5 Best Email Infrastructure Platforms Compared [2025]

A solid email infrastructure platform is the technical backbone of your sending functionality. With a solid infrastructure, sending messages to your users is a breeze. However, choosing one is not an easy task.

Fortunately for you, in the last couple of weeks, I have interviewed our deliverability experts, developers, as well as marketers, and asked them for recommendations. I tested each email infrastructure provider they recommended, and here are the results!

If you want to skip ahead, you can do so by clicking on some of the following links:

A snapshot of the platforms
Detailed reviews of each platform
In-depth comparison criteria

Ready to deliver your emails?

Try Mailtrap for Free

Best email infrastructure platforms for developers: a snapshot

Click on a platform name to jump ahead to the detailed review.

Mailtrap is the best email infrastructure for developer and product teams who need high inboxing rates, fast email delivery, and 24/7 expert support.
SendGrid is for teams that need a scalable email delivery service with a lot of quality-of-life features.
Mailgun offers developer teams an email infrastructure with detailed email logs, a validation API, and extra features to tweak their sending configuration.
Amazon SES is for experienced developers who are already deep in the AWS ecosystem and want to go easy on their budget.
Postmark offers a minimalistic yet configurable email infrastructure for teams that need to send transactional emails with no extra features.

For your convenience, here’s a quick comparison of the email infrastructure platforms:

Email infrastructure provider	Best for	Free tier	Pricing
Mailtrap	High-volume sending	Up to 3,500 emails/month	From $15 The most popular plan is from $85
SendGrid	Scalable delivery	100 per day	From $19.95
Mailgun	Developer teams	100 per day	From $15
Amazon SES	Teams on a budget	3,000 per month (during the first year)	$0.10 per 1,000 emails
Postmark	Transactional emails	N/A	From $15

Disclaimer: The ratings, features, and prices are up-to-date at the time of writing this article, but they may be different when you’re reading it, as they’re prone to change.

What is an email infrastructure platform?

An email infrastructure platform is a platform that provides you with the tools you need to send and control emails reliably. That is, without having to build and maintain that infrastructure yourself.

Such a platform should allow you to send both transactional (e.g., password resets) and marketing emails, like newsletters and product updates. So, best case scenario: an email infrastructure platform should cater to both developers and marketers, but that’s not always the case.

However, you typically need all bases covered if you are:

Sending a high-volume of emails
A startup or a fast-growing product
In a regulated industry, and you need a reliable email infrastructure

On the other hand, in case you’re a solopreneur with a vibe coding project, you can do well with just an email API or SMTP service.

What to consider when choosing an email infrastructure solution?

Over at Mailtrap, we leave nothing to chance and leave no stone unturned. That’s why, before creating this list, I conducted thorough research and tested each email infrastructure solution I present here.

Documentation research

Before creating an account for each email infrastructure platform, I dug through:

Official API documentation to see how flexible and configurable an email infrastructure is, how many use cases it covers, what it offers, etc.
User reviews and testimonials to have a better idea of what the community thinks about platforms and whether they stay true to their advertised promises.
Blogs and help centers to check if there are any helpful step-by-step tutorials that can help you set up an infrastructure and start sending emails.

Hands-on testing

Once I was done with the extensive documentation research, I verified my sending domains and:

Sent transactional emails since they’re the heart of every email campaign and pretty much mandatory for most businesses nowadays.
Launched email campaigns to see how well I could promote my product and keep in touch with my users. I’ve also played around with contact management.
Tried out email template design tools and personalized my messages as much as I could, testing templating logic and dynamic content along the way.

In the following section, we’ll start with the reviews of each email infrastructure platform. However, if you’re interested in checking out the criteria I used in detail, click here.

Best email infrastructure provider: Mailtrap

G2: 4.8 🌟 Capterra: 4.8 🌟 Trustpilot: 3.5 🌟

Mailtrap is an email platform for developer and product teams that offers high inboxing rates, fast email delivery, and 24/7 expert support. It’s best for digital product companies that need to send transactional and bulk emails at scale.

To achieve high inboxing rates, Mailtrap uses separate sending streams for transactional and bulk emails, dedicated IPs, email warm-up, throttling, and other features.

Most importantly, you’ll see high rates regardless of the plan, since they’re there by design.

Recently, Mailtrap has gone a step further and conducted deliverability tests with the top email infrastructure platforms. We’ve used free plans, didn’t warm up domains, sent the same email template, and covered a few other technical tidbits to make the tests 100% fair. Here’s how Mailtrap performed:

Platform	Email placement results	Spam filter rating	Inbox email delivery with top providers
Mailtrap	Inbox: 78.8% Tabs: 4.8% Spam: 14.4% Missing: 2.0%	Google Spam Filter: Not spam; Not phishy Barracuda: Score 0 Spam Assassin: Score: -3.8	Gmail: 67.50% Outlook: 77.78% Hotmail: 100% Yahoo: 55.56%

Source

However, sending emails without knowing where they are landing would be like shooting in the dark, wouldn’t it? That’s why Mailtrap has helicopter view dashboards and drill-down reports, with which you can track important email metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, etc.

