Choosing the right tool for testing your product's communication workflows is critical, especially when email and SMS are core parts of your user experience. Both Mailosaur and Mailtrap help developers and QA teams test email workflows, but they’re built with different scopes and abilities.
In this post, we’ll explore where they overlap, how they differ, and why Mailosaur might be the better fit for teams needing broader test coverage across multiple channels.
What do Mailosaur and Mailtrap have in common?
At a high level, both tools are designed to enhance your email capabilities, sharing features including:
- Automated email testing via an API
- Dedicated testing environments (virtual SMTP servers)
- Support for attachments, headers, and message inspection
- ISO 27001 certification and GDPR compliance
- Team collaboration with shared inboxes and project controls
- Support for popular testing frameworks and CI/CD pipelines
Meaning, if you’re only testing basic email content or delivery in non-production environments, both tools will help you get the job done. However, Mailtrap is primarily focused on email sending (i.e. it is an Email Service Provider), whereas Mailosaur is purpose-built QA software for software engineers and QA professionals.
Where Mailosaur goes further
While Mailtrap does include basic email testing functionality, Mailosaur was built to test any broader communication workflow, including email and other real-world use cases like SMS verification and multi-factor authentication, and even allows you to preview your emails across real devices before you even hit send.
- SMS Testing
Mailosaur supports automated SMS testing with real phone numbers, helping teams verify content, timing, and delivery of OTPs and alerts, without the need for real phone numbers nor purchasing expensive devices for your team. This comes with Mailosaur plans, so even if SMS testing isn’t something a customer is currently doing, there’s the option to expand their remit.
Mailtrap does not offer SMS testing of any kind, so you’d need to invest in an alternative solution to do so, which could be both expensive and time consuming.
- MFA flows and link & code extraction
Testing login and account security flows is a crucial step to ensure your customer experience is the best it could be - imagine if they can’t access your service because they can’t login properly!
Mailosaur allows you to test the full journey, across both email and SMS, all in one place. This is especially useful for apps that rely on 2FA or mobile number verification. Mailosaur can automatically extract links, verification codes, and dynamic tokens from messages, making it easy to validate end-to-end flows like account activation and password resets. It also enables you to automate testing of these functions, meaning there’s less tedious testing for your team.
Mailtrap allows you to inspect raw message content, but it’s then for your team to individually parse links and codes and take the time to manually continue the flow. This significantly slows down the speed of testing, and increases the risks of errors too.
- Email previews
With Mailosaur, you can preview how your emails render across real clients like Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, as well across devices and modes. This helps spot broken layouts, dark mode bugs, and formatting issues early, which means that you can cover all bases when it comes to customer experience. For example, you may think that an email is perfect and ready to send to customers, but once you preview how it’ll look in dark mode on an iPhone, you may realise there’s a white background to images or the text doesn’t have sufficient contrast ratio.
Mailtrap doesn’t offer visual email previews across clients, so even if you do perfect your content, there’s no way to see if users will receive it looking as you intend. This means that you’d have to manually send yourself an email to check it (which is both time consuming and only allows you to experience your messages on one device), and should you choose to expand to more comprehensive testing, you’d need to adopt an additional tool to do so.
- Limitless testing
With Mailosaur, there’s no limit to the number of test email addresses that you can ‘create’ under each domain (as each domain supports a wildcard pattern), and while there are caps on the number of emails you can send per day, you have the option to further customise your plan and add higher allowances should you need them.
Meanwhile, Mailtrap plans can be hard to understand, with their offering being split into what’s referred to as ‘sandboxes’, and ‘sandbox email addresses’, with additional limitations in the number of emails you can send within a 10 second period. This means a user needs to know the number of emails they need to test, the number of email addresses required, and the speed at which tests need to be conducted ahead of time in order to deduce whether Mailtrap could suit their needs.
To compare directly, a customer who required 5 email addresses and to send 5000 emails a day would know they could use a Mailosaur business plan (which also includes 500 SMS messages per month,) for $80 per month. Whereas, to use Mailtrap, they’d need at least a ‘Team’ tier plan to get 5 email addresses, but an Enterprise level plan would be required to send the volume of emails they’d require (which would cost $498 per month).
- Built to scale with you
The customisation available with Mailosaur’s plans makes them a perfect option for businesses of all shapes and sizes. From small startups to global enterprises, customers who choose Mailosaur do so because they know there’s the capacity to adapt and scale their plans as their testing needs grow, whether due to testing volumes or the features they require.
- Customer support experience
Mailosaur provides Enterprise customers with a dedicated Account Manager. This subject matter expert acts as a single point of contact for customers and is someone deeply familiar with their company and their unique needs. They also provide specific services such as providing a hands-on onboarding, and ensure that their questions and concerns are addressed promptly.
On the other hand Mailtrap, even for Enterprise customers, are only contactable by email or live chat, and don’t provide dedicated managers for specific accounts, which leaves less likelihood queries and concerns would be escalated quickly.
Key takeaways
Both Mailtrap and Mailosaur are tools that can be used for testing transactional emails. While Mailtrap is a good option for people looking for a cheap email sending solution, with some basic email testing features on the side, Mailosaur is purpose-build QA software offering a far broader set of testing capabilities that can scale with your business.
Want to try Mailosaur for yourself? Request a free, personalised demo from our friendly team, or dive in yourself with a 14-day free trial.