Mandrill vs SparkPost

Overview

Mandrill

Stacks4.4K

Followers1.6K

Votes926

SparkPost

Stacks135

Followers115

Votes14

Mandrill vs SparkPost: What are the differences?

What is Mandrill? Send transactional, triggered, and personalized email, then track results. Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

What is SparkPost? Email Delivery and Analytics for Developers and Enterprises. SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.

Mandrill and SparkPost belong to "Transactional Email" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Mandrill are:

Inbound Email- Set up inboxes for Mandrill to control. When they receive email, we’ll make an API call to your app with all the relevant information, so you don’t have to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes.
Webhooks Support- Create custom event notifications, keep track of new signups and unsubscribes in real-time, get a notice of every spam complaint so you can flag them in your database.
Rules Engine- Modify the content of email coming through Mandrill without having to involve developers. For example, you could tell Mandrill to take any email coming from confirmation@yourdomain.com, give it a new template, and add Google Analytics tracking.

On the other hand, SparkPost provides the following key features:

Quick and easy SMTP or REST API integration
Free trial
Real-time & predictive analytics

"Simple installation" is the primary reason why developers consider Mandrill over the competitors, whereas "I could start sending real emails in less than 5 mins" was stated as the key factor in picking SparkPost.

According to the StackShare community, Mandrill has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2312 company stacks & 205 developers stacks; compared to SparkPost, which is listed in 49 company stacks and 14 developer stacks.

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Advice on Mandrill, SparkPost

Imelda

Engineer at pounce3 Project Management

Dec 9, 2020

Decided

We did a quick test on the reliability of these three common email services, sending a few emails an hour at random intervals.

Unfortunately, none of them had 100% availability over the 30 day test. I don't understand why this is so hard?

Mailgun performed the best with the most reliability and fastest response times. Mandrill was notably bad.

30.9k views30.9k

Comments

Klaus

Jan 22, 2020

Needs advice

For transactional emails, notifications, reminders, etc, I want to make it so writers/designers can set up the emails and maintain them, and then dynamically insert fields, that I then replace when actually sending the mail from code.

I think the ability to use a basic layout template across individual email templates would make things a lot easier (think header, footer, standard typography, etc).

What is best for this? Why would you prefer Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill or something else?

101k views101k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Mandrill	SparkPost
Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.	SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.
Inbound Email- Set up inboxes for Mandrill to control. When they receive email, we’ll make an API call to your app with all the relevant information, so you don’t have to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes.;Webhooks Support- Create custom event notifications, keep track of new signups and unsubscribes in real-time, get a notice of every spam complaint so you can flag them in your database.;Rules Engine- Modify the content of email coming through Mandrill without having to involve developers. For example, you could tell Mandrill to take any email coming from confirmation@yourdomain.com, give it a new template, and add Google Analytics tracking.;Advanced Tagging and Reports- Generate custom reports based on the stats that matter to you. Add campaign tags like “confirmation email” and “mailing list,” and combine them with data Mandrill automatically tracks. Tagging allows you to graph sets of data like “bounce rate for confirmation emails to Gmail addresses.”;Meaningful Metrics- Observe trends and monitor delivery to see if you’re on track or if you need to make adjustments. Search by recipient or domain, sort sent email by bounces or rejections, and track opens and clicks.;Status Updates- Troubleshoot from wherever you are, and send status messages to recipients from Mandrill;Mobile Access- Your transactional email is generated at all hours. Mandrill is the only service with a mobile app, so you can monitor your performance even when you’re away from your desk.	Quick and easy SMTP or REST API integration; Free trial;Real-time & predictive analytics;Performance and scalability;Superior deliverability;Powerful templating language;Message event log webhooks and API;Email relay webhooks;Subaccounts;Advanced security options;Comprehensive REST API and documentation; Pre-built client libraries;Excellent support;Developer hub
Statistics
Stacks 4.4K	Stacks 135
Followers 1.6K	Followers 115
Votes 926	Votes 14
Pros & Cons
Pros 189 Simple installation 141 Great api 123 Generous free allowance to get you started 114 Cheap and simple 99 Trackable Cons 1 Really hard to pull analytics out via api	Pros 10 I could start sending real emails in less than 5 mins 2 Email don't end up in spam after DNS verification 1 Flexible, robust API 1 Very easy to integrate with Laravel Cons 1 Only free for 100 emails/day 1 Suspended paid acount without warning or reason 1 Spam trap reports are suspicious b/c all users opted in 1 New dedicated ip blacklisted by some clients 1 Support won't answer mail (9h so far)
Integrations
Parse sendwithus	Moxtra Elixir Zapier C# sendwithus Iterable WordPress Django Python PHP

What are some alternatives to Mandrill, SparkPost?

Twilio SendGrid

Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.

Mailgun

Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.

Amazon SES

Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2.

sendwithus

Send email from your app with a simple API call, Sendwithus manages the rest. Templates, testing, data management, segments, and analytics are all accessible through a friendly dashboard.

Postmark

Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.

Mailjet

Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: scalable, agile and flexible. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.

Mailtrap

We offer one platform that covers all email-related needs in one place: testing, sending, and in-depth tracking to control how email infrastructure works and performs.

Apostle.io

Transactional emails are the forgotten step child of internet marketers. Apostle.io empowers marketers to manage transactional emails themselves, as they would their list based campaigns. Preview, Update, Analyse and Test your transactional email all in one place.

Nodemailer

It is a single module with zero dependencies – code is easily auditable. The email delivery is Secure using TLS/STARTTLS. You can use HTML content, as well as plain text alternative.