Unitpost vs Mailgun
Mailgun is Sinch-owned email infrastructure aimed at developers, with strong validation and deliverability tooling. Unitpost covers transactional and marketing email in one product with unlimited contacts on paid plans and a free tier of 3,000 emails a month. Across 11 compared capabilities, Unitpost leads on 7 and Mailgun leads on 3.
Which should you choose?
Choose Mailgun if
- You need email address validation as part of your pipeline
- You need EU data residency for compliance reasons
- You want inbox-placement testing and detailed deliverability analytics
Choose Unitpost if
- You want Bearer token auth rather than HTTP Basic with api:key
- You want marketing email in the same product rather than as a separate concern
- You want a permanent free tier rather than a trial
- You want a visual builder for non-developers alongside code mode
What Mailgun does well
Stated plainly, because a comparison that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.
- Email validation is a genuinely good, widely used product we do not offer
- Deep deliverability tooling, including inbox placement testing
- Log retention and analytics depth aimed at high-volume senders
- EU data residency, which we do not offer yet
Pricing and free tier
- Unitpost
- 3,000 emails/month free, 100/day, no credit card
- On paid plans your monthly price is a sending allowance you spend at your tier's rate, and it refreshes every month. Marketing and unlimited contacts are included rather than billed as add-ons.
- Mailgun
- 100 emails/day on the trial
- Volume tiers with noticeable jumps between them, plus paid add-ons for validation and dedicated IPs.
Mailgun pricing and free-tier details last verified 2026-07. Providers change these often — check their pricing page before making a decision.
Feature comparison
| Capability | Unitpost | Mailgun |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | Bearer token: Authorization: Bearer pk_live_… | HTTP Basic auth with api:key |
| Email validation | Not offered | A mature, widely used validation product |
| EU data residency | Not offered — US region only today | EU region available |
| Free tier | 3,000 emails/month, 100/day, no credit card | Trial only, 100 emails/day |
| IP allowlisting | Not offered yet | Supported |
| Idempotency keys | Idempotency-Key on sends, 24-hour dedupe window | Not offered |
| Pricing curve | Smooth — your plan price is a sending allowance you spend down | Tier jumps can be steep between volume bands |
| Idempotency keys on send | Idempotency-Key on sends, 24-hour dedupe window | — |
| Webhook secret rotation without dropped deliveries | svix-compatible HMAC-SHA256 with a 24-hour dual-signing rotation grace | Rotation replaces the secret immediately |
| Hybrid template editing | Visual drag-and-drop and React/TSX code mode over one shared document — the same @unitpost/email library renders both | Varies |
| One-key import from Mailgun | Migration Assistant moves contacts, segments, topics, templates, domains, suppressions, and webhooks in about 4 minutes with a read-only key | n/a |
How do I migrate from Mailgun?
Paste a read-only Mailgun API key into the Migration Assistant and it previews everything that would carry over — contacts, segments, topics, templates, domains, suppressions, and webhooks. Nothing is written until you accept, and Mailgun keeps sending the whole time, so there is no downtime. It takes about four minutes.
Two things do not carry over: sending domains must re-verify with freshly generated DKIM keys, and webhook signing secrets are regenerated. Dynamic segments import as a static snapshot of their members.
Frequently asked questions
Does Unitpost do email validation like Mailgun?
No. We validate syntax and check the TLD against the IANA allowlist at the API boundary, and we suppress addresses that hard-bounce or complain, but we do not offer standalone list validation as a product. If validation is part of your pipeline, Mailgun's is mature and we do not have an equivalent.
Do you offer EU data residency?
Not today — we operate in the US only. We do ship a DPA with Standard Contractual Clauses, and we honour Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track signals, which none of the four major providers we benchmarked do. But if EU residency is a hard compliance requirement, Mailgun's EU region is the answer and we are not.
Is Unitpost's API easier to use than Mailgun's?
For most developers, yes — mainly because of auth and consistency. We use a Bearer token where Mailgun uses HTTP Basic with api:key, our list endpoints are uniformly cursor-paginated with one response envelope, and errors follow a single documented code set. Mailgun's API is older and carries more historical variation across endpoints.
Switching from Mailgun?
Try it on the free tier first
3,000 emails a month, no credit card. Verify a domain, send a test, and preview the migration before you move anything.