The best email APIs for Laravel developers are Mailtrap, SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, and Postmark.
To provide you with a fair and unbiased comparison of these APIs, I researched and tested them all with the help of Mailtrap email deliverability experts, security team, and developers.
Together, we integrated each API into a demo Laravel application, tested the most common use cases, sent a bunch of emails, tried out the key features, etc. This provided us with a clearer picture of the differences in deliverability rates, infrastructure quality, and other comparison criteria you should evaluate when choosing a Laravel email API.
Best email SDKs for Laravel: a snapshot
- Mailtrap is the best email API for Laravel developers and product teams who need high inboxing rates, fast delivery, a developer-friendly experience, and reliability.
- SendGrid is for large developer teams and enterprises that need a flexible API, a high level of multitenancy support, and extra quality-of-life features.
- Mailgun is for teams who want to send mass emails while also being able to automatically validate their recipients’ addresses.
- Amazon SES is for developer teams who are experienced working with the AWS infrastructure and could use its numerous integrations.
- Postmark is for developers who want to send transactional emails with a highly configurable API while also having inbound email capabilities.
And here’s the most essential info you need to get started with the best email APIs for Laravel developers:
Laravel email API comparison: comparison criteria
We organized our comparison criteria into these categories:
- Laravel integration
- Developer experience
- Webhooks
- Email infrastructure
- Email API flexibility
- Pricing comparison
- Customer support
Laravel integration
For starters, I present to you the essential information any developer would want to know before integrating an email API with their Laravel project.
Developer experience
Setup time & learning curve
You can integrate easily all of the Laravel email API providers that I listed in this article, although there are a few nuanced differences. More specifically:
- Mailtrap provides an official Laravel bridge, which uses its very own, regularly updated and maintained, PHP SDK.
- SendGrid can be integrated via a community-maintained s-ichikawa package, which provides a native Laravel mail driver.
- Mailgun, Amazon SES, and Postmark integrate via the Symfony transport package. This is because Laravel 9+ uses Symfony Mailer as its underlying mail engine.
And here’s what you can expect when it comes to setup time and complexity:
MCP server support
MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers are essentially a quality-of-life feature that allows you to interact with email APIs while developing your project. For instance, you can manage email templates through your IDE without having to alt-tab from your workflow.
So, here’s a table that summarizes the capabilities of each email API provider in this article:
Webhooks
Webhooks are a staple tool for any developer serious about their project, especially those using an email API. Think of them as an extension that lets you get real-time notifications on key events like delivered or bounces, monitor engagement, etc.
All five email API providers on this list offer webhooks, although they are slightly different in the events they offer and retry logic:
Want the full comparison?
If you’d like to explore the complete breakdown, including detailed comparisons of email infrastructure, email API flexibility, pricing and customer support, check out the full version of our comparison of the best transactional email API for Laravel on Mailtrap's blog!
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