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Mailjet’s Essential plan costs $17 per month and includes 15,000 emails. Mailjet’s Premium plan costs $27 per month and includes 15,000 emails. The volume is identical. Both numbers come straight from Mailjet’s own pricing page.
That is a 59 percent price increase for zero additional sending capacity. Premium buys features: Advanced Statistics, Automations, Landing Pages, team management, and priority support. If you need marketing automation, you pay $27 to send exactly what $17 already sent.
Mailjet is not a bad product. It is a competent European sender with a solid editor, real SMTP and API access on the free tier, and Sinch infrastructure behind it. The pricing structure is simply built around feature gates rather than volume, and that structure penalises small senders who need automation and large senders who do not.
We compared seven alternatives on the metric that actually matters: what it costs to send email, normalised per 1,000 messages, plus where each provider gates the features Mailjet reserves for Premium. Every price below comes from vendor pricing pages.
Quick Comparison: Mailjet Alternatives at a Glance
| Platform | Best For | Free Tier | Entry Paid Plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brevo | The most usable free tier | 9,000/mo (300/day) | $9/mo for 5,000 emails |
| Amazon SES | Lowest cost at any volume | Limited trial allowance | $0.10 per 1,000 emails |
| Resend | Developer experience | 3,000/mo | $20/mo for 50,000 emails |
| SendGrid | High-volume marketing and API | None since March 2025 | $19.95/mo for up to 100,000 |
| Postmark | Transactional deliverability | 100/mo | $15/mo for 10,000 emails |
| Mailgun | API-first sending with EU routing | Limited daily allowance | $15/mo for 10,000 emails |
| SMTP2GO | Drop-in SMTP relay | 1,000/mo | $15/mo for 10,000 emails |

Why Do Teams Look for Mailjet Alternatives?
Teams leave Mailjet over pricing structure rather than deliverability. Three gates drive it: Essential and Premium both cap at 15,000 emails despite a $10 price gap, automations are locked behind the $27 Premium tier, and the free plan is throttled to 200 emails per day regardless of remaining monthly quota.
Each of those is verifiable on Mailjet’s pricing page, and each affects a different kind of sender.
- The free tier is a daily throttle, not a monthly allowance. Mailjet Free advertises 6,000 emails per month but limits sending to 200 per day. A newsletter to 500 subscribers cannot go out in one send, even in week one with the full quota untouched. Starter at $9 is the first tier with no daily sending limit.
- Automation costs the top self-serve tier. Automations appear only in the Premium feature list at $27 per month. Competitors that include basic automation lower down make Mailjet look expensive for small marketing teams.
- The dedicated IP line is conditional. Premium lists “1 Dedicated IP” but qualifies it as “For 100k+ Plans upon request.” A team paying $27 for 15,000 emails does not receive a dedicated IP, despite the feature appearing under the plan they bought.
Contacts add a fourth constraint. Free allows 1,000 contacts and Starter allows 2,000, so list growth forces an upgrade independently of how much email you send. Unlimited contacts arrive at Essential.
If you are evaluating the wider category rather than one vendor, our AI email marketing software guide covers platform selection from the top.
What You Actually Pay Per 1,000 Emails
Normalising every plan to cost per 1,000 emails exposes differences that plan tables hide. Mailjet Essential works out to $1.13 per 1,000. Mailjet Premium costs $1.80 per 1,000 for the same volume. Amazon SES charges $0.10 per 1,000, roughly eighteen times cheaper than Mailjet Premium.
The figures below divide each entry paid plan’s price by its included volume. This is the comparison most roundups leave out, and it reorders the field completely.
| Platform | Entry Paid Plan | Included Volume | Cost Per 1,000 Emails |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon SES | Pay as you go | Unmetered | $0.10 |
| SendGrid Essentials | $19.95/mo | Up to 100,000 | About $0.20 |
| Resend Pro | $20/mo | 50,000 | $0.40 |
| Mailjet Starter | $9/mo | 8,000 | $1.13 |
| Mailjet Essential | $17/mo | 15,000 | $1.13 |
| Postmark | $15/mo | 10,000 | $1.50 |
| Mailgun Basic | $15/mo | 10,000 | $1.50 |
| SMTP2GO | $15/mo | 10,000 | $1.50 |
| Mailjet Premium | $27/mo | 15,000 | $1.80 |
| Brevo Starter | $9/mo | 5,000 | $1.80 |
Read this table carefully rather than simply picking the top row. Cost per 1,000 rewards providers that bundle large volumes into a low flat fee, which is why SendGrid and Resend rank high and Brevo ranks last despite being the best free option here. Brevo’s advantage is its 9,000 email monthly free tier, which costs nothing at all and therefore does not appear in a paid-plan calculation.
