Brevo is an all-in-one marketing platform. Mailgun is a developer email API. They show up in the same Google searches, but they serve completely different audiences. If you are comparing brevo vs mailgun for your online store, the answer hinges on one question: do you have a developer on your team?
Both platforms handle transactional email (order confirmations, shipping updates, password resets). Beyond that, they diverge sharply. Brevo includes marketing campaigns, automation, CRM, and native ecommerce plugins. Mailgun includes none of those things. The pricing crossover adds nuance: Mailgun costs less at 50K emails per month, Brevo costs less at 100K and above.
I tested both platforms against the needs of real ecommerce merchants: Shopify Integration, WooCommerce setup, abandoned cart recovery, newsletter campaigns, and deliverability. I pulled independent test data, pricing at actual volumes, and user reviews from Trustpilot, G2, and Reddit. Brevo was formerly Sendinblue, so the sendinblue vs mailgun comparison applies here too.
Schnelles Urteil: Brevo wins for most ecommerce store owners. Mailgun only makes sense if you have a developer and need API-level transactional control exclusively.
Brevo vs Mailgun at a Glance
This table covers the criteria that matter most for brevo vs mailgun comparison shoppers.
| Brevo | Mailgun | |
|---|---|---|
| Plattformtyp | All-in-one marketing + transactional | Developer transactional email API |
| Am besten geeignet, | Besitzer von E-Commerce-Shops | Developers and SaaS teams |
| Freier Plan | 300 emails/day (9K/month) | 100 emails/day (3K/month) |
| Anfangspreis | $17/month (10K emails) | $15/month (10K emails) |
| Shopify Integration | Native app (PushOwl/Brevo) | Requires Zapier middleware |
| WooCommerce Integration | Ureinwohner plugin (Kostenlos) | Manual SMTP or third-party plugin |
| Marketing-Kampagnen | Yes (drag-and-drop builder) | Nein |
| Transaktions-E-Mail | Yes (SMTP + API) | Yes (REST API + SMTP) |
| Automation | Builder für visuellen Workflow | Nein |
| Trustpilot Bewertung | 4.2/5 (7,040 Bewertungen) | 4.1/5 (1,458 Bewertungen) |
| Independent inbox rate | 78.78% | 76.84% |
Brevo is a marketing platform that also sends transactional emails. Mailgun is a transactional email API that does not send marketing campaigns at all. If you need marketing capabilities with Mailgun, you will need Mailjet (its sister brand under Sinch) or an entirely separate tool.
1. Preisgestaltung: Brevo Wins at Scale, Mailgun Wins at Mid-Volume
Gewinner: Bedingt. The cheaper platform depends entirely on how many emails you send per month. Mailgun costs less at 50K emails. Brevo Kosten less at 100K and above. Once you factor in the tools each price includes, the math shifts further.
Actual brevo or mailgun costs at ecommerce-relevant volumes:
| Monatliches Volumen | Mailgun | Brevo |
|---|---|---|
| 10K emails | 15 $ (Basis) | 17 $ (Starter) |
| 50K emails | $35 (Foundation) | 55 $ (Starter) |
| 100K emails | 90 $ (Waage) | $69 (Starter) or $129 (Standard with automation) |
| Pay-as-you-go | $2.00 per 1,000 (Flex, doubled Dec 2025) | $0.003 to $0.006 per email (credits never expire) |
Those headline numbers look straightforward. They are not.
Versteckten Kosten
Mailgun's add-ons stack up fast. Dedicated IPs cost $59/month each. The Optimize deliverability suite runs $49 to $99/month on top of your plan. Email validation costs $1.20 per 100 on the Foundation tier. Overages range from $1.10 to $1.80 per 1,000 extra emails.
One Trustpilot reviewer described the pricing as “misleading” after discovering dedicated IPs were not included on lower plans.
Brevo has its own extras. Removing the “Powered by Brevo” footer on the Starter plan costs $10/month. A dedicated IP runs $251/year (roughly $21/month). Multi-user access on Standard requires $12/month per additional seat.
