Shopify vs Mailgun

Dominant SaaS commerce platform — Online Store + Hydrogen headless
vs. Email API for developers with deep deliverability tooling

Shopify website ↗Mailgun website ↗

Pricing tiers

Shopify

Starter

$5/mo. Sell via social/chat links. No checkout site. Basic.

$5/mo

Basic

$29/mo ($19 annual). Full store. 2.9% + 30¢ online. 2 staff.

$29/mo

Shopify

$79/mo ($49 annual). 2.7% online. 5 staff.

$79/mo

Advanced

$299/mo ($229 annual). 2.5% online. Custom reports. 15 staff.

$299/mo

Plus

$2,300/mo (starting). Enterprise features, checkout customization, unlimited staff.

$2300/mo

Enterprise

Custom. For $1M+ GMV merchants. Dedicated support, Checkout Extensibility.

Custom

Shopify website ↗

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

Mailgun website ↗

Free-tier quotas head-to-head

Comparing starter on Shopify vs free on Mailgun.

Metric	Shopify	Mailgun
No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers.

Features

Shopify · 22 features

Admin APIs — REST + GraphQL for management.
App Store — 8,000+ apps.
B2B (Plus) — Company accounts + catalogs.
Checkout — Shopify-managed checkout (PCI-compliant).
Checkout Extensibility — UI extensions in checkout (Plus).
Collections — Manual + smart grouping.
Customers — CRM-lite + B2B (Plus).
Discounts — Automatic + code-based.
Hydrogen — React/Remix headless framework.
Inventory — Multi-location stock.
Markets — Multi-region selling (currency, language).
Online Store — Default Liquid-based storefront.
Orders + Fulfillment — Multi-location fulfillment.
Oxygen — Edge hosting for Hydrogen (Plus).
Products + Variants — Full PIM.
Shipping + Rates — Carrier integrations.
Shopify Functions — Rust/WASM backend extensions.
Shopify Payments — First-party payment processor.
Shop Pay — Accelerated checkout with saved payment.
Storefront API — GraphQL for custom storefronts.
Theme Store — First-party + paid themes.
Webhooks — Event subscriptions.

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_…

Developer interfaces

Kind	Shopify	Mailgun
CLI	shopify CLI	—
SDK	@shopify/admin-api-client, @shopify/hydrogen	mailgun.js (Node), mailgun-php, mailgun-python, mailgun-ruby
REST	Admin REST API	Mailgun REST API
GRAPHQL	Admin GraphQL API, Storefront API	—
MCP	Shopify MCP (unofficial)	—
OTHER	Liquid Templates, Shopify Admin, Shopify Webhooks	Inbound Routing, SMTP Relay, Webhooks

Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Some links to Shopify and Mailgun 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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