Mailpit vs MailHog
Active maintenance versus a popular tool that stopped getting updates.
What matters for SaaS product teams
A SaaS product sends on behalf of its customers, so the deciding factors are tenant isolation, whether suppressions can be scoped rather than global, and whether support can answer why one specific account did not receive one specific email. Lifecycle automation and transactional sending usually need to coexist.
| Priority | Mailpit | MailHog |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-tenant | No | No |
| Event stream | No | No |
| Suppressions API | No | No |
| Operating since | Not published | Not published |
| Scheduling | No | No |
| Best published rate per 1,000 | Tiers not published in comparable form | Tiers not published in comparable form |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| Webhooks | No | No |
| Starts at | Free | Free |
For a multi-tenant SaaS product running trial expiry notices, dunning, onboarding sequences, and per-tenant transactional mail, 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. On entry price, Mailpit offers Free against Free from MailHog. That ordering reflects this audience. Weigh the same table differently and the answer changes.
Side by side
| Feature | Mailpit | MailHog |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-tenant | No | No |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| Webhooks | No | No |
| Starts at | Free | Free |
| Tagline | Modern local SMTP catcher. | Classic local SMTP catcher (unmaintained since 2020). |
| Free tier | Free, MIT-licensed | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Pricing model | self-hosted | self-hosted |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes | Yes |
| SDKs | None | None |
| Templates | none | none |
| React Email | No | No |
| Inbound | 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
- ›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
MailHog
- ›Familiar from years of tutorials and boilerplates
- ›Single Go binary with a Docker image and a chaos-testing mode
- ›No meaningful releases since 2020
- ›HTML and modern CSS rendering trails current email clients
- ›Open issues and pull requests are effectively unattended