Der tatsächliche Kostenvergleich
Most comparison articles miss this: at Brevo's price, you get marketing campaigns, automation, and transactional email in one subscription. At Mailgun's price, you get transactional email only. If you need marketing capabilities too, add $30 to $100/month for Mailchimp, Mailjet, or another tool on top of Mailgun.
Free plans tell the same story. Brevo offers 300 emails/day (9K/month) with unlimited contacts. Mailgun offers 100 emails/day (3K/month) with sandbox-only sending until you verify a domain.
For ecommerce merchants who need both marketing and transactional email, Brevo's total cost of ownership is lower at nearly every volume tier.
2. Benutzerfreundlichkeit: Brevo
Gewinner: Brevo. If your team does not include a developer, this section ends the mailgun vs brevo debate by itself.
I watched a complete Brevo setup tutorial where the presenter went from account creation to first campaign in unter 15 Minuten. The interface uses a clean left-sidebar navigation. The drag-and-drop email editor works without touching code.
Domain authentication walks you through DNS setup with auto-detection for 10+ hosting providers. WooCommerce integration takes three steps: Installieren Sie die plugin, paste your API key, toggle SMTP on. Shopify integration is a single app install from the App Store (PushOwl/Brevo app). Both are fully functional within minutes.
Mailgun's setup is a different experience entirely. Die Freiheit sandbox only allows sending to 5 pre-authorized email addresses. Going to production requires DNS TXT, MX, and CNAME record configuration, domain propagation (which can take hours), and API key creation. You will then need to choose between REST API coding or SMTP relay configuration. Shopify integration requires a Zapier account as middleware. There is no visual UI for composing emails.
The contrast is stark: Brevo's WooCommerce transactional email setup is one toggle. Mailgun's is a multi-step DNS, API, and code process.
To be fair, Mailgun's developer experience is genuinely excellent. The documentation earns consistent praise across Reddit and Hacker News. SDKs cover Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Java, and C#. If your team includes developers who prefer APIs over GUIs, Mailgun's setup feels natural.
But for the audience reading this article, a store owner choosing between these platforms, Brevo ist die einzig praktikable Option.
3. Ecommerce Integrations: Brevo
Gewinner: Brevo. Native ecommerce plugins that require zero coding give Brevo a commanding lead. Most competitor comparisons skip this criteria entirely, and it matters most for the brevo vs mailgun audience.
Brevo's Shopify Integration
The PushOwl/Brevo app (available since August 2025) syncs customer data in real time, triggers abandoned cart workflows, handles transactional emails, sends web push notifications and SMS, and serves product recommendations. One app, one dashboard, no coding.
Brevo's WooCommerce Integration
The free WordPress plugin replaces default WooCommerce emails with a single toggle. It covers every order state: new, processing, completed, refunded. You get delivery, open, and click tracking per email type directly in the Brevo Instrumententafel. Zero code required.
Mailgun's Shopify Integration
This requires three separate accounts: Mailgun, Shopify, and Zapier. You will configure Zap triggers manually. Email templates must be written in HTML or assembled in Zapier's limited template editor. Marketing campaigns still require a completely separate tool.
Mailgun's WooCommerce Integration
Kein Eingeborener plugin exists. You need manual SMTP configuration in wp-config.php or a third-party SMTP plugin. There is no automatic order state tracking and no delivery analytics per email type in the Mailgun dashboard.
Quick setup comparison: Brevo WooCommerce takes 3 steps (install plugin, paste API key, toggle SMTP). Mailgun WooCommerce takes 8+ steps involving DNS records, API configuration, and either code or a third-party plugin.
Brevo also supports 150+ integrations including Magento, Shopware, and Salesforce. Dynamic product blocks pull live inventory data into promotional emails automatically. Native integrations eliminate the developer dependency that makes Mailgun impractical for most merchants.
