Compare
Where the tools stop, and where we start.
Every provider below is good at something, and we say so. The pattern to watch for is the same in every comparison: the pipe works, the operating layer is missing, and the missing layer is the part that decides whether your mail lands.
A quick way to read this page: ask of each tool, who is watching? Who notices the IP listing at 2 a.m., the SPF record that crept past its lookup limit, the deferral pattern that started Tuesday? Who moves the traffic, files the delisting, and writes down what the receiver said? For every product below, the honest answer is "you". That is the actual product gap, and it is why teams that already pay for one of these tools still come to us. The pipes stay. The blindness goes. And switching the sending side is usually an afternoon: point your application at our relay or API, templates untouched, your current provider still carrying traffic until you are sure.
The short version
One table before the prose.
| Moves mail | Watches reputation | Acts on incidents | Manages your DNS | Hosts mailboxes | Humans on your side | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Postmark | ✓ | · | · | · | · | · |
| SendGrid | ✓ | · | · | · | · | · |
| Mailgun | ✓ | · | · | · | · | · |
| Amazon SES | ✓ | · | · | · | · | · |
| Google / Microsoft relay | ✓ | · | · | · | ✓ | · |
| Self-hosted | ✓ | you | you | you | you | you |
| Egressif | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
· = not their job. "you" = congratulations, it is your job.
Most rows above can stay. Several clients keep Postmark, SendGrid, or SES wired in as one path under our routing while we add the watching, failover, suppression, and evidence. The pipe is fine. The missing layer is the point. We connect over SMTP and usually the provider's API, and because we host your DNS we configure the authentication that makes mail land, so onboarding a provider is a guided setup rather than a paste-in-SMTP switch. There is no rigid "supported providers" list; the major ESPs and your own infrastructure fit. See the overlay for provider-specific details.
How the overlay works
Your ESP becomes one path. We become the layer above it.
vs. The transactional specialist
Postmark
Genuinely good at
Postmark is genuinely good at one thing: fast, clean transactional sending for a single application. Their stream separation is real, their API is pleasant, and for a small product sending resets and receipts from one domain, it just works.
Where it stops
It stops at the edges of that one job. One account means one reputation context. There is no managed DNS, no mailboxes, no per-destination routing, and when Postmark itself throttles you or has an incident, you have no second path. Multi-domain and multi-tenant setups get awkward fast, and nobody at Postmark is watching your domains, your blocklist exposure, or your DMARC posture. That is all still your job.
With Egressif
With Egressif, you keep the thing Postmark taught you to expect (transactional mail that lands fast) and gain everything around it: isolated streams per traffic class, automatic failover when any path degrades, managed DNS with verified authentication, real mailboxes, and people who own your reputation. Several clients arrived here from Postmark when their second product, second domain, or first incident outgrew a single pipe.
vs. The high-volume workhorse
SendGrid
Genuinely good at
SendGrid moves enormous volume and the API is everywhere. If you need to push millions of messages and you have someone steering it, the pipe itself is capable. Dedicated IPs are available, and the tooling covers marketing and transactional in one place.
Where it stops
Shared IP pools mean your reputation rides with strangers, and the quality of those pools varies a lot. Dedicated IPs hand you the warmup problem with documentation instead of automation. Support at the tiers most companies buy is slow and scripted, deliverability guidance costs extra, and when Gmail starts deferring your mail, the dashboard tells you that it happened, not why, and certainly not what to do about it. You are the deliverability team.
With Egressif
Egressif treats a SendGrid account as what it is: one possible path among several. We warm and monitor the capacity, watch the reputation, reroute around trouble, suppress at the gate, and keep the verbatim receiver responses your delisting tickets and postmortems need. Some clients keep SendGrid inside our routing. The difference is that now somebody is flying the plane.
vs. The developer pipe
Mailgun
Genuinely good at
Mailgun gives developers a straightforward sending API with decent logs, flexible domains, and a route-inbound feature people genuinely like. For an engineering team that wants to ship email features quickly, it is a reasonable pipe.
Where it stops
It is a pipe with a dashboard. List hygiene, warmup, reputation strategy, DMARC enforcement, and incident response are all reading material, not services. Shared IPs carry the usual neighbors problem. Log retention is short on most plans, so by the time a placement problem becomes visible, the evidence that would explain it is often already gone.
