MailHog works great locally.
Sendpit works for your team.
MailHog is a fine local tool that has not seen an update since 2020. Sendpit is a hosted sandbox with the same workflow, built for teams. 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
- MailHog Self-hosted open-source
- Pricing and features last verified: 2026-03-18
Where Sendpit wins
vs self-hosted mailhog · verified 2026-03-18One release ever (v1.0.1), no commits since 2020 and 200+ open issues. No security patches, no fixes, no compatibility updates.
The whole product: capture, inspection, team access. Not a trial, never expires, no card required.
MailHog stores email in RAM; a restart wipes the inbox. Sendpit persists messages until your retention window deletes them.
TLS in transit, team mailboxes and per-mailbox access control. MailHog is unencrypted, single-inbox and localhost-only.
Feature by feature
15 features · 3 groups| Feature | MailHog | Sendpit |
|---|---|---|
| Shared basics | ||
| SMTP capture | ✓ | ✓ |
| REST API | ✓ retrieval only | ✓ Basic and above |
| Price | free (self-host) | free tier + paid plans |
| Where they differ | ||
| Actively maintained | ~ last update 2020 | ✓ |
| Cloud hosted | — | ✓ |
| Email persistence | ~ in-memory | ✓ retention window |
| Multi-mailbox | — | ✓ |
| Team user accounts | — | ✓ |
| Per-mailbox access control | — | ✓ |
| TLS encryption | — | ✓ |
| Webhooks | — | ✓ Pro and above |
| Spam score analysis | — | ✓ |
| Responsive device previews | — | ✓ |
| Honest trade-offs | ||
| Chaos testing | ✓ Jim middleware | — |
| Works offline | ✓ | — hosted |
MailHog makes sense if...
- · You're working alone on your local machine.
- · You don't need emails to persist between sessions.
- · You need Jim chaos testing to simulate SMTP failures.
Sendpit makes sense if...
- ✓ 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.
- ✓ You don't want to self-host infrastructure.
The Go community has largely moved to Mailpit as the spiritual successor to MailHog. If you want to stay local and self-hosted, consider Mailpit; if you want shared, hosted capture, that is what Sendpit is for.
Frequently asked questions
Is MailHog still maintained?
▾
MailHog's GitHub repository has not had significant updates in several years. It remains functional for basic SMTP capture, but there are no new features or security patches. If you need an actively maintained solution, Mailpit is the modern open-source successor, and Sendpit is a managed cloud alternative.
Can I migrate from MailHog to Sendpit?
▾
Yes, and the migration is straightforward. Update your SMTP host and port from MailHog's localhost:1025 to Sendpit's SMTP credentials in your application's environment configuration. Add the Sendpit username and password. No code changes required-your application sends email via SMTP the same way.
Does Sendpit work with Docker like MailHog?
▾
MailHog runs as a Docker container on your local machine. Sendpit is a cloud service-you do not need Docker, containers, or any local infrastructure. You point your application's SMTP configuration at Sendpit's server and it captures emails in the cloud. This means your team can share the same test mailbox without running anything locally.
How does Sendpit compare to MailHog for team use?
▾
MailHog is designed for individual developers running it locally. Sharing captured emails between team members requires sharing the same MailHog instance or forwarding ports. Sendpit is designed for teams from the start-create an organization, invite members, and everyone accesses the same captured emails through their own accounts.
Does Sendpit have MailHog's Jim chaos testing?
▾
No. MailHog includes Jim, a chaos monkey that can simulate network failures, rejected connections, and throttled delivery. Sendpit does not offer chaos testing features-it focuses on reliable email capture and inspection. If you depend on Jim for resilience testing, you would need to keep MailHog for that specific use case.
Is Sendpit free like MailHog?
▾
MailHog is completely free and open source with no usage limits. Sendpit has a permanent free tier with generous limits that covers most small team needs. Sendpit's paid plans add more capacity, API access, and webhooks. If budget is the only factor, MailHog costs nothing to run-but you pay in infrastructure and maintenance time.
Free forever, not a trial
1 mailbox · 3 seats · 200 stored emails · full inspection · no card · never expires also comparing: Mailtrap · Mailpit · MailCatcher · Mailosaur · Ethereal Email