Mailtrap review: pricing, features, pros & cons. Everything you need to know.

When you search for email platforms, the chances are that both Google and YouTube will give you more than two dozen results. Among them, you’ll likely see the Mailtrap Email Platform.

The platform is well-known in the community for its high inboxing rates and fast delivery, receiving praise on the most popular user-review platforms. But, does it hold true to its advertisements and what its user base says about it?

Over at GetResponse, as we leave nothing to chance, we got together to put this email platform to work and see how it delivers in action, so you can decide whether it’s a good fit for your business.

1. TL/DR—Our Mailtrap review summarized

After spending hours and hours analyzing around a hundred Mailtrap reviews and testing out the platform and its features, here are our findings.

All in all, the platform is well-received by its users and seems to help them send transactional and bulk emails at scale. People seem to be able to integrate it easily with their applications and projects, which we confirmed as well. And, if they get stuck, Mailtrap’s customer service seems reliable and willing to help.

Of course, it has some downsides. It’s not the best when it comes to marketing automation, it has limited integrations, and you can’t reach its support team via phone.

Long story short, here’s a little table for your convenience so you can get a better idea of what Mailtrap is all about:

Pros	Cons
High inboxing rates	Basic workflow builder
Fast email delivery	Limited third-party integrations
Industry best analytics	Support cannot be reached via phone
Safe and fast scaling	Analytics not deep for multi-step journeys
24/7 expert support	Dedicated IPs are on the Business plan
Flexible RESTful email API	New accounts have throttling of 200 emails/hour
SMTP relay with 25+ pre-made code snippets	Lower-tier plans have restricted log retention periods
Major SDKs (Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Python, Elixir, and Java)	Free plan offers limited contacts
Email Templates API	No dedicated A/B testing functionality

2. How we reviewed Mailtrap

Before we dive in, a quick disclaimer: the point of this review is not to put Mailtrap in a bad spotlight or position our product as the better option. Badmouthing other email platforms is not how we do it at GetResponse.

Our goal is to give you a detailed and, most importantly, unbiased breakdown of Mailtrap so you can see whether it’s suitable for your use case or not. As a reader of our blog, we appreciate you and support your efforts to grow a successful business. We’re here to help, not get in the way. 

And, since every team out there has different needs and requirements to get their job done efficiently, why not consider all alternatives that might offer features we don’t?

So, brace yourself for a ride, it’s not going to be a short one.

For this article, we’ve read about a hundred Mailtrap user reviews and analyzed each of them to get a consensus of what people think of the platform. This way, we felt we’d have most success knowing how it helped them achieve their goals, what some of its advantages and disadvantages are, and so on.

Of course, we didn’t cheap out for this review, so we asked our procurement team for a little Mailtrap subscription. This way, we could use all the platform’s features to the fullest and see how the paid users feel. And don’t worry, we didn’t forget about the free plan.

So, what you have in front of you is the result of analyzing and quite some hours of testing by our team of marketing experts who put Mailtrap to work.

3. Quick overview: What is Mailtrap?

Mailtrap is a modern email platform for developers and product teams. It provides a RESTful email API and SMTP service focused on high deliverability and fast delivery.

Along with email API and SMTP, you also get many email marketing features you can use to create campaigns and get them off the ground.

In other words, the platform gives you the deliverability tools to send both transactional and bulk emails.

4. Pricing – How much does Mailtrap cost?

The free trial lasts forever, lets you send up to 3,500 emails/month or 150/day, and store 100 contacts. To register an account, you don’t need to provide your credit card details, and you can simply log in via Google, GitHub, or Office 365 accounts. 

What’s the downside?

Although you can send a decent amount of transactional emails with the free plan, you are limited to only 100 contacts. Moreover, the free plan accounts can only have one user and don’t allow team members.

What if the sending limits are exceeded on the free plan?

If you’re a free user and you send more than 3,500 emails in one month or go over the daily limit of 150 emails per day, your emails will be rejected and not sent.

However, even the basic paid plans give you a hefty sending allowance, starting with 10,000 emails per month and up to 50,000 contacts. Of course, there is also a slider that lets you select the number of emails you want to send monthly, giving you extra room for flexibility and scaling.

It’s also important that you can send unlimited emails per day, with the hourly limit starting at 600 emails, although it can be raised.

So how much will it cost me exactly?

