Short answer: Mailjet is a dedicated email platform — transactional email over an API and an SMTP relay, a code-and-visual template builder (Passport) your marketing team can own, and marketing contact lists; email is the whole product. Devotel Orbit is the AI-first omnichannel platform: the same transactional-email envelope — the send API plus an SMTP relay authenticated on the same tenant API key, with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC domain authentication — running on the same account as AI voice agents, SMS and MMS, WhatsApp, RCS, embeddable video, and a built-in contact center, on one pay-as-you-go bill.
Pick Mailjet when the template program genuinely belongs to marketing in a shared, no-code builder, or when contact lists are the centrepiece and transactional email is your only channel. Pick Orbit when a transactional email has to share one unified customer profile and one bill with the rest of your channels. The row-by-row matrix lives at /compare/mailjet.
1. What Mailjet actually is
Mailjet's public surface covers the email envelope end to end, and the honest read credits both halves of it:
- Transactional email over an API and an SMTP relay. Mailjet exposes a REST send API plus an SMTP relay on its own host (smtp.mailjet.com) with API-key-based authentication. A legacy system wired over SMTP joins the same pipeline as the API path.
- Passport, the team-owned template builder. Passport is a code-and-visual editor built for non-developers — a marketing team drafts, versions, and reuses transactional templates without filing an engineering ticket. That is a genuinely differentiated surface in this category.
- Marketing contact lists. Mailjet carries contact-list management for marketing sends as a first-class product. Orbit's email pillar is deliberately transactional-scope — a unified commerce and customer data platform sits behind the flows, but a team-owned email list builder is not a surface Orbit claims.
2. The shared envelope: where the two platforms tie
The four rows a transactional-buyer shortlist actually weighs resolve at parity, and the /compare/mailjet matrix grades them that way:
- Send API. Both platforms expose a transactional send endpoint on an API key; the buyer's forwardable payload shape carries over.
- SMTP relay. Mailjet's smtp.mailjet.com and Orbit's SMTP relay are genuine parity both ways: Orbit's relay is a shipped ingress endpoint (smtp.orbit.devotel.io, ports 587, 465, and 2525, TLS required) authenticated with the same tenant API key that gates the HTTP endpoint — one credential covers both paths. The full connection profile is documented at Send email through the SMTP relay.
- Domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). Both require a verified sending domain; the verification dance is the same, so the migration is a DNS re-point, not a rebuild.
- Deliverability health. Both ship deliverability tooling. Orbit adds DMARC aggregate-report ingest plus automatic spam-complaint and bounce suppression on top of the domain-authentication grid — a row the /compare/mailjet matrix credits as an Orbit lead rather than a tie.
No marketing-list parity row appears in the matrix, deliberately: Orbit's email pillar scope (documented at Send transactional and marketing email with Orbit) is the transactional surface — API and SMTP relay, templates, attachments, engagement tracking, suppression — and a team-owned list-builder product is outside that scope. Declaring the gap a parity tie would violate the honesty contract this whole comparison series runs on.
3. Where Mailjet remains the right choice
- Passport as the team's template home. If your template ownership model is marketing-drafted, no-code, shared in one workspace, and transactional email is genuinely your only channel, Passport is a feature set Orbit does not replace. Orbit's own drag-and-drop block builder renders templates and re-hydrates a saved canvas — a developer-facing flow — but a team-owned visual editor with the shape Passport has is Mailjet's honest win.
- An email-only program. If contact lists plus transactional sending are the entire scope — no SMS, no voice, no contact center — the all-in-one bill advantage dissolves and a dedicated email plan is a defensible shape.
Pick Orbit instead when the email program shares a customer profile with everything around it: a password-reset email should fall back to an SMS, a suppression decision should hold across email and SMS, and the contact center should read the same send history.
4. Migration sketch: one send call, DNS first
A Mailjet-to-Orbit move mirrors the move from every dedicated email vendor, in the order that keeps delivery green:
- Reuse your sending domain. The authenticated domain you already run on Mailjet transfers as-is; register the same sender domain in Orbit's dashboard (Settings → Email) and re-publish the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records Orbit specifies so the DNS proof flips cleanly.
- Repoint the send call or the relay endpoint. For API integrations, swap the API key and endpoint your app posts to — the payload shape carries over. For SMTP clients, change the relay host to
smtp.orbit.devotel.io(port 587 STARTTLS, or 465/2525), keep the literalapikeyusername, and reuse the same tenant API key as the password — the same key gates both ingress paths, so the HTTP and the relay cut in one move. - Export every suppression category out of the old account before the first send and re-import it so bounce, complaint, and unsubscribe state holds across the cutover.
- Move inbound replies onto Orbit's inbound parse webhook so replies land in the shared inbox, then shut off the old account once delivery is green.
5. Frequently asked questions
Can I reuse my sender domain when I migrate from Mailjet?
Yes. Domain verification attaches the DNS proof to the same domain — register the sending domain in Orbit, republish the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records Orbit specifies, and the recipient side of your sending traffic does not change shape. The migration is a DNS re-point, not a domain rebuild.
Does Orbit replace Mailjet's Passport template builder?
Not fully. Orbit's own block-builder renders templates and re-hydrates a saved canvas — a developer-facing surface, documented at Send transactional and marketing email with Orbit — but a team-owned, no-code template editor of the Passport shape is a Mailjet win this post credits rather than claims parity on. A team whose template program is owned in a code-first workflow should evaluate both; a team whose marketing department drafts templates itself should weigh Passport deliberately.
What is Orbit's pricing model compared to Mailjet's?
Mailjet sells email as monthly subscription tiers priced for email alone. Orbit is pay-as-you-go with published per-email pricing and bundled credit across every channel, so transactional email draws from the same account balance as SMS, voice, and the rest of the stack — the rate you see is the whole cost: no per-product fees, no carrier or compliance surcharges, and no paid support tier stacked on usage. Compare the current published terms on both vendors' pricing pages before committing.
What if I only move my SMTP-based sending first?
The SMTP relay cutover is the bounded version of the move: update the relay host and credential, let the same tenant API key authenticate submissions, and the suppression and consent gates apply identically to relay and HTTP ingress. The relay connection profile (host, ports, username sentinel) is at Send email through the SMTP relay.
6. The full matrix and the next step
Every row above comes from the public comparison table; per-row notes and the structured-data pairings live on the Orbit vs Mailjet head-to-head. The field-wide view of the transactional-email category is the best transactional email API providers 2026 listicle, the SMTP-relay early-access posture is documented at Send email through the SMTP relay, and the pricing page is the source of truth for what actually bills.