn’t:

• Your domain stays. Add the new provider’s SPF and DKIM records next to the old ones and verify the domain there before you move traffic.
• Suppressions need moving. Export bounces, unsubscribes and complaints from the old account and import them, so you don’t mail people who already left.
• Templates, webhooks and inbound mail need rebuilding. Mailgun’s inbound routes become SendGrid’s Inbound Parse webhook, or the reverse.
• A dedicated IP stays with the old provider, since both rent them by the month. The new one starts with the new provider’s automated warmup.
• Overage is billed a month later on both. Mailgun bills usage at the start of the next month and settles any balance before closing an account; SendGrid bills overage on the following invoice, and upgrading doesn’t cancel it.

Send a slice of your mail through the new provider first. Both vendors offer help: Twilio’s comparison page links a guide for moving from Mailgun, and Mailgun’s offers a migration guide and its deliverability team.

If I were wiring email into an app, I’d decide on two numbers: monthly volume, and whether I need my own IP. For a free sandbox or under about 13,000 emails a month, Mailgun. On shared IPs from there up to 100,000, SendGrid Essentials costs less. Once I wanted a dedicated IP, I’d price my exact volume on both, because the lead swaps between tiers: Mailgun at 100,000, 250,000 and 1 million, SendGrid at 300,000, 700,000 and 2.5 million, and SendGrid once I needed several extra IPs, at $30 each against $59.

Support would tip a close call. Mailgun keeps chat and phone for Scale, and SendGrid’s pricing sheet lists chat from Essentials. Neither tool is for cold email, whatever the price.

More detail: the Mailgun profile, the SendGrid profile, Mailgun alternatives and SendGrid alternatives.