Mailtrap offers its users four different plans:

• Free
• Basic
• Business (most popular)
• Enterprise

Let’s say that you want to send 10,000 emails per month to the same number of contacts. In that case, you’ll pay just $15 per month. On the other hand, if you plan to send 100,000 emails/month, you can either choose the Basic ($30) or Business ($85) plans, depending on how advanced features you need.

Mailtrap Price List

• Free: You can send up to 3,500 emails from your app/project and a limited number of marketing emails since you can have only 100 contacts. But, at least, your emails won’t have Mailtrap branding.
• Basic: The starter pricing plan lets you send between 10,000 and 100,000 emails, and store up to 50,000 contacts. However, it lacks some advanced features like dedicated IPs and keeps your email logs only for 5 days. The biggest downside is that you’ll be able to contact the customer support team only via email, Monday through Friday.
• Business: Being priced at $85/month for 100,000 emails and up to 750,000 contacts, this plan sits right in the golden middle. It includes everything from the basic features, like in-depth analytics, to advanced stuff, such as dedicated IPs, SSO, and priority 24/7 support that you can contact via live chat. Additionally, bootstrappers and indie hackers get a 35% lifetime discount for this plan.
• Enterprise: The plan for users who wish to send 750,000 emails per month or more, while having all the features Mailtrap can offer.

Note that if you’re a big sender, you can talk to Mailtrap’s sales team and agree on custom pricing. You’ll also get a deliverability manager, onboarding assistance, unlimited user seats, and more.

5. Mailtrap’s online reviews

To provide you with a fair and unbiased review of Mailtrap, we’ve gone over almost a hundred reviews on G2.com.

Based on our research, we’ve found that Mailtrap has mostly positive reviews and is pretty well-received by the community.

How does Mailtrap help?

When it comes to sending transactional emails and bulk emails via a flexible API and SMTP, Mailtrap seems to knock it out of the park with high inboxing rates and fast delivery.

Here’s a treemap that summarizes the positive remarks from users who were asked how Mailtrap helped their businesses.

As you can see, most users acknowledge Mailtrap’s email deliverability features, developer experience, and its expert support.

And how did Mailtrap help its clients achieve their goals? For instance, a client from the FinTech industry remarked that Mailtrap ensured fast and reliable delivery of their KYC emails, account notifications, and other important user-triggered messages:

Another user said that they use Mailtrap to send high volumes of transactional emails and that they maintain a clean separation from their bulk infrastructure. We’re guessing they achieve this using the platform’s separate sending streams, but more on that later.

Then, there is a user who says they use the platform to track whether their emails have been delivered or not:

Basically, Mailtrap seems to be a reliable and flexible transactional email service not only for small-to-medium-sized businesses but also high-volume senders.

What do users like about it?

Mailtrap users think it’s an affordable tool that has an intuitive setup with responsive customer support. They also appreciate its deliverability, major SDKs, and smooth integration, among other things.

Here’s a cool little bubble chart that summarizes some of the user impressions:

Many users point out how Mailtrap’s SMTP is easy to integrate and that it reliably delivers their transactional emails. For instance:

Of course, the platform’s customer support team has received a lot of praise as well:

What do users dislike about Mailtrap?

Obviously, people like the platform and mostly have positive things to say. But, as with everything in life, even for Mailtrap, it’s not all milk and honey.

Some of the most common negative remarks I’ve noticed about the platform are that it has simple automations, no A/B testing, or that its analytics aren’t deep enough for advanced marketing, which you can see from the bubble chart below.

To some extent, comments about its basic automation builder are to be expected, since Mailtrap is a platform focused on providing services to developers.

On the other hand, if it’s geared towards developers, why do some users have an issue with its documentation? However, if it’s updated often, it can pass as a minor issue.

We have also seen some remarks about the fact that Mailtrap’s servers are based in the US, which can be an issue if you want to comply with regional regulations. But, we’ve also found that Mailtrap is compliant with GDPR, so there’s that.

Some users also have an issue with the free account having a limit on the number of emails you are able to send (3,500 emails/month).

When you look at the big picture, users didn’t like the lack of email marketing features, and that they had to use their own solutions for integrations, automations, and A/B testing. However, Mailtrap is a service geared for developers, so we’ve decided to cut them some slack here.