The honest conclusion: below roughly 9,000 emails per month, Brevo’s free tier beats every paid plan in this table. Between 10,000 and 50,000, Resend and SendGrid deliver the best value. Above that, Amazon SES is cheaper than everything by an order of magnitude, provided you can operate it.
Best Mailjet Alternatives for Value
1 Brevo: Best for the most usable free tier
Brevo gives away more monthly email than Mailjet sells at its first paid tier.
What it does well. Brevo’s free plan includes 9,000 emails per month with a 300 per day limit, full API access, and no credit card requirement. That is 50 percent more monthly volume than Mailjet’s free plan and a 50 percent higher daily ceiling. Brevo also combines marketing campaigns, transactional sending, and basic CRM in one account, so small teams avoid stitching two vendors together.
Key features:
- 9,000 emails per month free, 300 per day
- Marketing campaigns and transactional API in a single platform
- Contact management and basic CRM included
- SMTP relay and webhooks on the free tier
- Automation available below the top plan tier
Pricing. Paid plans start at $9 per month for 5,000 emails. On a strict cost-per-1,000 basis that is $1.80, the most expensive entry plan in this comparison, so Brevo’s case rests on the free tier and the bundled feature set rather than unit economics.
Best for: Small businesses sending under 9,000 emails per month who want marketing and transactional email in one place.
Limitations. Paid volume pricing is uncompetitive against Resend or SendGrid. The interface carries the complexity of a platform that does several jobs, and deliverability, while solid, does not match a dedicated transactional specialist. Our Brevo alternatives comparison covers where it stops making sense, and Mailchimp versus Brevo covers the marketing side directly.
2 Resend: Best for developer experience
Resend gives you 50,000 emails for the price of Mailjet’s 15,000.
What it does well. Resend was built API-first for engineering teams, with React Email templates, clean SDKs, and logs that make debugging a failed send take minutes instead of hours. The volume-to-price ratio is the headline: $20 per month covers 50,000 emails, against Mailjet Premium’s 15,000 for $27. That is more than three times the volume for less money.
Key features:
- 50,000 emails per month on the $20 Pro plan
- React Email component library for templating
- Clear delivery logs and webhook events
- 3,000 emails per month free
- Modern SDKs across major languages
Pricing. Free covers 3,000 emails per month. Pro costs $20 per month for 50,000 emails, with overage at $0.90 per 1,000. That works out to $0.40 per 1,000 within the included allowance.
Best for: Product and engineering teams sending transactional email who want the send path to be code, not a UI.
Limitations. Resend is a sending platform, not a marketing suite. There is no campaign builder, no landing pages, and no contact segmentation of the kind Mailjet Essential includes. Marketing teams without engineering support will find it unusable.
Best Mailjet Alternatives for Transactional Deliverability
3 Postmark: Best for transactional deliverability
Postmark separates transactional and broadcast traffic so receipts do not land beside newsletters.
What it does well. Postmark maintains dedicated infrastructure for transactional mail and enforces strict sending policies, which is why password resets and order confirmations reliably reach the inbox. It publishes delivery times openly and keeps 45 days of message history, so support teams can prove a message was sent and opened.
Key features:
- Separate message streams for transactional and broadcast mail
- 45 day searchable message history
- Published delivery time statistics
- Detailed bounce and spam complaint handling
- Inbound email parsing included
Pricing. Plans start at $15 per month for 10,000 emails, which is $1.50 per 1,000. The free tier is 100 emails per month, enough to verify an integration and nothing more.
Best for: Applications where a delayed transactional email costs money or trust.
Limitations. Postmark is expensive per 1,000 compared with Resend or SendGrid, and its marketing capabilities are deliberately minimal. Sending policies are strict enough that some legitimate bulk use cases get declined. Our Postmark alternatives guide covers that trade-off in depth.
4 SMTP2GO: Best for a drop-in SMTP relay
SMTP2GO replaces Mailjet’s SMTP credentials without touching application code.
What it does well. If your app already sends through SMTP, SMTP2GO is a credential swap rather than a migration. It handles relay, reporting, and deliverability monitoring, with global sending infrastructure that routes around regional blocks. For teams on legacy stacks or off-the-shelf software that only speaks SMTP, this is the shortest path off Mailjet.
