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  1. Stackups
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  3. Email Services
  4. Transactional Email
  5. Gmail vs Mandrill

Gmail vs Mandrill

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Mandrill
Mandrill
Stacks4.4K
Followers1.6K
Votes926
Gmail
Gmail
Stacks131.1K
Followers80.9K
Votes32

Gmail vs Mandrill: What are the differences?

  1. Pricing Structure: One of the key differences between Gmail and Mandrill is their pricing structure. While Gmail is typically free for personal use with limited storage, Mandrill is a paid service offering email delivery for businesses with a pay-per-use model or monthly subscription plan depending on the volume of emails sent.

  2. Email Delivery Purpose: Gmail is primarily a web-based email service used for personal and professional communication, while Mandrill is a transactional email API service designed to help businesses send personalized and targeted transactional emails like password resets, order confirmations, and notifications.

  3. Email Delivery Limits: Gmail imposes daily sending limits for both personal and business accounts to prevent spamming, whereas Mandrill allows higher email delivery rates and customization options, making it more suitable for businesses requiring high-volume email delivery.

  4. Integration Options: Gmail is integrated with Google's suite of productivity tools like Google Drive, Calendar, and Hangouts, offering a seamless workflow for personal and professional users. On the other hand, Mandrill provides easy integration with various platforms and programming languages such as PHP, Python, and Ruby for businesses to send transactional emails efficiently.

  5. Analytics and Reporting: Gmail provides basic open and click tracking for emails, while Mandrill offers advanced analytics and reporting features such as delivery status, bounce rate, engagement metrics, and A/B testing capabilities, enabling businesses to monitor and optimize their email delivery performance effectively.

  6. Customization and Branding: Mandrill allows businesses to customize email templates, add company branding, and personalize messages for recipients, whereas Gmail has limited customization options and branding capabilities, making it more suited for standard email communications rather than targeted marketing campaigns.

In Summary, Gmail and Mandrill differ in pricing structure, email delivery purpose, limits, integration options, analytics and reporting, and customization and branding.

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Advice on Mandrill, Gmail

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

Detailed Comparison

Mandrill
Mandrill
Gmail
Gmail

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

An easy to use email app that saves you time and keeps your messages safe. Get your messages instantly via push notifications, read and respond online & offline, and find any message quickly.

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.
Schedule emails; Get notifications for certain emails
Statistics
Stacks
4.4K
Stacks
131.1K
Followers
1.6K
Followers
80.9K
Votes
926
Votes
32
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
  • 21
    Its free
  • 7
    User-friendly
  • 2
    Nice UI
  • 2
    Snooze
Cons
  • 4
    Can't unsend, add open trackers or read recipients
Integrations
Parse
Parse
sendwithus
sendwithus
Zapier
Zapier

What are some alternatives to Mandrill, Gmail?

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.

Mailgun

Mailgun

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

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.

ProtonMail

ProtonMail

It is the world's largest secure email service, developed by CERN and MIT scientists. We are open source and protected by Swiss privacy law

Apostle.io

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.

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