Kickbox is an email verification tool and service from the company of the same name in Dallas.
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Sinch Mailgun
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Mailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.
$35
per month
Pricing
Kickbox
Sinch Mailgun
Editions & Modules
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Foundation
$35
per month
Growth
$80
per month
Scale
$90
per month
Flex
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Kickbox
Sinch Mailgun
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
100 Free Credits
Transparency & Pay-as-You-Go Pricing
No Contracts
Volume Discounts (1M+)
Auto-recharge
Unknown Results are Always Free
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Kickbox
Sinch Mailgun
Considered Both Products
Kickbox
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Kickbox
I like Kickbox output files better as it includes the "domain". Overall, both softwares could do a better job cleaning lists. Kickbox shows more "unknown" emails where are BriteVerify shows less "unknown emails" but then more bad emails end up in the valid list. Kickbox has a …
All three solution we evaluated are compatible and integrated in Google Cloud Platform (the cloud solution we use). We went for Sinch Mailgun since we already used Sinch to handle SMSs, and they are from the same Company.
To be honest, the tools are quite similar and again I dont recommend using them as a standalone products, but they power the work we do via CRMs and our marketing campaigns. Mailgun integrates slightly better which it is why it is the preferred choice for our agency, as it …
We chose Mailgun over SendGrid and Postmark because we really like their API. We have stuck with them because they have never given us any reason to switch. Their reliability is superb and their API remains excellent. SendGrid and Postmark are both good in their own rites, …
They have a great free tier for up to some amount of emails a month. Looks attractive when you are a new startup, but once you have customers and they go down, not so much.
MailGun is more expensive than SparkPost and about the same price-wise as SendGrid. MailGun had a notably easy set-up process, since they are the first SMTP service we signed up with, and their support has been very helpful in identifying deliverability issues, providing …
I chose Mailgun because I work in the healthcare space, and they were the only company I could find that was decent, not over the top expensive, and would sign a BAA.
Not really a con but I typically choose SendGrid over Mailgun simply because I've been using SendGrid for so long. Overall, SendGrid and Mailgun are both rock solid and very affordable. You could probably flip a coin on which one to use. I would definitely look into SendGrid's …
Mailgun was selected by the co-founders and original development team. But once I took over as the head of development and marketing we switched over to the competitor, SendGrid. SendGrid was not only cheaper, but gave us a much more robust product with marketing emails, ads, a …
Amongst the various transactional email vendors (Mandrill by MailChimp, SendGrid's transactional email product, Mailjet, etc.) they are all relatively similar. Mailgun stands out in that it has one of the more generous free tiers and therefore is a strong choice for small …
I've tried SES. It had spotty deliverability and AWS has fiddly docs and apis. I tried a few others and while some worked well, they had neither the exposure or maturity to make me confident in using them in a production app. Out of all the products that I have tried that offer …
I used Mailgun first, and after they weren't able to fix my problems or offer any support I switched to Postmark with lower bounce rates, higher delivery rates with more detailed reporting. Setup is more of a to-do but it's well worth it once you start seeing your bounce rate …
As I mentioned before, even when you do try to validate an email address client side, you have options (see above) BUT and that is the big but, those are mostly a regex solution, but it's not enough. mailgun addresses that exact issue and also looks at the domains, their rules, …
We went with Mailgun because they had fantastic APIs and libraries (Ruby in our case) and because their pricing was among the best of all services that we evaluated.
I previously selected mailgun because of a PHP framework called Laravel. Since I was using that framework, and they had ready examples with mailgun and how to set things up, I went with the flow. It was really easy. Later when I started deploying my services, I was introduced …
I haven't used many other email validation products before, only a couple of 'free' cloud-based options with limited list size capability. Kickbox is super professional, easy to use, and works.
Even with the list of negatives, Mailgun is still a great solution for how easy it is to work with and how ubiquitous it is to find examples and libraries out there on the internet. The company has great support and are usually quick to address and fix things. I do think they have some room for improvement with the lack of templates and the outdated UI log handling/filtering.
Mailgun is used by spammers, and sometimes your assigned mail server will get blacklisted because of other users on it.
If you end up with a mail server that is blacklisted, your mail will go nowhere. And, below the $300 and up pricing tiers, there is no one at Mailgun to help you get this problem resolved. You are just stuck.
In other words, Mailgun is unreliable as a mission-critical service. I would strongly recommend using a service with better processes in place.
The time for the initial setup is very quick, since you can start sending (thus developing) from their sandbox in no time. The actual configuration involves, as usual, some DNS changes that may require time but are well explained and documented. Once everything is set up, there are a lot of monitoring tools that you can use to optimize your lists.
There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.
The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.
MailGun's support staff is both friendly and helpful. They were very instrumental early on with helping out during the setup process by answering questions, providing documentation on best sending practices, detailing information about the advantages of sending from a dedicated IP rather than an IP pool, and helping us to remove ourselves from blacklists.
I like Kickbox output files better as it includes the "domain". Overall, both softwares could do a better job cleaning lists. Kickbox shows more "unknown" emails where are BriteVerify shows less "unknown emails" but then more bad emails end up in the valid list. Kickbox has a higher threshold to put emails in "unknown".
Not really a con but I typically choose SendGrid over Mailgun simply because I've been using SendGrid for so long. Overall, SendGrid and Mailgun are both rock solid and very affordable. You could probably flip a coin on which one to use. I would definitely look into SendGrid's Accelerate Program too.
Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.