Mailcatcher vs. Mailpit
The modern, actively maintained successor to MailHog — excellent for solo local development, but you're on your own for team access and infrastructure.
| Feature | Mailcatcher | Mailpit |
|---|---|---|
Deployment | Hosted SaaS | Self-hosted (Docker or a single binary) |
Setup | Point your SMTP settings at us | Install, run, and keep the server up |
Team accounts & permissions | Yes | No |
Shared access without exposing your network Remote access means running your own reverse proxy or tunnel | Yes | No |
Multiple isolated projects | Unlimited | One shared inbox per instance |
HTML/text preview, headers & attachments Mailpit's inspector is fast and well built | Yes | Yes |
Open source / full control Free, MIT-licensed, runs anywhere | No | Yes |
Active development Actively maintained, built as the spiritual successor to MailHog | Yes | Yes |
What is Mailpit?
Mailpit is a free, open-source SMTP test server written in Go. It ships as a single binary or Docker image, catches everything sent to it, and shows you the result in a clean, fast web interface. It was built as a modern replacement for MailHog and has become a popular default in local docker-compose setups.
Where Mailpit shines
Mailpit is well-built software. It's lightweight, starts in milliseconds, and its message inspector is one of the better ones in this category. Because it's a single binary with no external dependencies, it's easy to drop into a CI pipeline or a local dev environment, and its REST API makes it scriptable for automated tests. It's also completely free, with no account or usage limits — you just need somewhere to run it.
Where Mailcatcher differs
Mailpit gives you one shared inbox per running instance, with no built-in concept of separate projects, user accounts, or permissions. That's fine for a single developer on their own machine. It becomes friction once a team needs to look at the same captured emails: someone has to expose the instance, manage access to it, and keep it running and updated.
Mailcatcher is hosted, so there's no server to run or patch. Projects, users, and permissions are built in, so a designer or QA engineer can log in and see exactly the emails they're meant to, without SSH access or a shared instance URL.
Which should you choose?
If you're working solo, testing locally, and you're comfortable maintaining a small piece of infrastructure, Mailpit is a strong, free choice. If your team needs to share captured emails across developers, QA, or clients without standing up and securing your own server, Mailcatcher's hosted model removes that step entirely.