User reviews’ summary 

Based on our breakdown of Mailtrap reviews, users seem to love it, but, of course, it has its downsides. Overall, it’s great for sending transactional emails, it’s intuitive, and it can help you keep track of your deliverability, even improve it.

However, if you’re an advanced email marketer who needs to automate multi-step journeys or integrate your app or project with a CRM, you might have to look elsewhere.

Additionally, if you want to use Mailtrap as a free solution, you might find it a bit limited in features, since it has live chat with customer support and dedicated IPs reserved for paid plans.

To sum it up: the platform nails transactional emails, but falls short when it comes to high-end email marketing or providing free users with the advanced service they’re looking for.

6. In-depth software review

Now, it’s time for us to share our key takeaways after sending emails with Mailtrap and rigorously testing the platform. Our general impression is that the software is pretty straightforward to use, even for junior developers and non-tech-savvy marketers.

The interface is intuitive since there are pre-made code snippets to save you some time setting up transactional emails. On the other hand, launching campaigns follows the typical industry-standard workflow, so it’s a breeze, especially if you’ve used similar services before.

However, domain authentication needs to be done manually, even if you’re using a popular provider like GoDaddy, which can be an issue for some. Luckily, it doesn’t take much time, and Mailtrap is quick to verify your domain.

Here’s what the whole process of sending emails with Mailtrap looks like. 

The Sign-up process

Signing up is seamless, since, like I’ve said, you can use your Gmail, GitHub, or Office 365 accounts. 

Then, things get a bit tricky since you have to manually add the DNS records provided by Mailtrap to your domain provider. There isn’t an option to do it automatically, as with some email service providers, so you need to do it by hand.

Fortunately, Mailtrap provides a bunch of tutorials on their website, both in the form of step-by-step articles as well as videos, if you’re more of a visual learner. For instance, there’s a helpful guide for each of the major domain providers in the market, which is a nice touch.

Once you add your domain, you’ll just need to fill in the compliance form with some basic sender information, which has become an industry standard nowadays. This only took a couple of minutes to complete, and we saw the Verified badge next to our domain, which meant it was ready to start sending emails.

Email API/SMTP

Mailtrap’s major selling point is its email API and SMTP services built for developer teams. If you’re a high-volume sender and if you’re building for scale, speed, and advanced functionality, you’ll need the API. But if you want a simple, yet compatible, solution, go with the SMTP. 

Regardless of which one you choose, the first thing you’ll notice is that you can choose between Transactional and Bulk streams. These are Mailtrap’s dedicated streams, which allow you to send both user-triggered and bulk emails at the same time without noticing a drop in your deliverability rates.

It’s also worth noting that these separate streams are true separate streams, meaning they use their own IP addresses, domains, and infrastructure to send emails. This means you’ll see higher deliverability rates than streams that use a shared infrastructure but isolate sender reputation at the IP level through dedicated IPs.

Moving on from technical jibber-jabber, once you choose your desired sending stream, you’ll see a screen with your SMTP and API credentials. So, to start sending emails, all you need to do is copy/paste them into your configuration, or use one of the code samples provided by Mailtrap, which makes integration super straightforward. 

If you plan to go the API route and automate your email delivery, you’ll be pleased to know that Mailtrap’s email API offers many other features besides sending. For example, you can design, edit, and host templates, manage contacts, connect webhooks, and more.

Once we started sending some transactional emails, we noticed that almost all of them landed straight into the main inbox, in a timely fashion at that, too. Moreover, we first sent them on the free plan, meaning we didn’t have access to dedicated IPs, warm-up, and other deliverability features, but we still achieved high inboxing rates, which are actually there by design, just like Mailtrap advertises.

We were also able to turn on tracking for opened emails and clicks, which showed up as statistics in a separate dashboard, which we cover a bit later in the article. 

You can also hook up Mailtrap’s MCP server to your IDE to send emails or simply smooth out your workflow. We’ve tried it out in Cursor for desktop and it worked like a charm.

So, does Mailtrap Email API/SMTP service get a yes or a no from us? According to how it fared on our tests, it’s a yes. We don’t like the fact that dedicated IPs are locked to the Business plan and that there’s an initial hourly sending limit for new plans, but it did everything as promised. 

Overall, if you’re a developer, we think that you’ll enjoy Mailtrap, regardless of your experience. However, if you’re on a budget and need dedicated IPs or multiple users, or need a plethora of integrations, you might want to look elsewhere.