4. Email Marketing Features: Brevo
Gewinner: Brevo. Mailgun has no email marketing features. Not limited features. Not basic features. None. No send button, no drag-and-drop editor, no campaign scheduling, no A/B testing, no segmentation, no landing pages, no CRM. It is a transactional API only.
Brevo's marketing toolkit, by contrast, is comprehensive. The drag-and-drop email builder includes 40+ templates. You get campaign scheduling, A/B testing for subject lines and content, audience segmentation by behavior and attributes, a landing page builder, signup forms, and RSS-to-email functionality. Aura AI (launched May 2025) generates subject lines, email body copy, and CTAs through a chat-style interface. Send-time optimization uses engagement data to pick the best delivery window for each subscriber.
Brevo also includes a free CRM on all plans. Contact management, deal pipeline, task tracking. Competitors like Mailchimp charge extra for CRM capabilities. For ecommerce store owners, this means your customer purchase history, email engagement, and sales pipeline live in one place.
Email, SMS, WhatsApp, and web push notifications all run from one dashboard. Flash sale announcements, order updates, and cart reminders can reach customers across whatever channel they prefer.
If you need marketing campaigns with Mailgun, your workaround is Mailjet (its sister brand under Sinch). That means a separate account, separate billing, and separate dashboard with no unified view of transactional and marketing performance. This is not a competitive category in the brevo vs mailgun comparison. If you need marketing email, Brevo is your only option between the two.
5. Transactional Email: Mailgun
Winner: It depends. Mailgun wins for developer teams that need granular API control over transactional email. Brevo wins for merchants who want transactional email handled without writing a single line of code.
Mailgun was purpose-built for transactional email. The REST API has excellent backward compatibility. Official SDKs support Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C#, and Node.js. You get 9-event tracking (delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained, unsubscribed, stored, dropped, failed). Log retention extends up to 30 days on the Scale plan. Native inbound email routing and parsing handle reply processing. Webhook endpoints enable real-time event processing in your own backend.
The customer list speaks for itself: 150,000+ businesses including Microsoft, Slack, Reddit, Stripe, Booking.com, and Etsy. These are developer-heavy teams using Mailgun's API at massive scale.
Brevo's transactional capabilities are more modest but surprisingly capable. SMTP relay delivers 50% of emails within 1 second and 99.98% within 20 seconds. A RESTful API is available for developers who want programmatic access. WooCommerce und Shopify transactional emails work automatically through plugins. You can track delivery, opens, and clicks per email type in the dashboard. Transactional email is included on all plans, including the free tier, with no separate subscription needed.
The key difference for ecommerce: Brevo's plugin-based transactional emails mean order confirmations just work after a 3-step setup. Mailgun's transactional emails require coding the trigger, designing the template in HTML, and wiring up the API call. For a store owner without a developer, that gap is decisive.
Most ecommerce store owners will never need Mailgun's API depth. If you do, it is genuinely best-in-class.
6. Automatisierung: Brevo
Gewinner: Brevo. Mailgun has no automation features whatsoever. This is not a close call.
Brevo's visual workflow builder uses drag-and-drop nodes to create automated sequences. Pre-built templates cover the workflows ecommerce merchants need most: welcome series, abandoned cart recovery, post-purchase follow-up, win-back campaigns, and birthday or anniversary triggers.
Abandoned Cart Recovery Example
Ein typischer Brevo abandoned cart workflow runs like this: a customer leaves items in their cart. After 1 hour, Brevo checks if they completed the purchase. If not, it sends a reminder with dynamic product blocks showing the exact items left behind, pulled from your live inventory. After 24 hours, a second email offers a small discount. At 72 hours, a final urgency email closes the sequence. All of this runs automatically once you set it up.
Conditional logic adds precision. If/else splits let you send different emails to first-time buyers versus repeat customers. You can branch on purchase history, engagement level, or any contact attribute you track. Example: a first-time buyer gets a welcome discount in their post-purchase email, while a repeat customer gets a loyalty reward instead.
With Mailgun, building automation requires your own backend code, a task queue, and significant engineering time. There is no visual builder, no triggers, no conditional logic in the platform itself.
