Mailpit vs MailHog
Active maintenance versus a popular tool that stopped getting updates.
What matters for developers picking email infrastructure
The question here is which one a backend engineer would rather operate. That means SDK depth in the language already in use, whether a retry can safely be replayed, how much the event log tells you when a customer says the email never arrived, and whether the pricing curve stays sane as volume grows.
| Priority | Mailpit | MailHog |
|---|---|---|
| DX score | 9/10 | 5/10 |
| SDKs | None | None |
| Idempotency keys | No | No |
| Operating since | Not published | Not published |
| Event stream | No | No |
| Best published rate per 1,000 | Tiers not published in comparable form | Tiers not published in comparable form |
| Webhooks | No | No |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| Free tier | Free, MIT-licensed | Free, MIT-licensed |
For a developer-owned stack running password resets, receipts, and magic links shipped from application code, Mailpit takes every priority that separates them here (developer experience), while MailHog matches it on the rest. On free tier, Mailpit offers Free, MIT-licensed against Free, MIT-licensed from MailHog. That ordering reflects this audience. Weigh the same table differently and the answer changes.
Side by side
| Feature | Mailpit | MailHog |
|---|---|---|
| DX score | 9/10 | 5/10 |
| SDKs | None | None |
| Webhooks | No | No |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| Free tier | Free, MIT-licensed | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Tagline | Modern local SMTP catcher. | Classic local SMTP catcher (unmaintained since 2020). |
| 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 |
| 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