5 Best Email API for PHP Developers Tested & Compared: Here’s What I Found

The best email APIs for PHP developers are Mailtrap, SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, and Postmark.

I researched and tested each of these services with the help of Mailtrap’s deliverability experts and security team. My goal was to identify the best email APIs for PHP developers by looking at real-world infrastructure needs rather than just reading marketing copy.

We created a demo application, integrated each API, and tested the most common use cases, such as sending transactional and marketing emails, trying out webhooks, etc. The differences between deliverability, setup speeds, and other comparison criteria were more than clear, to say the least.

Best email API for PHP: a snapshot

• Mailtrap is the best PHP email API for developers and product teams who need high deliverability rates, a developer-friendly experience, and reliability.
• SendGrid is for enterprises that need to send transactional and marketing emails at the same time from a single ecosystem.
• Mailgun is for teams who want to send mass emails while also being able to automatically validate their recipients’ addresses.
• Amazon SES is for experienced developer teams who are working with the AWS infrastructure and have spare time to set it up.
• Postmark is for businesses that want to focus on sending transactional emails from a highly configurable API with a clean interface.

For your skimming convenience, I’ve compiled a little table that compares the essential info for the best PHP email APIs out there:

PHP email API comparison: comparison criteria

For easier navigation, we broke down our comparison criteria into the following categories:

• SDK quality
• Frameworks compatibility
• Developer experience
• Webhooks
• Email infrastructure
• Pricing comparison
• Customer support

SDK quality

When it comes to SDK quality, I noted down the most important information any developer could use before adopting it, such as unpacked size and minimum PHP version.

Frameworks compatibility

Since we’ve included only the best APIs on this list, you can rest assured that they all offer well-maintained SDKs for major frameworks, such as Laravel and Symfony.
This makes it straightforward to plug into most modern apps, as you can keep your existing mailers and simply swap the transport layers when integrating a PHP-based email API into your stack.

Developer experience

Setup time & learning curve

All five providers offer Composer-installable SDKs, clear quickstarts, and sample code, so a basic integration can usually be completed in under an hour once your account and domain are verified.

However, there are a few nuances, namely:

• Mailtrap provides very simple PHP integration with ready-made code samples and environment-based configuration, making it easy to drop into existing apps for email sending.
• SendGrid and Mailgun both rely on official PHP SDKs installed via Composer and require API key management plus some familiarity with their message models, but their quickstart guides and examples keep initial setup relatively straightforward.
• Amazon SES adds extra steps around AWS SDK configuration, IAM permissions, and understanding SES-specific sending limits and regions, so PHP developers who are new to AWS may spend more time on initial setup and troubleshooting.
• Postmark’s official PHP client is distributed via Composer and comes with simple helper methods for sending transactional messages and handling templates, which keeps the integration surface small and easy to reason about for most PHP projects.

Note: The differences in setup time and learning curve surface when you start using platform-specific features like AWS IAM for SES, or simply advanced features like templates and webhooks.

Here’s what you can expect from the setup time and complexity of each provider, after you’ve been verified as a sender:

Wrapping up

We hope you enjoyed this summary of transactional email APIs for PHP. If you want to explore the full version of it, including our deep-dive into webhooks and pricing, you can visit Mailtrap's blog page!