Brevo makes automation available for your first 2,000 contacts on the free plan. That is enough to test and validate workflows before upgrading. For ecommerce, automation is where revenue gets recovered and lifetime value grows. Brevo provides it out of the box. Mailgun does not.
7. Lieferbarkeit: Brevo (Slightly)
Gewinner: Brevo, but neither platform is exceptional. Independent testing reveals numbers that neither vendor advertises on their marketing pages.
emaildeliverabilityreport.com tested 65,773 Brevo emails and 51,817 Mailgun emails across 13 industry categories and 15 major email providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and more). The results:
| Metrisch | Brevo | Mailgun |
|---|---|---|
| Inbox rate | 78.78% | 76.84% |
| Spam-Rate | 19.37% | 20.88% |
| Lost emails | 1.85% | 2.28% |
Both platforms claim 97%+ deliverability in their marketing materials. Independent testing tells a different story. Neither is stellar, but Brevo holds a consistent edge.
The Mailgun Outlook Problem
This is well-documented and matters for ecommerce. Shared IP reputation contamination causes Mailgun emails to land in Outlook and Hotmail spam folders, even when SPF, DKIM, and DMARC pass correctly. Microsoft's EFV:NLI header flags Mailgun shared IPs as low-reputation. One developer investigated this extensively and concluded the only fix was switching providers entirely.
Roughly 15% of US email users are on Outlook or Hotmail. If order confirmations land in spam for those customers, you get support tickets, lost trust, and potential chargebacks. This is not just a marketing email nuisance. It is a transactional email reliability problem.
Dedizierte IP-Option
A dedicated IP isolates your sender reputation from other users on the platform. Mailgun charges $59/month (included on Scale plan). Brevo charges $251/year, roughly $21/month. If you are sending enough volume to warrant a dedicated IP, Brevo's pricing is more competitive here too.
Neither platform delivers perfectly. But Brevo's higher inbox rate and lack of a systemic Outlook problem give it the edge for ecommerce reliability.
8. API and Developer Experience: Mailgun
Winner: Mailgun. It was built API-first, and it shows.
Mailgun's REST API is the gold standard for transactional email developers. Backward compatibility means integrations do not break with updates. Official SDKs span six languages: Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C#, and Node.js. The 9-event webhook tracking gives you granular visibility into every email's lifecycle. Native inbound email routing and parsing handle reply processing without third-party tools. Sandbox testing lets you validate before going to production. Granular logs with up to 30-day retention on the Scale plan make debugging straightforward.
The developer documentation earns consistent praise across Reddit and Hacker News. That quality shows in the customer base: 150,000+ businesses including Slack, Stripe, Reddit, and Booking.com trust Mailgun's infrastructure.
Brevo's API is also RESTful and adequate for transactional email triggering and contact management. But the API is secondary to the visual UI. Brevo was designed as a GUI-first platform with API access layered on top. Its documentation is functional but oriented toward plugin and GUI setup rather than raw API usage.
The ecommerce relevance check: vor allem warme Shopify und WooCommerce store owners will never write an API call. They will use plugins, visual editors, and pre-built integrations. This criteria matters only if your team includes developers who want programmatic control over their email infrastructure.
Mailgun delivers best-in-class developer tools. For the majority of ecommerce merchants comparing brevo vs mailgun, those tools are irrelevant.
9. Kundensupport und Reputation: Brevo (Narrowly)
Gewinner: Brevo, but neither platform excels at support. If responsive customer service is your top priority, prepare for disappointment on both sides.
Punkte überprüfen
| Plattform | Trustpilot | G2 | Capterra |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brevo | 4.2/5 (7,040 Bewertungen) | 4.5/5 | 4.5/5 |
| Mailgun | 4.1/5 (1,458 Bewertungen) | 4.2/5 | 4.3/5 (197 Bewertungen) |
Brevo has nearly 5x more Trustpilot reviews than Mailgun, which indicates a much larger active user community providing feedback.