What we liked	What we did not like
High inboxing rates	Dedicated IPs are on the Business plan
Fast email delivery	Initial hourly throttling of 200 emails/hour for new accounts
Flexible API	Limited third-party integrations
Major SDKs and code snippets	API documentation feels a bit outdated
Email templates API
Separate sending streams
MCP servers

In-depth analytics

Tracking the performance of your emails by observing key metrics like spam, bounce, open rates, etc., has always been important for adhering to all the email marketing laws and regulations.

Moreover, with the 2024 addition of Google and Yahoo authentication changes, as well as 2025 Microsoft bulk-sender regulations, having some email analytics is a non-negotiable.

When it comes to Mailtrap, the platform does a pretty solid job with its analytics dashboard. You get helicopter-view dashboards and drill-down reports where you can track all the most important metrics for all domains or streams together, or separately, as you prefer.

We also liked that we were able to see stats for all major mailbox providers, including Google, Google Workspace, iCloud, Microsoft, and others. 

Additionally, we turned on color coding, which told us how each email performance metric is doing based on Mailtrap’s pre-determined numbers.

We also dug through email logs after sending our test emails to see where they went, their status, template variables, and other technical details. Although the logs are pretty detailed, we don’t like the fact that they are kept only for 3 days on the free plan. And if you want Mailtrap to keep them for 15 or 30 days, you’ll have to subscribe to the platform’s Business or Enterprise plans.

We would also like to mention that you can share your Google Postmaster Tools with Mailtrap’s deliverability team. This way, you can rest easy, since they will observe the dashboards for you, let you know if something is off, and suggest the needed fixes.

In general, Mailtrap’s analytics dashboards tick all modern checkboxes and can fare pretty well among the industry’s best. They’re comprehensive and intuitive, and show all statistics you need to comply with the latest regulations and identify or troubleshoot issues affecting your email performance.

Email marketing and campaigns

Besides an email API and SMTP for developers, Mailtrap also offers various features for marketers. 

However, similarly to MailerLite, before creating your first campaign, you first need to verify your domain. Luckily, as we’ve mentioned already, this doesn’t take too much time with Mailtrap.

The campaign builder is super simple, which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a minimalistic solution to send regular email marketing campaigns, then look no further. But if you want to send RSS, auto-resend, A/B split, or other types of campaigns, you might want to look into a more advanced solution.

You start by entering your desired campaign name, email subject, from name, and other important details. The usual stuff, right? 

You then move on to choosing whether you want to start your design from scratch or based on some of the basic email templates Mailtrap offers. We went with a template and used the drag-and-drop editor to make it according to our liking.

The drag-and-drop builder comes with the usual features: design on the left, elements on the right. You can also preview how your email looks on mobile phones, in dark mode, on different resolutions, etc. 

Also, a super minor thing, but we appreciated the fact that the one-click subscribe button was added automatically to our bulk emails. This way, you can rest assured you don’t break this important regulation imposed by most mailbox providers.

By contrast, the AI features the drag-and-drop email editor offers are solid, but don’t expect a miracle. You can generate buttons, headings, even text and images, which can be helpful if you want some ideas, but as with all things AI, not an result.

So far, the campaign builder has worked flawlessly. We tried out the drag-and-drop editor, the AI tools that came with it, played around with different elements, etc. However, when we wanted to try out the HTML editor, we couldn’t get back to the design screen. Instead, we could only keep editing the one template we’ve made. This might be an issue for some, but you can go past it by creating designs in advance on the dedicated Email Templates page.

Eventually, we created a new template, played around with the HTML editor, and were quite satisfied with it. We also personalized it a bit with user data and previewed it. However, while previewing it for different devices, we realized it doesn’t have the dark-mode preview feature like the drag-and-drop editor, which was a nuance, so to speak. 

When we moved on with the design and chose our Audience, that is, the recipients, or call it as you will, we were presented with a summary of our campaign. On this page, you can edit the campaign details, design, recipients and make any fixes before hitting the Schedule Campaign button.

However, we must note that although you can schedule your email campaigns for up to two weeks in advance, you can’t do it for different time zones. You are only locked to the time zone you are in, but we found out you can go around this by quickly changing the time zone in the user settings.

