Mailpit vs MailHog
Active maintenance versus a popular tool that stopped getting updates.
What matters for early-stage startups
At an early stage the deciding factors are what the free tier actually covers, what the first paid invoice looks like, and how much of a founding engineer's week the setup costs. Feature depth that only matters at a million sends a month is noise until it is not.
| Priority | Mailpit | MailHog |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free, MIT-licensed | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Best published rate per 1,000 | Tiers not published in comparable form | Tiers not published in comparable form |
| Starts at | Free | Free |
| DX score | 9/10 | 5/10 |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| Operating since | Not published | Not published |
| Scheduling | No | No |
| SDKs | None | None |
| Webhooks | No | No |
For a pre-revenue or early-revenue team running a waitlist, a launch announcement, onboarding email, and the first transactional sends, 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Free, MIT-licensed | Free, MIT-licensed |
| Starts at | Free | Free |
| DX score | 9/10 | 5/10 |
| Deliverability | Not applicable; capture-only. | Not applicable; capture-only. |
| SDKs | None | None |
| Webhooks | No | No |
| Tagline | Modern local SMTP catcher. | Classic local SMTP catcher (unmaintained since 2020). |
| 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