Brevo's Support Issues
Email ticket responses take 4 to 5 days. Lower tiers get an AI chatbot only, not live chat. Phone support is reserved for the highest plan. Account suspensions happen without clear explanation.
Mailgun's Support Issues
No phone support at any tier. Account suspensions are more aggressive and less transparent. New accounts get flagged immediately. Long-standing accounts have been disabled without warning. One Hacker News user described losing email delivery after nearly a decade of use because a 0.05% complaint rate triggered an automated suspension with no advance notice. Capterra reviews include descriptions like “absolutely worst product ever used.” One documented case took 8 days to reactivate a suspended account.
Marktverlauf
Mailgun's mindshare in the Cloud Email category dropped from 9.2% to 6.6% year-over-year as of March 2026. Brevo grew from 2.5% to 5.4% in the same period. When a platform loses market traction, long-term investment in support and features becomes a legitimate concern.
Fazit
Brevo wins 7 of 9 criteria in this comparison. Mailgun wins 2 (transactional email API and developer experience). Pricing is conditional on volume.
For ecommerce store owners running Shopify or WooCommerce, Brevo ist die bessere Plattform. It handles marketing campaigns and transactional emails from one dashboard, integrates natively with your store, and does not require a developer. The visual automation builder recovers abandoned carts and nurtures post-purchase relationships without you writing a line of code.
When Mailgun Makes Sense
- Your team has a developer who prefers API-level control
- You send exclusively transactional emails with no marketing campaigns
- You are at 50K emails/month or below, where Mailgun is cheaper
- You do not rely on Outlook or Hotmail delivery for your customers
Wenn die Funktion Brevo Macht Sinn
- You need marketing and transactional email from one platform
- You want native Shopify or WooCommerce Integration
- You do not have a developer on staff
- You send 100K+ emails/month
- You need automation for cart abandonment and post-purchase sequences
Nächster Schritt: Beginnen mit Brevo's free plan (300 emails/day, unlimited contacts) to test the platform with your store before committing to a paid tier.
FAQ
Can Mailgun send marketing email campaigns?
No. Mailgun is a transactional email API with no campaign builder, no send button, and no marketing UI. If you need marketing campaigns alongside Mailgun, you will need Mailjet (Mailgun's sister brand under Sinch) or another tool entirely. Mailjet requires a separate account and separate billing.
Is Brevo good for transactional emails or just marketing?
Beide. Brevo handles transactional emails via SMTP relay and REST API on all plans, including the free tier. WooCommerce und Shopify merchants get transactional email through native plugins ohne zusätzliche Konfiguration. Brevo's SMTP relay delivers 50% of emails within 1 second and 99.98% within 20 seconds.
Which is cheaper: Brevo or Mailgun?
It depends on your volume. Mailgun is cheaper at 50K emails/month ($35 vs $55). Brevo is cheaper at 100K+ emails/month ($69 vs $90). But Brevo's price includes marketing tools that Mailgun does not, so total cost of ownership favors Brevo for merchants who need both transactional and marketing email.
Does Mailgun have Outlook deliverability problems?
Yes. Shared IP reputation contamination causes emails to land in Outlook and Hotmail spam folders even with proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication. Independent developers have documented this as an infrastructure-level issue that individual senders cannot fix. The commonly recommended solution is switching to a different provider or purchasing a dedicated IP.
Who owns Mailgun?
Sinch acquired Mailgun (along with Mailjet and Email on Acid) for $1.9 billion in 2021 through the Pathwire deal. Both Mailgun and Mailjet remain separate brands under Sinch. The backing provides financial stability, though Mailgun's market mindshare has been declining from 9.2% to 6.6% year-over-year.
Can a non-developer use Mailgun?
Not practically. Mailgun requires DNS record configuration, API key management, and either REST API coding or SMTP setup. There is no visual editor, no campaign builder, and no drag-and-drop interface. Independent reviewers and users consistently confirm that Mailgun is not suitable for non-technical users.
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