Most business websites include a contact form, payment portal or an ecommerce feature. All of these functionalities rely heavily on email notifications. Missing the notification can hurt your business. You might be missing connections with a new customer or losing ecommerce business. By default WordPress sends PHP emails with the outgoing address matching the admin address for your website. These emails are not authenticated by the email server and will be blocked as spam 99% of the time. In order to ensure that your emails are delivered correctly you need to authenticate all the messages with SMTP. For years the market leader for this important plugin was WP MAIL SMTP. Recently, Gravity, mostly known for Gravity Forms, released an SMTP plugin called Gravity SMTP. Let’s compare the 2 products side by side.
Pricing
WP MAIL SMTP is available for free with limited features. The only major email provider included in the free version is Google. The WP Mail SMTP pro version includes all other major email integrations.
Gravity SMTP is only available with a Gravity Forms license (which is included with most of our WordPress Security & Performance Plans). For a single site the license is currently 40% less expensive than WP MAIL SMTP.
Installation
Both plugins require you to configure the API Authentication with your email provider. This process can be intimidating, but WP MAIL SMTP provides excellent documentation with easy to follow steps for all the integrations they support. The Gravity documentation is not quite as easy to follow, but of course our team is intimately familiar with it and can configure it as part of your Security & Performance Plan.
Features
Both plugins offer a similar list of features – email logging, test email, and ability to re-send messages. The alerts and secondary integrations are only available in the pro version of WP MAIL SMTP. Unfortunately, Gravity only allows you to configure alerts for Twilio and Slack whereas WP MAIL SMTP offers email, teams and webhook alerts as well.
One frustrating feature of the free WP MAIL SMTP plugin are the automated emails it sends when WP user accounts have been updated. The website owner has no control over the content of these emails and is not able to turn them off. Only upgrading to pro allows you to turn these messages off.
Reliability
WP MAIL SMTP has been on the market for many years and gained the trust of the community. Gravity SMTP is still a new product, they continue adding features at a rapid pace and might run into more reliability issues.
If your website does not include an SMTP plugin yet, consider installing one today. It will greatly improve email deliverability. Our team of developers is here to help. Not sure which product to purchase? For clients using Gmail, that do not require either alerts or secondary integrations I would recommend the free version of WP MAIL SMTP. If you do require features or integrations that are not included in the free version, we would recommend purchasing Gravity. It is a much better value, and includes the Gravity Forms license which is one of, if not the best forms plugins on the market.