Also, one of the biggest downsides to Mailtrap’s email marketing capabilities is that it doesn’t provide any features for A/B testing. This means you’ll have to resort to using separate tools for this or analyze the results of different campaigns yourself.

To sum up our impressions regarding Mailtrap’s email marketing features, here’s a nice little table for you:

What we liked	What we didn’t like
Solid drag-and-drop builder	Not yet as feature-packed and ready for large-scale enterprise email marketing
Easy-to-use templates	You can’t schedule campaigns for different time zones
Campaign scheduling	No dark mode preview for HTML email editor
Easy contacts and lists management	No dedicated A/B testing functionality
HTML email builder	Analytics are too simple for advanced email marketing
One-click unsubscribe button included by default in marketing emails
AI helper for generating text, images, headers, and buttons

List management 

For a platform that’s geared towards developers, Mailtrap offers contact management functionality that meets pretty much all industry standards.

You can import your contacts in CSV, and if you don’t have one, the platform offers a template you can use to make it a bit easier for you. Once you import them, you can manage their details by defining Fields (e.g., name, state, country, etc.), which can also be used for personalization. 

You can also create lists on the dedicated page, where you can filter your contacts by many different variables, such as subscriber status or the segment they’re in.

Speaking of segments, if you want to target your audience more specifically, you can do so by basing it on the Fields you previously created and the events like clicks or opens. For instance, if you were to, let’s say, try to drive higher conversions, you can send a targeted campaign to subscribers who have clicked on a promotional link in your previous campaigns.

Integrations

As far as integrations go, they are not Mailtrap’s strongest feature, to say the least. More precisely, the integrations page currently has around 20 of them, if we exclude the SDKs listed there.

Though we have to say that the featured integrations can be super useful, since they include Zapier, which lets you connect Mailtrap to a plethora of apps in just a few clicks, or Make, which you can use for advanced automations.

There are also many integrations with AI-powered tools, such as Lovable or Retool, to name a couple. These can be helpful if you’re a vibe coder or if you want to make an app without any previous coding skills.

Automation

Mailtrap’s automation builder is also one of its weak links, which makes sense since it came out of beta recently. Currently, you can use it to make:

• Welcome series emails
• Onboarding prompts from profile changes
• Event-driven follow-ups
• Segment-based campaigns

You can also trigger event flows by sending API calls, which is a nice touch to bring your transactional and marketing efforts together. 

However, although it’s simple compared to what some of the competitors have to offer, we admit that it gets the job done, especially if you’re looking for a simple tool. You’ve got your usual triggers like ‘contact created’ or ‘contact removed from list,’ actions like ‘send email’ or ‘unsubscribe contact,’ and rules such as time delay and conditional split. All of this is packed in a pretty standard format that can be easily navigated and used without much research.

You can also track the performance of your automations in the Reports tab within the automation builder. This will allow you to see metrics for each step of your sequence, such as the number of recipients who have completed each action, clicks, opens for your emails, etc.

But, if you need advanced automations that can guide your customer through every step of your marketing funnel or that can be connected to other platforms and tools, you should probably check out some alternative options on the market.

Customer support

Finally, we come to customer support, which Mailtrap promotes as one of its top-selling features. And, we have to say, they have earned every right to do so. That is, if the online user reviews are to be trusted. 

Namely, out of one hundred reviews we’ve analyzed, pretty much all of them praise Mailtrap’s customer support team. Take, for example, this small-business owner who says they have received help for setting up transactional emails into their web site.

However, it’s not all roses and daisies. Namely, you can contact the platform’s customer support only via email if you’re on Free and Basic plans, and they’ll be available only Monday through Friday. But if you upgrade to Business plans or higher, you’ll be able to reach them via live chat as well, and even get priority support. Oh, and there is no phone support.

But if you can live with these minor obstacles, we believe that Mailtrap’s customer support will prove reliable.

Do we recommend Mailtrap?

As we reach the end of the article, we sincerely hope that we’ve provided you with enough information on whether Mailtrap is the right solution for your business.

To sum it up, if you are looking for a flexible API/SMTP service with high deliverability rates and you don’t need advanced automations, you should give Mailtrap a go! 

On the other hand, if you need advanced automations, integrations to CRM platforms, or analytics for multi-step journey email marketing, we recommend giving some of the alternatives a go.

Don’t know where to start? Feel free to check out our list of the best newsletter software, which might have some platforms that will tick some marketing boxes for you.