See a discrepancy in your email metrics or simply want to improve their performance? You can do so with the help of Mailtrap’s expert consultants, who can help you with any potential issues or simply give you a hand with email deliverability optimization. Of course, there’s also Mailtrap’s customer support team that works around the clock, which you can reach via tickets or live chat.

Key features:

Strong deliverability features
Fast email delivery
Industry-best analytics
Safe and fast scaling
24/7 expert support
GDPR compliant
ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified
Advanced webhooks
Email marketing suite
Comprehensive API documentation
Integration to MCP servers via Claude, Cursor, or VSC code editor.

Pricing

To help you scale efficiently (and affordably), Mailtrap offers several straightforward pricing plans, along with a slider that lets you choose your monthly email sending volume. Here’s a quick summary table:

Plan	Monthly cost	Email limit	Key features
Free	$0	Up to 3,500 emails	SMTP relay, SMTP API, drag-and-drop editor, webhooks
Basic	From $15	10,000+ emails	Email logs (5 days), body retention, click-rate tracking, HTTPS link branding
Business (the most popular)	From $85	100,000+ emails	Email logs (15 days), dedicated IP, auto warm-up
Enterprise	From $750	1,500,000 emails	All of the above + priority support and 30 days email log retention
Custom	Custom	From 1,500,000	All of the above

For more details, please consult the official Mailtrap pricing page.

Developer experience

Official API documentation

Mailtrap offers easy-to-use SDKs for Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Python, Elixir, and Ja v a.

If you’re a developer, you’ll appreciate Mailtrap for its straightforward approach to email sending. Namely, to start using the platform, all you need to do is verify your domain and copy/paste the pre-made code snippet of the programming language or framework you’re using.

For instance, if you want to send emails with Flask, a popular Python framework, you could just use this pre-made snippet and insert your credentials, simple as that:

app.config['MAIL_SERVER']='live.smtp.mailtrap.io'
app.config['MAIL_PORT'] = 587
app.config['MAIL_USERNAME'] = 'api'
app.config['MAIL_PASSWORD'] = '<YOUR_API_TOKEN>'
app.config['MAIL_USE_TLS'] = True
app.config['MAIL_USE_SSL'] = False

Moreover, if you ever get stuck or lost in the process, Mailtrap has a comprehensive knowledge base with a plethora of step-by-step articles, as well as a blog, and, wait for it, even a YouTube channel. For example, if you want to add sending functionality for Python applications, here’s a dedicated tutorial you could follow.

Security & compliance

Mailtrap checks a lot of boxes when it comes to email security & compliance, from super solid email authentication to GDPR compliance. Additionally, it is ISO certified, while SOC 2 certification is on the way.

Security	Compliance
Strong TLS enforcement, MTA-STS support	GDPR compliant
SPF, DKIM, DMARC alignment	Based in EU but the servers are in the US
Granular API keys, IP whitelisting	Compliant with ISO and HIPAA, SOC 2 is in progress
MFA, RBAC, detailed audit logs	DSAR support & data deletion upon request
Robust reputation management, real-time security monitoring	Detailed logs, exportable
Detailed logs, customizable alerts	DPA Available on request

Testimonials

When it comes to user testimonials, I am happy to see that Mailtrap gets a lot of love on the web. It’s praised for deliverability, separate sending streams, and working well at scale.

Another user, a developer, says Mailtrap’s analytics help him notice delivery issues quickly and that the platform delivers as expected.

Send Emails with Mailtrap

SendGrid

G2: 4.0 🌟 Capterra: 4.2 🌟 Trustpilot: 1.1 🌟

SendGrid by Twilio is a communication platform for transactional and marketing email sending. It offers an email API and SMTP relay for developers, whereas marketers can use its campaign builder to launch campaigns.

It’s a solid choice for teams that need a scalable email delivery service with a lot of quality-of-life features.

By quality-of-life features, I mean automatic IP warm-up and throttling, ready-made code snippets, engagement quality API, and a few others. Although these aren’t mandatory by any means, they can be quite useful for email infrastructure optimization.

Moving on, another notable SendGrid feature is its deliverability insights dashboard, where you can track the most important deliverability metrics, such as delivered, bounced, opens, etc. You can also see what’s causing your emails to bounce, track deliverability trends, filter metrics by top mailbox providers, and more.

Speaking of mailbox providers, I must note that SendGrid had mixed deliverability test results when it comes to providers like Yahoo, Outlook, and AOL.

Platform	Email placement results	Spam filter rating	Inbox email delivery with top providers
SendGrid	Inbox: 61.0% Tabs: 1.0% Spam: 17.1% Missing: 20.9%	Google Spam Filter: Not spam; Not phishy Barracuda: Score 0 Spam Assassin: Score: -0.1	Gmail: 75% Outlook: 0% Hotmail: 0% Yahoo: 33.33%

Key features:

Solid analytics
High sending throughput
Granular user control
Email validation API
Onboarding assistance
SMS support via Twilio
CRM support
Pre-warmed up, geo-specific IPs