Mailpit is free — why pay for Facteur?

To operate nothing, and for what Mailpit does not do: inboxes shared across CI pipelines, mail arriving from outside, retention and history, accounts and SSO, and SMS. If none of that is missing for you, stay on Mailpit.

That is the most common arrangement: Mailpit on the development machine, where immediacy wins, and a hosted service in continuous integration, where sharing and external reception win.

How is it different from MailHog?

Mailpit is its de facto successor; the MailHog repository is no longer actively maintained. If you are still on MailHog, this comparison applies in the same way.

Facteur vs Mailpit

Comparison

Facteur or Mailpit: which should you pick?

Mailpit is free, open source, starts with one command and lets no data leave your machine. For testing email **locally**, it is hard to beat, and we will not pretend otherwise.

The question changes in continuous integration, when several people and several pipelines have to share the same inboxes, find them again later, and receive real mail from outside.

Where they differ

	Facteur	Mailpit
Software cost	Subscription	Free, MIT licence
To operate	Nothing, a hosted service	A server, its monitoring, its upgrades
Sharing across pipelines	Yes, shared and partitioned inboxes	Build it yourself
Receiving from outside	Yes, public addresses	Local network only, unless exposed by hand
Retention and history	3 to 90 days by plan	Whatever you configure, on your disk
Accounts, roles, SSO	Yes	No
SMS	Yes	No, email only

What Mailpit does better

It is free, and that is not up for debate. No subscription beats zero.
No data leaves your machine: for a team that refuses on principle to let a test message pass through a third party, it is the only argument that counts, and it is decisive.
One command and it is running, with no account to create. In local development that immediacy beats every feature we have.

Choose Mailpit if…

Your email tests run on developers’ machines, you do not need to share them, and you would rather operate one more service than pay for one. It is an excellent choice, and many teams will never need anything else.

mailpit.axllent.org

Choose Facteur if…

Your tests run in continuous integration and must share inboxes across pipelines, if you need to receive mail from outside — a provider, an SMS gateway — or if nobody on the team wants to operate one more server.

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The real cost

Mailpit costs nothing to install. What it costs is elsewhere: the machine that runs it, its monitoring, its upgrades, and the time of whoever looks after it the day it falls over while the pipeline waits.

Where this comes from

Logiciel libre, sous licence MIT, auto-hébergé. Aucun tarif : le coût est celui de la machine qui le fait tourner et du temps passé à l’exploiter.
Successeur de facto de MailHog, dont le dépôt n’est plus maintenu activement.

Frequently asked

Mailpit is free — why pay for Facteur?: To operate nothing, and for what Mailpit does not do: inboxes shared across CI pipelines, mail arriving from outside, retention and history, accounts and SSO, and SMS. If none of that is missing for you, stay on Mailpit.
Can you use both?: That is the most common arrangement: Mailpit on the development machine, where immediacy wins, and a hosted service in continuous integration, where sharing and external reception win.
How is it different from MailHog?: Mailpit is its de facto successor; the MailHog repository is no longer actively maintained. If you are still on MailHog, this comparison applies in the same way.

Other comparisons: Mailtrap · MailSlurp · Mailosaur

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