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  1. Stackups
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  3. Email Services
  4. Transactional Email
  5. Customer.io vs Mailgun

Customer.io vs Mailgun

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Mailgun
Mailgun
Stacks7.8K
Followers4.2K
Votes656
Customer.io
Customer.io
Stacks348
Followers138
Votes33

Customer.io vs Mailgun: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Customer.io and Mailgun

Customer.io and Mailgun are both powerful tools in the field of email marketing and customer communication. While they serve similar purposes, there are several key differences between the two platforms.

  1. Integration Capabilities: Customer.io is primarily focused on customer engagement and journey automation. It offers powerful integration capabilities, allowing businesses to connect various data sources and trigger personalized messages based on user behavior. On the other hand, Mailgun is primarily an email service provider, offering robust email delivery infrastructure and APIs for transactional and marketing emails.

  2. Email Design and Templates: Customer.io provides a user-friendly drag-and-drop email editor with pre-designed templates, making it easy for non-technical users to create visually appealing emails. Mailgun, on the other hand, primarily focuses on providing developers with flexible email building blocks to create and customize email templates.

  3. Automation and Personalization: Customer.io excels in providing advanced automation and personalization features. It allows businesses to create complex workflows and trigger automated messages based on user actions, enabling targeted and personalized communication. Mailgun, although capable of automation, is more focused on email delivery and may require additional development effort to achieve sophisticated automation and personalization.

  4. Email Deliverability: Mailgun has a strong emphasis on email deliverability, offering various features and tools to improve inbox placement rates. It provides detailed delivery analytics, reputation monitoring, and deliverability consulting services to ensure high deliverability rates. While Customer.io also emphasizes deliverability, its primary focus is on automation and customer engagement.

  5. Pricing and Scalability: Customer.io offers tiered pricing based on the number of monthly active profiles, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes. It provides flexible plans for startups, small businesses, and enterprises. Mailgun, on the other hand, offers pricing based on the number of emails sent per month, making it more suitable for businesses with high email volumes. It provides scalable plans with options for high-volume senders.

  6. API and Technical Documentation: Mailgun is renowned for its comprehensive API documentation and developer-friendly resources. Its API is well-documented and offers a wide range of features and functionalities for email integration. Customer.io also provides an API, but its emphasis is more on marketing automation rather than providing extensive technical documentation.

In summary, Customer.io and Mailgun are both excellent tools for email marketing and customer communication. However, Customer.io focuses more on automation, integration capabilities, and personalization, while Mailgun emphasizes email delivery infrastructure, scalability, and developer resources. The choice between the two platforms depends on specific needs and priorities, be it automation, design flexibility, email delivery, or technical integration.

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Advice on Mailgun, Customer.io

Slawomir
Slawomir

Head of Product at Coresender

Oct 15, 2020

Decided

Of course we chose Coresender to send our own transactional emails :) So I thought I'll let you know how we use it.

  • We set up separate sending accounts for all company needs, eg. transactional emails, monitoring alerts, time to inbox. We even configured our office printers to send emails through Coresender.

  • We have a real-time and extremely usable view into what emails go through each account, so each time anybody reports an email not arriving we're able to assist them in a few seconds

  • We utilize our message timeline feature, so we can learn eg. if people are clicking on password reset links

  • We always know how many of our onboarding emails are being opened which helps us improve them

  • Finally, we have full controll over our suppressions lists, so we can add (and remove!) from them whenever necessary.

To sum up, at Coresender we're eating our own dogfood and it helps us stay connected to the product and understand our customers better.

88.6k views88.6k
Comments
Klaus
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
Ben
Ben

May 18, 2020

Decided

While building our authentication system, we originally picked Mailgun. However, emails took minutes to arrive and some of them didn't get delivered - or got delivered to spam.

We started looking for a new provider, and settled on Postmark. We love that they track time-to-inbox, it makes me feel they really care about going above and beyond to provide a good service.

62.8k views62.8k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Mailgun
Mailgun
Customer.io
Customer.io

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

Customer engagement platform for tech savvy marketers sending personalized, data-driven marketing, product, and transactional messages. Ideal for mid-market SaaS, FinTech, EdTech, mobile apps, marketplaces companies, and more.

Optimized Queue;Scheduled Delivery;MIME Assembly;Test Mode;ESP Feedback Handling;Unsubscribe Handling;Spam Complaint Handling;Bounce Handling;HTTP POST to your App;Routing w RegEx Filters;Parsing to UTF-8;Signature Separation;Quoted Reply Separation;Wildcard Domains;Spam Filtering;Live Logs;Message Tagging;Event Webhooks;Open/Click Tracking;Unsubscribe Tracking;Complaint Tracking;Bounce Tracking;Mailing Lists;Template Variables;A/B Testing;Link Performance;Geo Performance;Recipient Level Data;SMTP or HTTP API;Clean IP Addresses;SPF Authentication;DKIM Authentication;SSL/TLS;Scales on Demand
Data-driven segment builder updates in real-time;Integrates with your preferred data warehouse;Transactional, newsletters, and customer journeys in one platform;No-code visual workflow builder;Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native mobile SDKs;Multi-channel messaging: Emails, rich push notifications, SMS, in-app messages;A/B and multivariate testing;Ad audience sync;Programmatically or manually export your customer data;Manage leads and customers in one workspace;No-code and HTML/CSS email builder;Multi-language Messages;Webhooks;API;Industry-leading email code editor
Statistics
Stacks
7.8K
Stacks
348
Followers
4.2K
Followers
138
Votes
656
Votes
33
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 178
    Quick email integration
  • 148
    Free plan
  • 91
    Easy setup
  • 67
    Ridiculously reliable
  • 53
    Extensive apis
Cons
  • 2
    Cost
  • 2
    No HTTPS tracking links supported
  • 1
    Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun
  • 1
    Cannot create multiple api keys
Pros
  • 16
    Behavior based emails
  • 11
    Transactional emails
  • 6
    Newsletter to user base
Integrations
AppFog
AppFog
Magento
Magento
Ghost
Ghost
Heroku
Heroku
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Sendicate
Sendicate
WordPress
WordPress
cloudControl
cloudControl
Parse
Parse
sendwithus
sendwithus
Mixpanel
Mixpanel
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Slack
Slack
Census
Census
Segment
Segment
Twilio
Twilio
Google Forms
Google Forms
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads
Snowflake
Snowflake

What are some alternatives to Mailgun, Customer.io?

Mandrill

Mandrill

Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

Twilio SendGrid

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.

Intercom

Intercom

Intercom is a customer communication platform with a suite of integrated products for every team—including sales, marketing, product, and support. Have targeted communication with customers on your website, inside apps, and by email.

Amazon SES

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

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

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

Mailjet

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.

SparkPost

SparkPost

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.

Mailtrap

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.

Pimcore

Pimcore

It is a software vendor for free and open-source customer experience management, digital asset management, product information management, multi-channel publishing and e-commerce software.

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