Mailtrap is a platform designed to help businesses improve how they test, send, and control emails. Use it to build better marketing campaigns, inspect and debug messages before a campaign begins, and ensure better deliverability through features like a dedicated IP and suppression list segmentation.
If you’re considering Mailtrap for your business, read this guide first. You’ll discover the pros and cons of Mailtrap, as well as its features, pricing, and best use cases.
Mailtrap: The Good and the Bad
Our research team analyzed real user reviews of Mailtrap and the platform itself to identify this email solution’s strengths and weaknesses. Read on to learn more about what Mailtrap does best and where it can use some improvements.
What Mailtrap Is Good At
Mailtrap shines with its email testing tools and ability to help businesses to maintain a positive domain reputation. It’s developer-friendly and delivers useful critical alerts and weekly reports.
Email testing: Mailtrap’s ability to test and evaluate emails is its biggest strength and the most common praise we found in user reviews. You can create a testing environment with ease then test anything having to do with emails and campaigns without accidentally sending messages to real recipients.
This gives you a safe setting to make design and copy changes, tweak placement of elements, analyze source code, test deliverability, gauge the functionality of messages with dynamic, personalized, or shoppable content, and a whole lot more. You’ll also get persistent storage of revisions and originals to compare changes, plus collaborate with creatives and other stakeholders right within Mailtrap.
Domain reputation: The biggest concern with emails is deliverability and a big part of making sure messages show up in recipients’ mailboxes is maintaining a positive domain reputation. But test messages and the like can hurt your domain if you don’t have an isolated staging and testing environment. Mailtrap redirects test emails to fake accounts so nobody gets spammed and your domain’s reputation doesn’t get dinged. There are also additional safeguards in place to ensure customers aren’t receiving emails from the development environment.
With Business tier subscriptions and higher for the Email Sending platform, Mailtrap also provides you with a dedicated IP and automatic IP. This feature gives businesses even more control over domain authority and further protects the reputation of their domains.
Quality assurance (QA) automation: Admins love Mailtrap’s ability to test complex email sequences that goes beyond determining if emails are being sent and delivered. The testing API also helps you verify that headers, subjects, attachments, body structure, and other elements meet quality standards or other metrics.
You can use Mailtrap to create and launch automated sequences for email tests, as well. When results are confirmed to meet standards, approvals happen automatically and move the campaign closer to launch, which saves a significant amount of time for QA teams.
API freedom: When looking through Mailtrap user reviews, the job titles really stand out—especially for the positive comments. The platform seems universally loved by senior software developers, senior DevOps engineers, full-stack developers, CTOs, and IT project managers. All of these people’s reviews express how seamless the API is and how Mailtrap has been an excellent addition to their development toolkits.
Mailtrap helps developers build seamless integrations swiftly in unique testing environments. This is especially useful for mid-market and enterprise organizations that aren’t using cookie-cutter tools for their email needs. Mailtrap adapts well to different infrastructures and provides a pleasant experience for developers and engineers.
Visibility: In addition to Mailtrap’s robust testing capabilities, the platform also sends weekly reports with valuable comparison metrics. Development and QA teams can quickly identify trends and share those insights with marketers and stakeholders. If key metrics suddenly drop, Mailtrap will notify you right away with a critical notification.
Several reviewers mentioned how helpful these alerts are. They help save time since developers don’t feel like they need to constantly monitor things and manually check for bugs. They also get peace of mind, knowing that Mailtrap will notify them if there’s an emergent issue that needs to be addressed.
What Mailtrap Is Lacking
Mailtrap isn’t user-friendly for people without a technical background and it has some key limitations that may be deal-breakers for some prospective users.
User-friendliness: The average user or marketer may find themselves a bit lost within Mailtrap. As opposed to other email deliverability and testing platforms for use cases they’re more familiar with, Mailtrip is really designed for developers and quality assurance teams. It does have the ability to accommodate marketing teams, but it can only be used to its full potential if they’re collaborating with developers.
If you’re not comfortable debugging scripts and HTML templates or running automated tests with a sandbox API, then Mailtrap isn’t for you. It’s just too complex for non-technical users and businesses without dedicated IT resources. Just make sure you assess your technical limitations before you get started.
History logs: There are several reviews from Mailtrap users saying how useful the history logs are. This feature allows businesses to go back and assess what’s working, what’s not working, and how they’ve improved over time. It’s also really helpful for managing spam ratings and assessing your performance against goals, KPIs, and benchmarks.
However, the history logs only store information for up to 60 days—and that’s only available with Mailtrap’s Enterprise sending plan or higher, which starts at $750 per month for 1.5 million emails. If you’re on a Business or Individual plan, your history log is limited to just 30 or seven days, respectively. It would be nice to see those logs extended to six months or a year.
Free trial: To be clear, Mailtrap does have a free-forever version of its platform. But it’s extremely limited, and several user reviews mention that the free tier doesn’t really allow them to adequately test the platform out before committing to a paid plan. It’s limited to just 100 test emails per month and only allows up to 50 emails in your Mailtrap inboxes for a single project.
Mailtrap doesn’t give you the option to test its other plans with a free trial. Giving users the ability to try a Team or Business plan for a week or two would give them a better indication of how the platform works, whether they’ll be comfortable using it, and what they can possibly achieve by using Mailtrap.
