Mailjet Alternatives (2026): 9 Email Platforms Compared

Which half of your sending matters more?

Mailjet does two jobs on one account: marketing campaigns and the transactional email your app or shop triggers, such as receipts and password resets. Most alternatives are strong at one of those and adequate at the other, so the right replacement is the one built for the half you send most.

Look at a typical month. If sign-ups, order confirmations and alerts make up the bulk of it, you're mostly transactional. If it's newsletters, promotions and nurture sequences, you're a marketer first. Write that down before you open a single pricing page.

The four kinds of tool on this list

Developer-first sending services. An API and SMTP relay, with logs, webhooks and bounce handling. The editor is basic or missing, because your code builds the email. Right for product teams; wrong for a marketer who wants to drag blocks around.

Marketing and automation platforms. A visual builder, lists, segments and automated journeys, with transactional sending bolted on. Right for a small business that sends both kinds and wants one bill.

Newsletter tools. Built for writers and creators who publish an issue, grow a list and maybe charge for it. Light on automation, light on admin, quick to live with.

Self-hosted open source. Full marketing automation you install on your own server. You own the data and avoid lock-in, and in exchange you own the updates, the security and the deliverability.

Hosted, or run it yourself?

That last fork deserves its own minute. Running an open-source automation platform means a server, backups, a cron job that has to keep firing, and someone who knows what to do when a campaign queue stalls at 9pm. You'll still need a sending service behind it, so you often end up paying for a developer-first sending service anyway.

It's a good trade for a team with a developer and a strong reason to keep contact data in-house. For a three-person business that wants to send a newsletter on Tuesday, it's a hobby you didn't ask for.

Nine Mailjet alternatives worth a look

Buttondown

Small, independent newsletter software for writers and creators who'd like to pick a platform once and stay put.

Elastic Email

Puts marketing campaigns, an email API and team messaging under one roof, with an AI template designer in the mix.

Loops

Aimed at SaaS companies, it runs marketing, product and transactional email from the same contact record, starting at the waitlist.

Mailgun

A transactional email API for developers who need to send, receive and track messages from their own code.

Mailtrap

Email delivery over API or SMTP for developer and product teams who want engineers and deliverability people on the support line.

Mautic

Open-source marketing automation you host yourself, with campaign design, email and landing page builders and lead management.

Resend

A developer email API where templates are written as components using the open-source react-email library.

Sender

Email marketing for growing businesses, combining automation, transactional sending and a drag-and-drop builder, plus help moving across from your old platform.

SMTP2GO

An outgoing mail delivery service and API with reporting, built across several data centres to keep sending through outages.

Split the two streams before you move either

Here's the move I'd make whichever tool you pick: send marketing and transactional email from different subdomains, say news.yourdomain and mail.yourdomain. A bad campaign then can't drag your password resets into spam, and you can move one stream at a time instead of both on the same weekend.

It also matters more than it used to. Google's own Gmail announcement says that from February 2024, anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses must authenticate their mail, offer one-click unsubscribe and handle those requests within two days. Before you move, confirm on your shortlisted tool's own help pages that it lets you authenticate your own sending domain, then set that up for each subdomain.

An hour-long deliverability test

Don't choose on the feature grid. Open a free account or trial with your two shortlisted tools and run this, side by side:

1. Add the DNS records each tool asks for on a test subdomain. Note how long the verification takes and how clear the instructions were.
2. Send the same plain message to a Gmail address, an Outlook address and an Apple iCloud address you control.
3. In Gmail, open the message, choose Show original and check that SPF, DKIM and DMARC all say PASS.
4. Note which folder it landed in at each provider: inbox, promotions or spam.
5. Click unsubscribe on the marketing send and check the contact is suppressed in the tool within a few minutes.
6. For the transactional side, trigger one message through the API or SMTP and find it in the tool's logs. If you can't find it quickly, you won't find it during an outage either.

The tool that passes cleanly with the least fiddling is the one your team will keep healthy.

What moves across, and what you rebuild

Contacts export as a file from nearly any platform, so that part's easy. The things that get lost are the suppression list (people who unsubscribed or bounced), custom fields, template HTML, automation logic and the webhooks your app listens to. Export the suppression list first and import it before you send a single message from the new tool. Mailing someone who unsubscribed is the fastest way to wreck a new account's reputation.

Automations rarely transfer. Screenshot each one, write down its triggers and delays, and rebuild it by hand. It's a good moment to delete the ones nobody remembers setting up.

What it costs, roughly

None of the nine pages read for this list gave a figure I'd stand behind, so here's what drives the bill instead. Marketing platforms usually charge by the number of contacts on your list, which means a big, cold list costs you money every month. Developer-first services usually charge by the volume of email sent, which suits an app with lots of users and a modest send count. The self-hosted route has no licence fee but real costs in hosting, a sending service and somebody's time.

Several of these nine mention a free plan or free open-source software on their own sites, but terms move, so read the current page before you count on it. Treat a free tier as a test bed rather than a home: limits on sends, branding and support tend to bite just as you start to grow.

Which type I'd pick

App or SaaS product where most mail is triggered by code? A developer-first sending service, with a newsletter tool or a light marketing platform alongside for campaigns. Small business sending both kinds and wanting one login? An all-in-one marketing platform with transactional sending included. Writer or creator? A newsletter tool, and keep life simple. Developer on staff and a reason to keep data in-house? The self-hosted open-source route, paired with a delivery service.

If newsletters are your main job, my list of EmailOctopus alternatives covers more creator tools, the MailerLite alternatives page goes wider on small-business campaigns, and my guide to email marketing software for small businesses starts from scratch.

Do you make email sending or newsletter software? Tool makers can ask to be considered for a featured place on this list.

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Frequently asked questions

Is Sinch Mailjet the same as Mailjet?

Yes. Mailjet's own site now carries the Sinch Mailjet name, so older and newer articles may use different names for the same product.

Can I run two email tools at once during the switch?

Yes, and it's the safer way to move. Keep the old tool sending one stream while the new one warms up on a separate subdomain, then cut over once its sends land in the inbox reliably.