HTML has long been the backbone of email development. Many developers, including our own team at Email Mavlers, still value its transparency and the ability to fine-tune every table cell and inline style for maximum compatibility.
However, that same control comes at a cost.
Building production-ready campaigns in raw HTML is slow, repetitive, and error-prone. As email clients evolve unevenly, managing this complexity by hand has become unsustainable for most teams.
This is where frameworks such as the MJML email framework and the Maizzle email framework have entered the picture. Instead of replacing raw HTML outright, they layer efficiency and structure on top of it.
What follows is a closer look at why MJML and Maizzle are gaining traction as part of the wider world of HTML email development frameworks. Let’s get started.
Why Raw HTML Makes Email Development Difficult
Anyone who has ever hand-coded an email in raw HTML knows just how frustrating the process can be.
What sounds like a straightforward task—writing a bit of markup—quickly turns into a tangle of compromises and workarounds. You must have faced these challenges:
- Messy inline styles everywhere: Because many email clients strip out external stylesheets, you’re forced to inline every single CSS rule. This makes the code bloated, repetitive, and incredibly hard to maintain.
- Endless nesting of <table> tags: Modern web layouts thrive on clean semantic markup; however, in email development, you’re still stuck with table-based layouts from the early 2000s. In fact, achieving even a simple two-column design can require multiple layers of nested tables, creating fragile code that’s easy to break.
- Rendering inconsistencies across clients: Just when you think you’ve nailed the design, you open it in Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail—only to discover three different versions of the same email. Each client has its own quirks and limited CSS support, which means endless rounds of testing and tweaking.
- No access to modern layout tools: Forget Flexbox, CSS grid, or even advanced selectors. Email HTML feels like working with a stripped-down subset of the web, forcing developers to rely on hacks all the way through.
From these, it’s clear that a better approach is needed, one that simplifies coding without wrecking emails.
Enter MJML and Maizzle
Modern email frameworks are stepping in to solve these challenges. Tools like the MJML email framework and the Maizzle email framework let developers build responsive, consistent emails without wrestling with messy tables or inline styles. Let’s find out more.
1. MJML Email Framework
MJML (Mailjet Markup Language) is a specialized markup language created by Mailjet that abstracts away the hard parts of HTML coding.
Now, here’s why MJML is better than raw HTML:
- Clean, semantic syntax: MJML provides intuitive tags like <mj-section> and <mj-text> that mirror the structure of your email content, making the code far easier to read, write, and maintain than raw HTML riddled with nested tables and inline styles.
- Compiles into responsive, production-ready HTML: Once your MJML markup is ready, the framework automatically generates HTML that is fully responsive and optimized for every major email client. This eliminates the need for painstaking manual coding to ensure cross-client compatibility.
- Built-in components: MJML is equipped with a library of ready-to-use components such as headers, buttons, footers, and even social media blocks. These prebuilt elements save time, reduce errors, and let developers focus more on design and content rather than low-level coding.
- Easy integration into build pipelines: The MJML email framework works seamlessly with modern development workflows, whether it’s integrated into npm scripts, Gulp, or Webpack. This makes it ideal for teams practicing continuous integration and deployment, allowing email builds to be automated and consistent.
Thus, for teams comparing HTML email frameworks, the advantages of MJML for email development are clear.
As an example, here is a snippet of MJML code.
<mj-section>
<mj-column>
<mj-text align="center">Hello from MJML</mj-text>
</mj-column>
</mj-section>This will generate a fully responsive table-based layout, automatically.
Now, the same in raw HTML code would look something like the following.
<!-- Section (full-width wrapper) -->
<table role="presentation" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%" style="border-collapse:collapse; mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt;">
<tr>
<td align="center" style="padding:0; Margin:0;">
<!--[if mso | IE]>
<table role="presentation" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="600"><tr><td>
<![endif]-->
<!-- Column container (max-width layout) -->
<table role="presentation" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" width="100%" style="max-width:600px; width:100%; border-collapse:collapse; mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt;">
<tr>
<td align="center" style="padding:16px; Margin:0; word-break:break-word;">
<!-- Text -->
<div style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:16px; line-height:24px; text-align:center; color:#000000;">
Hello from MJML
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<!--[if mso | IE]>
</td></tr></table>
<![endif]-->
</td>
</tr>
</table>
2. Maizzle Email Framework
If you’re a Tailwind CSS fan, you’ll love Maizzle. It lets you build emails using Tailwind utility classes and Blade-style templating, then compiles them into optimized HTML .
So here’s why Maizzle stands out among other templating frameworks in email:
- Tailwind-style development for emails: Maizzle brings the utility-first approach of Tailwind CSS to email design, letting developers style content quickly using familiar classes. This eliminates messy inline CSS and keeps your code clean, consistent, and easy to maintain.
- Component support for modular templates: You can break your email into reusable components—headers, footers, buttons, and more—making it easy to manage large campaigns and maintain a consistent design system across multiple emails.
- Environment-aware builds: The Maizzle email framework can differentiate between development and production environments, automatically optimizing your emails for deployment while keeping a readable, debuggable version for QA and testing. So this streamlines workflows and reduces the risk of errors in live campaigns.
- Full control over HTML output: While Maizzle handles most of the heavy lifting, it also gives developers the ability to customize the generated HTML when needed. This flexibility ensures that even complex or highly specialized email designs can be implemented without compromise.
The benefits of the Maizzle framework are hard to ignore: it enables a faster, more modular workflow while keeping full control when necessary.
MJML vs Maizzle
MJML’s primary strength lies in its abstraction: developers use simple, semantic tags, which MJML compiles into responsive, production-ready HTML. This is what makes MJML especially attractive to developers who want reliability, speed, and minimal cross-client troubleshooting.
However, customization is more constrained in the case of the MJML email framework.
Because you must rely on MJML’s predefined structure, it may not fit every complex design.
Maizzle isn’t a markup language but an email development framework built around Tailwind CSS and templating (Blade-style). It allows developers to use utility classes for styling and encourages modular template building.
In short, while MJML focuses on simplifying development, Maizzle is more about flexibility, scalability, and integration into modern development pipelines.
Below is a comparative summary of both the HTML email development frameworks.
Is This the End of Raw HTML?
In light of the shift toward the MJML email framework and the Maizzle email framework, what happens to raw HTML?
It is important to understand a couple of things.
Many large organizations still use very old desktop email clients like Outlook 2007-2016 or Lotus Notes. These clients don’t use modern web rendering engines. Instead, they use a word processing engine (Microsoft Word) to render HTML, which ignores many modern CSS properties and requires a rigid, table-based layout.
Some clients have highly customized brand guidelines or complex email layouts that are difficult to reproduce with the pre-built components of a framework.
Therefore, a more nuanced conversion is the call of the day. The advantages of MJML for email development make it great for structure and speed, while the benefits of Maizzle framework shine in flexible, modular setups. So in either case, both shine compared to raw HTML.
Keep these things in mind, the future for email developers is a blend of old and new techniques, reflecting a growing ecosystem of HTML email development frameworks and a continuing need for specialized knowledge.
And after all, why MJML is better than raw HTML in certain workflows doesn’t mean raw HTML disappears. In addition, the debate of Maizzle vs raw HTML email only highlights that developers must stay adaptable.
Wrapping Up
Whether you lean toward MJML’s simplicity or Maizzle’s flexibility, the message is clear: the future of email is being built on frameworks that respect both the quirks of legacy clients and the expectations of today’s workflows. For email developers, that means less time fighting outdated limitations and more time focusing on design, content, and strategy, the parts of email that actually move the needle.
If you need help with email development OR design, get in touch with us, and let’s get started.