Mailtrap Pricing & Options
Mailtrap has two main product offerings—each with their own separate pricing and plan tiers. The first option is its email testing solution, which is designed for analyzing emails, validating HTML/CSS, and running tests in staging and development environments. Mailtrap also has an email sending platform, which is an email API/SMTP service that creates an infrastructure designed to ensure higher deliverability rates.
For businesses interested in using Mailtrap, you can decide to use just one of these solutions or both of them together. It all depends on your specific needs and what you’re trying to achieve. We’ll break down and review the features, pricing, and use cases for both solutions in greater detail below.
Mailtrap Email Testing
Mailtrap has a highly versatile email testing solution that’s used to automate test flows through a flexible API. Teams can automate testing processes through unlimited API calls, and you can send test emails directly through your company’s CRM or email platform.
The platform works for simulating different tests to multiple recipients, and it’s a great way to organize all of your testing data in one place.
Mailtrap lets you create different inboxes for each environment, or you can review different servers and group them into unique projects. The options are really flexible for testing needs.
You can set up your email tests in less than five minutes. Mailtrap works with any framework or app that supports SMTP.
Simply select your integration from over 20 different code samples or copy your SMTP credentials before pasting the configuration to your project. From there, you can run an email sending code and instantly receive messages to your inbox for tests.
Mailtrap can be used by different teams within an organization to solve different problems. For example, one team of developers can use Mailtrap’s test to experiment with sending functionality, run automated checks with the sandbox API, verify different aspects of an email, or use it to debug sending scripts or HTML templates.
Meanwhile, quality assurance teams can set up automated testing and run safe tests in a staging environment. They can also use it to compare revised email versions with previous ones to see which version performs better.
While Mailtrap does require technical expertise, it can still be used by marketers and managers—as long as they’re collaborating with software engineers or QA teams familiar with coding and API usage. Marketers can send test emails directly from CRMs and other sending tools, and it’s easy for developers to share reports and insights.
Here’s a quick overview of the Mailtrap Email Testing plans and prices:
- Individual — $14.99 per month
- Team — $34.99 per month
- Business — $64.99 per month
- Premium — $129.99 per month
- Enterprise — $399.99 per month
To get the most out of Mailtrap, you’ll likely want to start with the Business tier or higher. This plan comes with 50,000 tests per month, 40 inboxes, and 2,000 forwards per month. It also supports messages up to 15 MB and accommodates up to 40 unique projects.
Mailtrap does offer a free forever plan, but it’s very limited in terms of the features you can access.
Sign up for free to get started, and save 20% with an annual subscription.
Mailtrap Email Sending
Mailtrap’s email sending service is designed to give organizations more control over their email infrastructure and improve the performance of messages and campaigns. It comes with extensive analytical insights and KPIs to help manage and monitor your company’s most important metrics.
The platform works with all major mailbox providers, including Gmail, Google Workspace, Outlook, Office 365, and more.
One standout feature of Mailtrap’s sending service is its dashboard. This provides a bird’s-eye overview of your deliverability numbers, which makes it easier to identify problems and debug potential issues.
Mailtrap sends your team weekly reports to help you measure and keep tabs on your performance. It also provides critical alerts, delivered in real time, if key metrics suddenly drop.
To get started with Mailtrap’s sending platform, the first thing you need to do is verify your domain with your DNS records. Then, you can integrate the two using the SMTP integration or Mailtrap API.
If you’re sending more than 100,000 emails per month, Mailtrap will provide you with a dedicated IP for your business. You can also use the platform for suppression lists and recording key events, like hard bounces, spam complaints, and opt-outs.
You’ll need a developer to manage this platform for you, as it’s not designed for non-technical users. Your developers should also keep a close eye on Mailtrap’s API documentation, which is constantly updated. It can sometimes be a bit of a pain to read through everything when these documents are revised in any way, but it’s nice knowing that they’re always making improvements to the platform.
Pricing for Mailtrap Email Sending is based on two things—plan tier and emails sent per month. Here’s a look at some of the rates to give you a better understanding of the cost structure:
- Individual — $10 per month for up to 10,000 emails
- Individual — $14 per month for up to 40,000 emails
- Individual — $30 per month for up to 100,000 emails
- Business — $85 per month for up to 100,000 emails
- Business — $200 per month for up to 250,000 emails
- Business — $300 per month for up to 500,000 emails
- Enterprise — $750 per month for up to 1.5 million emails
As you can see, there are a couple different options for getting a plan that lets you send a certain amount of emails. For example, if you want to send up to 100,000 emails per month, there’s a $55 price difference between the Individual and Business plans that allow for that many sends.
So, what’s the difference? A few key features are unlocked on higher-tier plans. For one thing, the Individual plan does not allow you access to a dedicated IP nor the ability to have multiple team members on your Mailtrap account—both of which come with the Business and Enterprise plans.
The major difference, though, is the provided email log history. The Individual tier has a restrictive 15-day limit on its log, while the Business and Enterprise tiers have 30 and 60-day logs, respectively.
Organizations that want to send over five million emails per month can reach out to Mailtrap for custom pricing. There’s also a free forever plan that supports up to 1,000 emails per month.
Summary
Overall, Mailtrap is a quality tool for developers and QA teams that need an improved way to test, send, and gain more control over emails, both in terms of infrastructure and campaign performance. It can be used for testing alone, email sending, or both. We recommend it particularly for organizations with dedicated IT resources that send a high volume of emails with complex sequences. Sign up for free to get started.
