Mailgun vs GitHub Actions
Email API for developers with deep deliverability tooling
vs. CI/CD native to GitHub — workflows + marketplace + hosted runners
Pricing tiers
Mailgun
Free
100 emails/day. 1 custom domain, 1-day log retention, 1 inbound route. No credit card.
Free
Basic
$15/month. 10,000 emails/month, no daily limit, 5 inbound routes.
$15/mo
Foundation
$35/month (1st month free). 50,000 emails/month, 1,000 custom domains, 5-day retention.
$35/mo
Scale
$90/month. 100,000 emails/month, SAML SSO, 5,000 email validations, dedicated IP pools, 30-day retention.
$90/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Deliverability services, managed onboarding.
Custom
GitHub Actions
Public Repos
$0. Free unlimited minutes on hosted runners (Linux). No private runners.
$0 base (usage-based)
Free (Personal)
$0. 2,000 minutes/mo private repos (Linux). 500MB Packages storage.
Free
Per-minute Overage
$0.008/min Linux ($0.08 macOS, $0.016 Windows) after included minutes.
$0/mo
Team
$4/user/mo. 3,000 minutes/mo. 2GB storage. Org management.
$4/mo
Enterprise
$21/user/mo. 50,000 minutes/mo. 50GB storage. SAML SSO, audit.
$21/mo
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing free on Mailgun vs free on GitHub Actions.
| Metric | Mailgun | GitHub Actions |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
Mailgun · 14 features
- Batch Sending — Send up to 1,000 recipients per API call via recipient variables.
- Dedicated IPs — IP pools with auto warmup. Scale+ tier.
- Deliverability Suite — Inbox placement testing, DMARC reporting, seed lists.
- Email Logs — Searchable log of all send attempts + events.
- Email Templates — Template builder + variables + versioning.
- Email Validation — Real-time email verification (syntax, MX, role accounts, disposable).
- EU Region — Data stored in EU for GDPR-sensitive customers.
- Inbound Routing — Route incoming emails to URLs/SMTP. Attachment forwarding.
- Mailing Lists — Unlimited mailing lists with bulk subscribe/unsubscribe.
- Open/Click Tracking — HTML + text tracking with configurable tracking domain.
- SAML SSO — Scale+ tier.
- Send API — REST/SMTP send with MIME + tracking.
- Tags — Tag messages to slice stats.
- Webhook Events — delivered, opened, clicked, unsubscribed, complained, permanent_fail, temporary_…
GitHub Actions · 18 features
- Actions Cache — Persistent cache across runs.
- Actions Marketplace — 20K+ reusable actions.
- ARC (K8s Controller) — Autoscale self-hosted on K8s.
- Artifacts — Upload/download job outputs.
- Composite Actions — Actions made of other actions.
- Concurrency Groups — Cancel / queue overlapping runs.
- Container Jobs — Run a whole job in a Docker image.
- Environments + Approvals — Gate deploys with manual approval.
- Job Summaries — Markdown summaries in UI.
- Larger Runners — 4-64 vCPU, ARM, GPU.
- Matrix Strategy — Fan out over axes.
- OIDC Cloud Auth — Exchange JWT for cloud credentials.
- Reusable Workflows — workflow_call.
- Secrets + Variables — Encrypted org/repo/env secrets.
- Self-Hosted Runners — Your own runners.
- Service Containers — Sidecar containers (DBs, Redis) per job.
- Triggers — push, pull_request, schedule, workflow_dispatch, etc.
- Workflows — Event-driven YAML workflows.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | Mailgun | GitHub Actions |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | — | gh run CLI |
| SDK | mailgun.js (Node), mailgun-php, mailgun-python, mailgun-ruby | @actions/* toolkit |
| REST | Mailgun REST API | GitHub Actions REST API |
| GRAPHQL | — | GitHub GraphQL (Actions) |
| OTHER | Inbound Routing, SMTP Relay, Webhooks | Actions Marketplace, Actions Tab (Web), workflow_* webhooks, Workflow YAML |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Mailgun and GitHub Actions may be affiliate links — Staxly may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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