With Egressif
We keep the developer ergonomics (SMTP relay, a scoped API for provisioning) and add the operating layer: durable per-message evidence that does not expire when you need it, suppression enforced below your code, warming that runs itself, and a team that has already seen whatever just happened to you. Your engineers keep building features. We keep the mail landing.
vs. The cheapest raw pipe
Amazon SES
Genuinely good at
SES is the cheapest way to move email at scale, full stop. If you live in AWS, the integration is natural, and the infrastructure itself is reliable. For internal notifications and low-stakes volume, the price is unbeatable.
Where it stops
SES is deliberately bare. Reputation management is a dashboard you must check, warmup is your spreadsheet, suppression is partly yours to build, dedicated IPs are extra, and there is no human who knows your sending. Worse, the price tempts teams into treating email as solved, right up until account-level sending pauses or a shared-IP reputation dip hits revenue mail. The money you save on sending, you spend on engineering time, with interest.
With Egressif
Egressif costs more than raw SES because it is a different product: engineered routing, managed reputation, layered suppression, real mailboxes, DNS, evidence, and people. The honest comparison is not Egressif vs. SES. It is Egressif vs. SES plus the half-engineer who now babysits it plus the incidents nobody caught. Priced that way, the math usually flips.
vs. The "we already pay for it" option
Google Workspace relay
Genuinely good at
If your company lives in Workspace, the SMTP relay is right there, authenticated mail from your real domain with no new vendor. For modest internal and operational volume from a Workspace org, it is perfectly sensible.
Where it stops
It is built for a Workspace tenant’s own correspondence, not for products or platforms. The quotas are hard and per-user, bulk and automated sending sits against the acceptable-use line, you get no IP strategy, no failover, no event stream worth building on, and Google will throttle or suspend first and explain later. Many teams discover the ceiling during their busiest week.
With Egressif
Keep Workspace for what it is great at: your people’s mail. Egressif carries your product, platform, and volume sending on infrastructure designed for it, with the Workspace relay available as one configured path where it genuinely fits. When Google tightens a rule, that is a config change on our side, not a company-wide incident on yours.
vs. The corporate default
Microsoft 365 / Exchange Online
Genuinely good at
For corporate person-to-person mail, calendars, and compliance tooling, Exchange Online is the standard for a reason. SMTP submission from the tenant works for light operational mail, and your security team already trusts it.
Where it stops
Exchange Online throttles automated sending aggressively and opaquely. Per-mailbox rate limits, tenant-level controls, and anti-spam heuristics all assume a human is typing. Headers get rewritten, large sends get deferred with cryptic 4.x codes, and Microsoft support is unlikely to debug your product’s email pipeline. It is an inbox platform that tolerates outbound, not sending infrastructure.
With Egressif
Same division of labor: Exchange keeps the corporate inboxes, Egressif carries the automated and volume sending, with proper authentication keeping both aligned under your DMARC policy. Your product mail stops competing with your employees’ quota, and your IT team stops fielding tickets about an invisible throttle they cannot lift.
vs. The full-control trap
Self-hosted (Postfix and friends)
Genuinely good at
Self-hosting gives you total control and zero per-message cost, and for a competent operator with stable, modest volume it can absolutely work. Postfix itself is excellent software. Some of the best mail people alive run their own stacks.
Where it stops
The software was never the hard part. The hard part is IP space worth sending from, PTR and rDNS that pass scrutiny, warmup, per-receiver pacing, bounce parsing across every provider dialect, blocklist surveillance, 3 a.m. listings, and the slow accumulation of operational knowledge that big receivers never document. That is a permanent part-time job that becomes a full-time job exactly when something breaks, which is always the worst week for it.
With Egressif
We are the team that chose this as the actual job. Own ASN, own IP ranges, a multi-node cluster, and the receiver folklore you only get from operating at network scale. You keep the control that matters (routing choices, policies, your data via API) and shed the parts that were never your business to run. Several of our clients are former self-hosters. None of them miss the pager.
vs. The category mismatch
Inbox hosting as sending (Workspace, M365, SmarterMail)
Genuinely good at
Inbox hosts store, organize, and secure human mailboxes, and the good ones do it well. If your need is staff mailboxes with calendars and admin tooling, buy one and be happy.
Where it stops
Stretching an inbox plan into sending infrastructure fails on every axis at once: per-seat quotas, no reputation isolation, no warmup, no event streams, no routing, and terms of service that explicitly do not want your use case. The failure mode is quiet at first (slightly worse placement) and then sudden (a suspended account during a launch).
