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NimblyMail vs WP Mail SMTP

The market leader, with a free tier that connects a mailer and little else. Logging, alerts, routing, reports and multisite are all licensed.

Try NimblyMail Free See pricing

Claims on this page were checked against WP Mail SMTP 4.x, August 2026.

The short answer

Which one should you use?

Choose WP Mail SMTP if…

  • You want the most widely installed option, with the largest body of documentation and community answers behind it.
  • You are already paying for it and use the routing, reports and alerting that come with the licence.
  • You want white-glove setup as a purchasable service.

Choose NimblyMail if…

  • You want email logging and failure alerts without a licence.
  • You want deliverability audited on a schedule rather than checked by hand.
  • You run multisite, or you build staging copies and want a sandbox rather than an all-or-nothing switch.
Where they differ

The differences that matter

What they actually give away, and what they do not

Worth stating plainly, because several comparison pages on the internet get this wrong: WP Mail SMTP includes every mailer free, ships a real background sending queue free, has a Do Not Send toggle, and imports settings from several other plugins. What is licensed is the observability — logging, alerts, reports — plus routing, failover, rate limiting and multisite. If you have arrived here after discovering that logging is paid, that is the actual difference.

Logging is the thing you need at the worst moment

A missing email is diagnosed by knowing whether the message was generated, whether it was sent, and what the provider said in reply. Without a log you have none of that. Putting it behind a licence means the free tier cannot answer the question it exists to answer, and it is the single most common reason people go looking for an alternative.

Nobody in this category audits deliverability on a schedule

WP Mail SMTP publishes a manual deliverability checklist, which is a quarterly job somebody has to remember. NimblyMail runs six pillars weekly — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, PTR, connectivity and queue health — reads the expected SPF include and DKIM selector from the mailer you actually configured so it names the exact missing record, and opens a real TCP connection to your host rather than performing a DNS lookup. Deliverability decays silently; that is the gap this closes.

A staging kill switch, or a sandbox

Both can stop a staging site sending. NimblyMail adds a redirect mode that sends everything to one safe address while preserving the original recipients in headers, and an allowlist evaluated against every To, Cc and Bcc — so one customer address sandboxes the whole message rather than letting it out. It also fails closed: an unrecognised mode falls back to logging rather than delivering.

Feature by feature

Capability comparison

Capability WP Mail SMTP NimblyMail
Connect a mailer (Gmail, Outlook, SES, SMTP) Included Included
Free plan usable for real sites Included Included
Email logging with one-click resend Pro Free
Failure alerts Pro Free
Background sending queue Free Free
Per-message queue priority Not available Included
Recurring SPF/DKIM/DMARC/PTR audit Not available Included
Stop all sending on staging Included Included
Sandbox redirect mode + allowlist Not available Included
Multisite network admin with field locks Pro Free
Smart routing Pro Pro
Backup mailer failover Pro Pro
Email rate limiting Pro Pro
Scheduled reports and analytics Pro Pro
Import settings from other SMTP plugins Included Included

WP Mail SMTP pricing: Four tiers, with logging, alerts, routing, reports and multisite requiring a licence.

Switching

Moving from WP Mail SMTP

NimblyMail's setup wizard detects WP Mail SMTP and imports your sender identity, mailer choice, SMTP connection settings and plaintext provider API keys in one step. Anything it cannot carry across is reported rather than dropped silently, so you get a short list of what needs attention instead of finding out later. Two things need re-entering, and we would rather say so up front: WP Mail SMTP encrypts its SMTP password with its own key, so that field cannot be recovered by any importer, and OAuth authorisations for Gmail or Microsoft 365 have to be granted again — tokens are issued against one application's redirect URI and cannot be transferred between plugins. Your client ID and secret do move across, so reconnecting is a single click. Both plugins can stay active during cutover; NimblyMail only takes over wp_mail() once you confirm with a test email and a deliverability audit.

FAQ

NimblyMail vs WP Mail SMTP, answered

All mailers including Gmail, Outlook and Amazon SES, a background sending queue introduced in version 4.0 that is not licence-gated, a Do Not Send toggle, and settings import from several other SMTP plugins. Email logging, failure alerts, routing, backup connections, rate limiting, reports and multisite are paid.

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