MailGun Alternative – BigMailer

MailGun is known as a low-cost transactional email provider, similar to SendGrid. While they offer ability to send bulk emails (aka broadcasts or newsletters), the platform isn’t as optimized for marketing/promotional email sending as some of the leading email marketing service providers.

BigMailer is a hosted email marketing platform that offers an option to connect to your own Amazon SES account and supports all campaigns types – bulk, auto/drip, and transactional.

Pricing Model – Subscriptions Vs. Pay-as-you-go

The biggest different between MailGun and BigMailer is the pricing model.

BigMailer is priced based on number of contacts stored, offering greatest benefits to high volume and frequent senders. If you send 2 or more emails per month to your list, then BigMailer pricing works better for you.

As of February 2020, MailGun no longer offers a free plan or limit and offers 2 types of plans:

1. Flex plan is a pay-as-you-go plan that is priced at $0.8 per 1000 emails sent and has no commitment.
2. There is 3 additional plans based on fixed monthly sending limit that offer additional benefits, like IP address and different level of support, with any sending above set limits priced at the same rate as a Flex plan.

MailGun pricing benefits infrequent, occasional senders who send less than 3 emails per month. So if you send 1 or 2 bulk campaigns per month or don’t engage your entire lists on recurring basis and rather engage certain segments of your list then MailGun pricing is more cost effective for your needs.

Brand and User Access Management

BigMailer has built-in brand and user management which is ideal for organizations with large teams, digital marketing agencies, web development shops, and anyone managing multiple products. You can manage unlimited brands and users or clients, with custom permission levels for each team member or client.

An account admin can choose to share a template across all brands in the account, offering exceptional value and workflow improvement for agencies.

BigMailer also offers an option to white label BigMailer platform, offered on Agency and Enterprise plans.

Email Template Options

MailGun offers very simple template editor with direct access to template code, so you can customize your template directly via HTML edits. There is no drag-and-drop template editor, and the few pre-made templates offered as a starting point look more like plain-text emails with minimal design elements. MailGun’s template management is most suitable for transactional emails.

BigMailer offers the flexibility of choosing between 3 options:

1. Advanced drag-and-drop editor allows you to build beautiful mobile optimized templates in minutes. There is also a free stock photo search with unlimited access and storage.
2. Classic HTML Editor offers an option to add and manage existing branded templates and edit them in 2 modes – rich text or HTML code.
3. Pre-built mobile-optimized templates library that can be customized in the drag-n-drop editor.

BigMailer mobile-optimized templates library.

Here is a comparison table for some price levels and features.

Have questions about some features or volume discount pricing? Reach out to us via chat.