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EmailJS is popular with front-end developers for a good reason: you connect Gmail or another mail service, write a template, drop a script tag in your page, and your site can send email with no server at all. For a contact form, though, that design has consequences. The email leaves from your own mailbox, your public key sits in the page source for anyone to read, and nothing is ever received: EmailJS only sends.
mailcontact is built for the other direction. Each project gets a form endpoint and a real address, [email protected], and everything that comes in lands in one inbox for that project. Your visitor's message is received and stored, you reply from the inbox, and there is no key in the browser that can send anything on your behalf.
what is emailjs
EmailJS (emailjs.com) is a client-side email sending service. You connect an email provider, design templates in a dashboard, initialise the SDK with a public key, and call emailjs.sendForm from the page. Checked on 28 October 2026, the Free plan is $0 for 200 requests a month, 2 templates, requests up to 50 KB, 500 saved contacts, 7 days of history and no domain whitelist. Personal is $9/month for 2,000 requests, 6 templates, the whitelist and 500 KB attachments. Professional is $15/month for 5,000 requests (a slider goes to 10,000), unlimited templates, 2 MB attachments, a suppressions list and 3 seats. Business is $40/month for 25,000 requests, with tiers up to 200,000, and 30 MB attachments. Yearly billing takes 20% off. Requests over quota are dropped rather than billed.
Their own FAQ is candid about the key model: 'someone could copy your keys (a well-known issue of any public API)', with the mitigation that a copied key can only trigger templates you already built. The domain whitelist that limits where the key works starts at Personal, and the only supported CAPTCHA is reCAPTCHA v2. Email history is a debugging log with 7 or 30 days of retention, and you can turn it off; it is not a mailbox, and EmailJS has no way to receive a reply.
side by side
Every EmailJS figure below was checked against their own pricing page on . Found something out of date? Tell us and we'll fix it.
| mailcontact | EmailJS | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | Receives messages: a form endpoint and an inbound address per project | Sends messages from browser JavaScript through your own mail provider |
| What is in the page | A plain form action URL; nothing in the page can send email | A public key and service ID that anyone can copy from the source |
| Inbound email address | Included: [email protected], no DNS | None; EmailJS does not receive email |
| Where messages live | A per-project inbox with the conversation and your replies | Your connected mailbox, plus a 7 to 30 day history log you can disable |
| Free tier | 1 project, 1 form, 50 messages per month | 200 requests per month, 2 templates, no domain whitelist |
| Spam control | Server-side challenge on the endpoint, nothing to configure | Domain whitelist from $9/month; reCAPTCHA v2 only |
| First paid plan | Pro at €9/month: 10 projects, 1,000 messages, Slack, Discord, MCP | Personal at $9/month: 2,000 requests, 6 templates, whitelist |
the honest take
faq
Remove the EmailJS script, the init call and the sendForm call, give your form a method of POST and an action pointing at your mailcontact endpoint, and keep your fields. There is no key to embed. Submissions then land in the project inbox and you can forward them to your email, Slack or Discord from there. If you want the visitor to stay on the page, submit the form with fetch, since the configurable post-submit redirect is not available yet.
Not insecure, but exposed by design. The public key has to be in the page, so anyone can call your templates with their own content in the variables until you add the domain whitelist (Personal and up) or reCAPTCHA v2. With mailcontact the page only holds a form URL; the spam check and the storage happen on the server, and the only thing an attacker can do with the URL is send you a message you can ignore.
Sending. mailcontact does not send arbitrary email from your site; it receives messages and lets you reply to them. If your use case is a confirmation email to the visitor, a notification to a third party, or any outbound mail triggered from the browser, EmailJS is the right tool and this comparison does not apply.
EmailJS Free gives 200 sends a month and Personal is $9/month for 2,000. mailcontact Free gives 1 project, 1 form and 50 messages a month; Pro is €9/month or €90/year for 10 projects and 1,000 messages, and Plus is €29/month for 50 projects and 10,000 messages. The numbers measure different things: EmailJS counts outbound requests, mailcontact counts messages received and replies sent in the inbox.
more comparisons
Forms and a real email address, together, with notifications where you live. Start with a free account.
Create your free formNo credit card needed. Free includes one project and 50 form messages per month.