Anjal alternatives — an honest list
A vendor writing its own alternatives page usually produces a list of strawmen. That is a waste of your time and ours, so this one is organised around the question you are actually asking: what should I use instead of Anjal, and when.
Anjal gives an AI agent a real email inbox: an address on your domain that can send, receive, thread, search, hold a calendar, and be opened by a human in Apple Mail. If that is not the shape of your problem, one of the things below is a better buy.
Quick answer
| Your situation | Use |
|---|---|
| You only send. Nothing reads replies | Amazon SES, or Resend for the developer experience |
| You send a lot, cheaply, with some inbound | Mailgun |
| Deliverability is the whole problem | Postmark |
| The agent must work inside a person's existing Gmail or Outlook | Nylas, or the Gmail API directly |
| You want agent inboxes and we are not a fit | AgentMail |
| You just need mail forwarded, for free | Cloudflare Email Routing |
| You need LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Telegram too | Unipile |
| Email is core to your product, not plumbing | Build it |
The list
AgentMail
The closest thing to a direct competitor: also inbox-first, also built for agents, also with an MCP server. They raised a seed round and they publish more customer stories than we do, which is a real signal.
Pick them if their SDK fits your stack better, or you want a vendor with more public logos behind it. Where we differ: we ship prompt-injection quarantine on inbound by default, IMAP and SMTP on every mailbox so a human can open it in a normal mail client, and a calendar on every inbox. Judge it on those rather than on our summary of them.
Amazon SES
The cheapest reliable way to get mail out, at $0.10 per 1,000 outbound. We know because Anjal sends through SES.
Pick it if you only send, or volume is your dominant cost, or you are already deep in AWS. The catch: SES has no concept of a mailbox. Inbound lands in S3 or a Lambda as a raw RFC 5322 blob, and MIME parsing, threading, a store with search and bounce handling are all yours to write and maintain. Fine if that is a week you want to spend. Full comparison.
Resend
The nicest developer experience in transactional email, and a beautiful dashboard. We use them as a fallback relay.
Pick it if your app sends transactional mail from templates and inbound is a webhook you glance at occasionally. The catch: inbound is webhooks only, with no mailbox, no threading state and no IMAP. Full comparison.
Mailgun
The classic ESP that got closest to agents first: real inbound routing since long before anyone was building them.
Pick it if you send at volume and want inbound parsing without building it. The catch: inbound routes are plan-gated (1 free, 5 on Basic) and log retention is 1 day on Basic, so it is a delivery service with a log, not a mail store an agent can search next month. Full comparison.
Postmark
Deliverability people are genuinely fond of, with a long track record and fast transactional delivery.
Pick it if your single most important metric is whether a receipt lands in the inbox and you want a vendor with a reputation for exactly that. Full comparison.
Nylas, or the Gmail API directly
Both solve a problem we do not touch: acting inside a mailbox a person already owns.
Pick Nylas if you need one normalised API across Gmail, Microsoft and IMAP, and you would rather not write per-provider OAuth. They now also sell Nylas-hosted Agent Accounts, so they are a direct competitor for agent inboxes too. Pick the Gmail API directly if Google is your only provider and you are willing to own the restricted-scope security assessment, which costs $500 to $4,500 a year to a third-party assessor and must be repeated every 12 months.
The rule of thumb: agent acts as a person means Nylas or Gmail; agent acts as itself means an agent-owned inbox. Nylas comparison, Gmail API comparison.
Cloudflare Email Routing
Free, and genuinely good at the one thing it does: forwarding mail at a custom domain somewhere else.
Pick it if you want hello@yourdomain.com to land in your existing inbox and that is the whole requirement. The catch: it forwards, it does not host. There is no mailbox, no API to read a thread, and no sending. Full comparison.
Unipile
Multi-channel: email plus LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram and Messenger through one API.
Pick it if your agent needs to reach people on channels beyond email. We cover email and LinkedIn intent, and we do not do the rest. Full comparison.
Building it yourself
Sometimes right, and more often than vendors admit.
Pick it if email handling is your product rather than infrastructure under it. What it involves, so the estimate is honest: a receiving MTA, MIME parsing including the encodings real mail actually uses, threading via Message-ID, In-Reply-To and References in both directions, a store with search, attachment handling, bounce and complaint processing, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and reputation management, and a plan for prompt injection in anything an LLM reads. Each piece is tractable. Together they are a team, ongoing.
When we would tell you not to use us
Directly, because a list like this is worthless otherwise:
- You only send. Use SES or Resend. You will pay us for an inbox you never read.
- Marketing campaigns. Our limits are built for transactional and agent-driven mail, not a newsletter to 200,000 people. You will hit the ramp and the caps and be annoyed, correctly.
- The agent must live in a human's existing mailbox. Nylas or the Gmail API.
- You need a permanent free tier. We have a 7-day trial and no free plan. Mailgun, Resend, Nylas and Cloudflare all have real free tiers.
- You want one shared address with pattern-matching rules and no agent. A Mailgun route or an SES rule set is simpler and cheaper.
When we are the right answer
- The agent corresponds as itself, from an address on your domain.
- You need many addresses, created by API, isolated from each other.
- The inbound side is the point: reading, threading, searching, replying in-thread.
- You want inbound treated as hostile by default, because it is text a stranger wrote heading into a model's context.
- You want a human to be able to open the same mailbox and see what the agent has been doing.
Start a trial or read the comparisons if you would rather keep looking. Both are fine outcomes.
Competitor pricing and limits in the linked comparisons are quoted from each vendor's own pricing page and dated there. Things change; check the source before deciding.