Key features:
- SMTP relay compatible with existing application configuration
- 1,000 emails per month free
- Global sending infrastructure with regional routing
- Reporting, bounce handling, and deliverability alerts
- API available alongside SMTP
Pricing. Paid plans start at $15 per month for 10,000 emails, or $1.50 per 1,000. The free tier covers 1,000 emails per month, which is ten times Postmark’s free allowance.
Best for: Legacy applications and packaged software that send exclusively over SMTP.
Limitations. There is no marketing layer, no campaign builder, and no contact management. Per-1,000 pricing sits mid-table. If you are building new and can call an API, Resend offers far more volume for a similar price.
5 Mailgun: Best for API-first sending with EU routing
Mailgun is Mailjet’s sibling under Sinch, with an engineering-focused feature set.
What it does well. Mailgun and Mailjet share a parent company, so deliverability infrastructure is comparable, but Mailgun targets developers rather than marketers. It offers EU region routing for data residency, detailed validation tooling, and granular routing rules. Teams that like Mailjet’s reliability but need programmatic control usually land here.
Key features:
- EU region sending for data residency requirements
- Inbound routing and email parsing
- Email validation as a separate service
- Detailed logs and event webhooks
- Shared Sinch sending infrastructure
Pricing. The Basic plan starts at $15 per month for 10,000 emails, or $1.50 per 1,000. Flexible pay-as-you-go pricing is also available for irregular volumes.
Best for: Developer teams with EU data residency requirements who want a Sinch platform without Mailjet’s feature gates.
Limitations. Because it shares a parent with Mailjet, switching does not diversify your deliverability risk. Support quality has drawn criticism on lower tiers, and validation is billed separately. Our Mailgun alternatives comparison covers the details.
Best Mailjet Alternatives for Scale
6 SendGrid: Best for high-volume marketing and API sending
SendGrid bundles the largest volume of any flat-fee plan in this comparison.
What it does well. SendGrid’s Essentials plan covers up to 100,000 emails for $19.95 per month, which is roughly $0.20 per 1,000 and around nine times cheaper per message than Mailjet Premium. It combines a marketing campaign builder with a mature API, so one vendor serves both marketing and transactional needs at volume.
Key features:
- Up to 100,000 emails on the $19.95 Essentials plan
- Marketing campaigns and transactional API together
- Dedicated IP options on higher tiers
- Mature SDKs and long-standing integration coverage
- Detailed analytics and deliverability tooling
Pricing. Email API plans start at $19.95 per month. SendGrid retired its free plan in March 2025, so there is no zero-cost entry point.
Best for: Teams sending tens of thousands of emails monthly who want marketing and transactional in one account.
Limitations. Support on lower tiers is thin, and shared IP pools mean your deliverability depends partly on other senders. The absence of a free plan makes evaluation harder than with Brevo or Resend. Our SendGrid alternatives guide examines the deliverability question.
7 Amazon SES: Best for the lowest cost at any volume
Amazon SES costs $0.10 per 1,000 emails, and nothing else here comes close.
What it does well. SES is raw sending infrastructure at AWS prices. At $0.10 per 1,000, sending one million emails costs about $100, a figure no plan-based competitor approaches. For applications already inside AWS, integration with Lambda, SNS, and CloudWatch is native, and there are no plan tiers to outgrow.
Key features:
- $0.10 per 1,000 emails with no plan tiers
- Native integration across the AWS ecosystem
- Dedicated IP options available
- Configuration sets for per-stream tracking
- Scales to any volume without renegotiation
Pricing. Pay as you go at $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Additional charges apply for dedicated IPs and attachment data, and a limited free allowance is available to new accounts.
Best for: High-volume senders with engineering capacity who want the lowest possible unit cost.
Limitations. SES gives you nothing but a sending endpoint. There is no campaign builder, no templates worth the name, and no contact management, so you build or buy every layer above the API. New accounts start in a sandbox with restricted sending, and production access requests are sometimes declined without a detailed reason. Our Amazon SES alternatives guide covers what you have to build yourself.
How Should You Choose a Mailjet Alternative?
Choose on monthly volume first, then on whether you need a marketing layer. Under 9,000 emails, Brevo’s free tier costs nothing. Between 10,000 and 50,000, Resend and SendGrid win on unit cost. Above 100,000, Amazon SES is cheaper than every plan-based competitor combined.
Work through these questions before you migrate:
- What is your true monthly volume? Pull the last three months from your Mailjet dashboard, not your estimate. Most teams overestimate, and the answer usually moves them into Brevo’s free tier or Resend’s Pro plan.
