# AgentMail Gives Your Agent an Inbox. Cotera Gives You the Agent.

> AgentMail gives your agent a mailbox and leaves you to build the agent. Cotera gives you the agent, 144 tool integrations, and email as a trigger.

Source: https://cotera.co/agentmail-vs-cotera

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AgentMail is email infrastructure: inboxes over an API, and a webhook when mail lands. You still build the agent behind it. On Cotera you build the agent once and reuse it across Slack, schedules, and webhooks — email is simply another way to interact with it.

## Cotera vs AgentMail
| | Cotera | AgentMail |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Agents get their own email address | Yes | Yes |
| Inbound email starts a run | Yes | Webhook, you write the handler |
| The agent itself is included | Yes | No |
| Built-in tool integrations | 144 | No |
| Multi-step reasoning and tool chaining | Yes | No |
| Durable execution that survives restarts | Yes | No |
| Build it without writing code | Yes | No |
| Schedule and webhook triggers too | Yes | No |
| Runs against your data warehouse | Yes | No |
| Stored, searchable mailbox with threads and labels | No | Yes |
| IMAP and SMTP access | No | Yes |
| Custom sending domains with DKIM, SPF, DMARC | No | Yes |
| Multi-tenant inboxes for your own customers | No | Yes |
| Free tier | Yes (1,000 credits) | Yes (3 inboxes) |
| Entry paid plan | $0 pay-as-you-go | $20/mo |

## FAQ
### Is Cotera an AgentMail alternative?

It depends on which half of the problem you have. AgentMail sells the mailbox: inboxes your code creates over an API, with threads, labels, and a webhook when mail arrives. You still write the agent that reads the message and decides what to do. Cotera sells the other half. You build an agent once — its instructions, its tools, its guardrails — and then reuse it wherever the work shows up: a conversation in Slack, a nightly schedule, a webhook from another system, or an email address of its own. Email is one way to interact with that agent rather than a separate thing you build. If you were going to write the agent anyway, AgentMail is the right shape. If the agent is the part you did not want to build, Cotera is.

### Can Cotera give my agent an email address?

Yes. Add an email trigger to a workflow and Cotera mints an address like deals-k3f9x2@inbound.cotera.ai. Mail it, forward a thread to it, or CC it on one, and the run starts with the message as its input: sender, recipients, subject, plain-text and HTML bodies, attachment names, and the SPF, DKIM, and spam-score results. Recipients resolve from the SMTP envelope rather than the visible To: header, so a BCC still fires the run.

### What does AgentMail do that Cotera does not?

Several real things. AgentMail stores the mailbox, so your agent can search old threads, keep drafts, and use email as a persistent memory. It offers IMAP and SMTP, custom sending domains with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC handled for you, and multi-tenant Pods so a platform can hand an inbox to each of its own customers. Cotera mints a trigger address, not a mailbox you can browse, and sends through your connected Gmail, Outlook, or SendGrid account rather than its own domains. If agent-owned inbox storage is the product you need, AgentMail is built for it and Cotera is not.

### Do I need engineers to use Cotera?

No. AgentMail is a developer product by design: you install an SDK, create inboxes in code, receive a webhook, and write the loop that handles the message. Cotera agents are described in plain English, and the email trigger is a field on the trigger card that you copy and paste. The people who forward mail to a Cotera agent are usually the ones who were doing that work by hand, not the engineering team.

### How does pricing compare?

The two meter different things, so a direct comparison is misleading. AgentMail charges for inboxes and email volume: free for 3 inboxes and 3,000 monthly emails, $20/month for 10 inboxes, $200/month for 150. Cotera charges for the work the agent does. Pay-as-you-go starts at $0 with 1,000 free credits and no card, and the Team plan is $500/month with 100,000 credits and unlimited seats. If you are sending high volumes of mail from many inboxes, AgentMail is cheaper. If email is how a handful of agents get started and the cost that matters is the reasoning and the tool calls, Cotera is the one to price.

### Can I use both together?

Yes, and for some builds that is the right answer. Use AgentMail when your agent needs an inbox it truly owns, with stored threads and its own sending domain, and call Cotera from it for the reasoning and the tool work. The distinction worth holding on to is that AgentMail is infrastructure you build on and Cotera is a platform you run on. They overlap at the address and diverge everywhere after it.