Foundation for Emails vs MJML

Foundation for Emails is a free, open-source web framework for creating responsive HTML emails. It is aimed at marketing, promotional, drip campaign, and transactional messages, with designs intended for major email clients including Outlook. The collection includes 11 customizable templates for newsletters, orders, password resets, and welcome messages. Its responsive grid can stack content on small screens and adjust padding and row width for mobile devices. Inky lets developers write tags such as and , which become email table markup. The ZURB Email Stack combines Gulp, Sass, Inky, an inliner, BrowserSync live reloading, and automatic image compression. Panini layouts and Handlebars partials support reusable headers, footers, and other content. The inliner embeds CSS into style attributes, moves media queries into the body, and compresses output. The CSS version is a ZIP download; the Sass version has a build process requiring Node.js. HTML is the listed export format.

MJML is a markup language for building responsive email layouts. Its engine converts MJML into email HTML made with nested tables and inline CSS, with responsive behavior for popular email clients, including Outlook. Reusable, extensible components provide a starting point, and users can create their own components. MJML is open source under the MIT license and free to use. Its online editor supports writing and rendering MJML, and its free REST API renders markup into responsive HTML. The command-line interface can compile files, watch for changes, and save generated HTML to a chosen file. Local installation is available through npm on macOS, Linux, and Windows; plugins are available for Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text, alongside a desktop app. API accounts receive an Application ID and two API keys, with public and secret keys intended for browser and back-end use. Includes are ignored by default, and enabled include paths are restricted to approved roots. Once the HTML is rendered, users must send it through an email service provider or directly from a shell. The mj-button component is not fully clickable because of email-client support.