- Do you send in bursts? Daily caps matter more than monthly quotas for newsletters. Mailjet Free allows 200 per day and Brevo Free allows 300. Any paid plan here removes the daily limit.
- Do you need automation or campaigns? If yes, rule out Resend, SMTP2GO, and Amazon SES immediately. They send email; they do not build it.
- Is transactional email business-critical? Password resets and receipts justify Postmark’s higher unit cost. Marketing email does not.
- Do you have data residency requirements? Mailgun’s EU routing and Brevo’s European base address this. Check where the provider stores contact data, not just where it sends from.
One practical warning: moving providers resets your sending reputation on shared IP pools. Warm up gradually over two to three weeks rather than switching all traffic at once, or your first month of deliverability will look worse than Mailjet’s regardless of which platform you chose.
Teams comparing full marketing suites rather than senders should start with our AI marketing tools guide, and our GetResponse alternatives comparison covers the campaign-first end of the market.
How We Evaluated These Email Platforms
We priced every platform from its own pricing page and normalised the results, because plan tables are designed to resist comparison.
Our criteria:
- Vendor-sourced pricing. Every price and volume came from the provider’s published pricing page. Where third-party trackers disagreed, we used the vendor figure.
- Cost per 1,000 emails. We divided each entry paid plan by its included volume so plans with different bundle sizes could be compared directly.
- Feature gates, not feature lists. We recorded which tier unlocks automation, dedicated IPs, and unlimited contacts, because that is where Mailjet’s structure differs most from its competitors.
- Free tier realism. We treated daily sending caps as part of the free tier specification, since a monthly quota you cannot spend is not a monthly quota.
- Ownership transparency. We flagged that Mailgun and Mailjet share Sinch as a parent, because switching between them does not diversify deliverability risk.
We did not run deliverability inbox placement tests for this comparison, and we do not present vendor-published deliverability rates as independent evidence. Pricing changes frequently in this category. Verify current figures before you commit.
The Bottom Line
Brevo is the strongest Mailjet alternative for most small senders, because its free tier covers 9,000 emails per month against Mailjet’s 6,000 and lifts the daily cap from 200 to 300. That is more capacity than Mailjet’s $9 Starter plan, at no cost.
For engineering teams, Resend is the clearest upgrade: $20 per month buys 50,000 emails against Mailjet Premium’s 15,000 for $27. If you send at real volume, SendGrid Essentials covers up to 100,000 emails for $19.95, and Amazon SES undercuts everything at $0.10 per 1,000 if you can build the layers above it.
Stay on Mailjet only if you specifically want its editor, its European base, and its combined marketing and transactional feature set, and your volume sits close to 15,000 emails per month. Below that, Brevo is free. Above it, almost everything here costs less per message.
Next step: pull your last three months of send volume, find your row in the cost per 1,000 table, and price the two closest options. For the wider category, start with our email marketing software guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do Mailjet Essential and Premium include the same number of emails?
Mailjet prices Premium on features rather than volume. Both Essential at $17 per month and Premium at $27 per month include 15,000 emails, per Mailjet’s pricing page. Premium adds Advanced Statistics, Automations, Landing Pages, team management, and priority support. The extra $10 buys capability, not capacity.
Is Mailjet’s free plan really 6,000 emails per month?
The monthly figure is 6,000, but sending is capped at 200 emails per day. That daily limit applies regardless of how much monthly quota remains, so a single send to more than 200 recipients is not possible on the free plan. Starter at $9 per month is the first tier without a daily sending limit.
What is the cheapest Mailjet alternative?
Amazon SES is cheapest per message at $0.10 per 1,000 emails, roughly eighteen times less than Mailjet Premium’s effective $1.80 per 1,000. For senders under 9,000 emails per month, Brevo’s free tier costs nothing at all and is the cheapest practical option.
Does switching from Mailjet to Mailgun improve deliverability?
Not necessarily. Mailjet and Mailgun are both Sinch products and share sending infrastructure, so switching between them does not diversify your deliverability risk. Choose Mailgun for its developer tooling and EU region routing rather than as a deliverability hedge. For genuine separation, move to a different parent company.
Do I need a dedicated IP for 15,000 emails per month?
No. Dedicated IPs need consistent volume to build and hold reputation, and most guidance places that threshold well above 15,000 emails per month. Below it, a shared IP pool managed by the provider usually delivers better results. Mailjet reflects this by restricting its Premium dedicated IP to plans of 100,000 emails or more upon request.