With Egressif
Egressif is the other half of the picture: sending infrastructure with hosted mailboxes where your sending identities need to receive. Keep your inbox host for employees if you like it. Point the mail your business depends on at infrastructure that was built to carry it.
The other axis
It also depends on who you have.
The same tool produces wildly different outcomes depending on whether anyone owns email at your company. Here is what we change in each staffing reality.
No email owner at all
Email "belongs" to whoever touched it last. DNS records are folklore, the ESP password lives in a shared doc, and deliverability is discovered through customer complaints. Every incident is an archaeology project run by people with other jobs.
Egressif becomes the owner. Domains, authentication, sending, monitoring, and incident response all land with us, and you get plain-language summaries instead of mysteries. This is the configuration where we change a company’s life most visibly.
IT admin who owns it part-time
A capable generalist keeps the lights on between forty other responsibilities. They can fix a record and read a bounce, but warmup schedules, gateway behavior, and blocklist response are outside both their toolkit and their calendar. Things work until they suddenly don’t.
Your admin keeps control (console, RBAC, audit logs, routing choices) and loses the parts that were never reasonable for one person: 24/7 monitoring, reputation strategy, receiver folklore, incident execution. They become the informed owner of a managed system instead of the lonely operator of an unmanaged one.
A dedicated deliverability person
You have an expert, and they are drowning. They know exactly what good looks like and have a backlog of infrastructure projects (proper warmup automation, per-receiver shaping, evidence retention) that engineering will never prioritize. They are also the single point of failure for everything they know.
We are their force multiplier, not their replacement. The platform implements the practices they have been requesting for years, the event data feeds whatever tooling they trust, and our team becomes their peer group and their second on-call. Your expert finally gets to do strategy instead of toil.
A full team of experts
Rare, expensive, and usually found at senders big enough to justify it. Even then, the team spends most of its time maintaining undifferentiated plumbing: shaping tables, warmup tooling, suppression plumbing, log retention.
Teams like this use us as infrastructure: own routing policies through the API, full event streams into their systems, our network-scale receiver data as an input to their decisions. They keep the strategy. We carry the plumbing and the pager rotation.
FAQ
Before you decide.
Can we keep our current provider and still use Egressif?
Often, yes. An existing ESP account can run as one configured path inside our routing, with our monitoring, suppression, and failover around it. Several clients keep SendGrid or SES in the mix. The difference is that somebody is now watching it, and there is a plan B when it degrades.
Why not just build this in-house?
You can, and the compare sections above describe what that costs: IP space worth sending from, warmup automation, per-receiver shaping kept current, bounce-dialect parsing, blocklist surveillance, and a pager. It is one to two engineers, permanently, doing undifferentiated work. If email is your product, maybe. If email serves your product, buying the layer is almost always cheaper.
How painful is switching, really?
For sending: point your application at our SMTP relay or API, usually an afternoon, templates untouched. Domains warm onto our infrastructure on a measured ramp while your current provider keeps carrying traffic, so there is no cliff. DNS and mailboxes move on their own schedule, domain by domain, if you move them at all.
What if we mostly send marketing campaigns?
Permission-based marketing to people who asked for it is welcome, and stream separation will protect your transactional mail from your campaign calendar. Purchased lists and unsolicited bulk are not welcome, at any price point. We say this everywhere because it is the policy that keeps the network worth being on.
When is Egressif the wrong choice?
If your current setup genuinely works, email never costs you a thought, and your volume is modest, you do not need us yet. We would rather tell you that in the first call than onboard a client who did not need to move. The conversation is still free, and you will leave with a straight answer.
Honesty corner
And when should you come to us?
Small senders are welcome here, and plenty of our clients started small. Starting on solid infrastructure simply means you never have to do the painful migration later, and your domains build clean reputation from day one. So this section is not "go away if you are small." It is just honesty: if your current setup genuinely works and email never costs you a thought, there is no urgency. The moments worth a conversation are easy to spot. A second domain or brand. A second traffic type sharing your reputation. A first blocklisting or a compliance question you could not answer. Volume that needs warming. Or simply the day email starts eating engineering time. Come earlier than that if you would rather skip those moments entirely. Plenty do.
Related reading
Go deeper in the reference library
Tell us what you run today.
We'll tell you honestly whether switching is worth it, and what we'd keep from your current setup.