MailCatcher served Rails well.
Sendpit serves every stack.
MailCatcher is a Ruby gem for local email capture. Sendpit is a hosted sandbox that works with any language and any team. The honest comparison, round by round.
Key Facts
- SendPit Basic: $5/mo for 3 mailboxes and up to 1,000 stored emails across all mailboxes
- MailCatcher Self-hosted Ruby gem
- Pricing and features last verified: 2026-03-18
Where Sendpit wins
vs self-hosted mailcatcher · verified 2026-03-18MailCatcher needs Ruby plus native C extensions that often fail to compile on modern macOS. Sendpit needs SMTP credentials in your .env.
The whole product: capture, inspection, team access. Not a trial, never expires, no card required.
Rails, Django, Laravel, Node or anything that speaks SMTP: point your mail config at Sendpit and send. No gem, no compile step.
Shared mailboxes with owner, billing and member roles. MailCatcher is single-user and localhost-only.
Feature by feature
13 features · 2 groups| Feature | MailCatcher | Sendpit |
|---|---|---|
| Shared basics | ||
| SMTP capture | ✓ | ✓ |
| Attachment preview | ✓ | ✓ |
| Price | free (Ruby gem) | free tier + paid plans |
| Where they differ | ||
| Works beyond Ruby | ~ Ruby required | ✓ any SMTP client |
| Cloud hosted | — | ✓ |
| Multi-mailbox | — | ✓ |
| Team user accounts | — | ✓ |
| Per-mailbox access control | — | ✓ |
| Webhooks | — | ✓ Pro and above |
| REST API | — | ✓ Basic and above |
| TLS encryption | — | ✓ |
| Spam score analysis | — | ✓ |
| Live inbox updates | — manual refresh | ✓ real-time |
MailCatcher makes sense if...
- · You're working alone on a Rails project.
- · Your entire stack is Ruby and likely to stay that way.
- · You prefer offline-first, local-only tools.
Sendpit makes sense if...
- ✓ Your stack includes non-Ruby services.
- ✓ You need teammates or QA to see the same emails.
- ✓ Your CI pipeline or staging server sends emails.
- ✓ You want emails to persist and be retrievable.
If you want to stay local, Mailpit solves most of MailCatcher's problems and is worth a look. Many teams land on Mailpit for local development and Sendpit for shared environments.
Frequently asked questions
Is MailCatcher still maintained?
▾
MailCatcher receives occasional updates but development has slowed significantly. It remains functional for basic SMTP capture in Ruby environments. If you need an actively maintained solution with modern features, Sendpit or Mailpit are better options.
Does MailCatcher work outside of Ruby and Rails?
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Yes, MailCatcher captures any SMTP traffic regardless of the sending language. However, it is built with Ruby and its installation requires a Ruby runtime. If you do not already have Ruby in your development stack, the setup adds overhead. Sendpit works with any language via standard SMTP and requires no local installation.
Can I migrate from MailCatcher to Sendpit?
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Yes. Update your SMTP host and port from MailCatcher's localhost:1025 to Sendpit's SMTP credentials. Add the Sendpit username and password to your configuration. The change is the same whether you use Rails, Laravel, Django, or any other framework-just update the SMTP transport settings.
How does Sendpit compare to MailCatcher for teams?
▾
MailCatcher is a single-user local tool-it runs on one developer's machine and captured emails are only visible there. Sendpit is designed for teams with shared mailboxes, role-based access control, and organization management. Your whole team can view the same captured test emails from any device.
Does Sendpit have an API like MailCatcher?
▾
MailCatcher has a basic HTTP API for listing and retrieving messages. Sendpit provides a REST API with authentication, pagination, search, and attachments (Basic plans and above), plus webhooks for real-time notifications (Pro+). If you need programmatic access to captured emails in CI/CD pipelines, Sendpit's API is more capable-but requires a paid plan.
Is Sendpit free like MailCatcher?
▾
MailCatcher is completely free and open source. Sendpit has a permanent free tier that covers most small team needs without a credit card. The difference is that MailCatcher requires Ruby and local infrastructure, while Sendpit is a hosted service with zero setup. Paid plans add more capacity and features like webhooks and API access.
Free forever, not a trial
1 mailbox · 3 seats · 200 stored emails · full inspection · no card · never expires also comparing: Mailtrap · MailHog · Mailpit · Mailosaur · Ethereal Email