head to head
Mailpit vs MailHog
Active maintenance versus a popular tool that stopped getting updates.
What matters for teams choosing a transactional API
Judged purely as an API. What the request contract guarantees on retry, how complete the webhook event coverage is, whether suppressions are readable and writable programmatically, and how much the message log retains when something needs debugging in production.
| Priority | Mailpit | MailHog |
|---|---|---|
| Idempotency keys | No | No |
| Webhooks | No | No |
| Event stream | No | No |
| 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 |
| Batch sending | No | No |
| SDKs | None | None |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
For a transactional workload running high-frequency programmatic sends where a missed delivery is a product failure, 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. That ordering reflects this audience. Weigh the same table differently and the answer changes.
Side by side
| Feature | Mailpit | MailHog |
|---|---|---|
| Webhooks | No | No |
| SDKs | None | None |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| Tagline | Modern local SMTP catcher. | Classic local SMTP catcher (unmaintained since 2020). |
| Free tier | Free, MIT-licensed | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Starts at | Free | Free |
| Pricing model | self-hosted | self-hosted |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes | Yes |
| Templates | none | none |
| React Email | No | No |
| Inbound | No | No |
| Multi-tenant | 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
pros
- ›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
cons
- ›Local development and staging only, not a production sender
- ›No hosted or shared team-inbox mode
MailHog
pros
- ›Familiar from years of tutorials and boilerplates
- ›Single Go binary with a Docker image and a chaos-testing mode
cons
- ›No meaningful releases since 2020
- ›HTML and modern CSS rendering trails current email clients
- ›Open issues and pull requests are effectively unattended