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MailChimp vs Mailgun: What are the differences?
MailChimp: Easy email newsletters. MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It's like your own personal publishing platform; Mailgun: The Email Service for Developers. Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.
MailChimp belongs to "Email Marketing" category of the tech stack, while Mailgun can be primarily classified under "Transactional Email".
Some of the features offered by MailChimp are:
- Facebook Integration
- AutoConnect Templates
- Full Featured API
On the other hand, Mailgun provides the following key features:
- Optimized Queue
- Scheduled Delivery
- MIME Assembly
"Smooth setup & ui", "Mailing list" and "Robust e-mail creation" are the key factors why developers consider MailChimp; whereas "Quick email integration", "Free plan" and "Easy setup" are the primary reasons why Mailgun is favored.
According to the StackShare community, MailChimp has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1666 company stacks & 670 developers stacks; compared to Mailgun, which is listed in 1490 company stacks and 269 developer stacks.
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?
The only transactional email service that I've been able to stomach is Postmark! It is by far the easiest (and quickest to get feedback from) service that I have come across. While drowning in attempts to debug Mandril, Mailgun and others I get quick feedback from Postmark in what I need to do.
Postmark for the win!
If you need your emails to be sent in a time-sensitive manner, I'd recommend SendGrid. We were using Mailgun and the lag because they aren't "transactional" in nature caused issues for us. SendGrid also has the ability to do dynamic templates and bulk send from their API. I don't know that they have the shared layout ability you mentioned, though.
We are using more extensively Mandrill.
It is a ok tool, which gives you the power for emailing with nice set of features.
The templates editing and management is a bit tricky, but this is mostly related to email templates in general, which are hard to create and maintain.
I do not think you can share the parts of the templates. You can have your predefined templates with possibility to insert dynamic content.
They provide a limited possibility to preview and test your templates.
The template editor is text only. For the better editors checkout http://topol.io or https://mosaico.io
Unfortunately, I do not have experience with the other tools and possibilities to manage templates.
At this stage, all of the tools you mentioned do email delivery pretty well. They all support email templates as well. Here are some considerations:
- Twilio owns SendGrid. If you're an existing Twilio customer, in my opinion that's a good reason to use SendGrid over the other solutions. The APIs are solid, and Twilio has excellent developer tools that allow you to create interesting automations (which is important for scaling).
- Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
- Mailgun is a tool on its own. Like the other two, it supports mail templates and is built to be controlled almost exclusively via APIs.
SendGrid and Mandrill have pretty nice WYSIWIG template editors as part of their platform. Not so sure about Mailgun.
So for me the considerations would be: 1. How easy is it for you to integrate with their API? How complete is their API in terms of your own specific needs? 2. Prices: Which one works best for my budget? 3. Am I OK with editing the templates elsewhere (or even by hand), and then pasting the code into Mailgun? Or do I want the comfort of Mandrill or Sendgrid with their WYSIWYG editors?
Personally I'd go with Twilio, simply because it's such a massive ecosystem they are less likely to go bankrupt, and their APIs are rock solid.
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.
Pros of Mailchimp
- Smooth setup & ui259
- Mailing list248
- Robust e-mail creation149
- Integrates with a lot of external services120
- Custom templates109
- Free tier60
- Great api49
- Great UI42
- A/B Testing Subject Lines33
- Broad feature set30
- Subscriber Analytics11
- Great interface. The standard for email marketing9
- Great documentation8
- Mandrill integration8
- Segmentation7
- Best deliverability; helps you be the good guy6
- Facebook Integration5
- Autoresponders5
- RSS-to-email3
- Co-branding3
- Customization3
- Embedded signup forms3
- Automation2
- Great logo1
- Groups1
- Landing pages0
Pros of Mailgun
- Quick email integration178
- Free plan147
- Easy setup91
- Ridiculously reliable67
- Extensive apis54
- Great for parsing inbound emails29
- Nice UI25
- Developer-centric23
- Excellent customer support15
- Heroku Add-on12
- Easy to view logs of sent emails4
- Email mailbox management for developers3
- Great customer support, love rackspace2
- Great documentation2
- Great PHP library1
- Better than sendgrid not ask too many question1
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Cons of Mailchimp
- Super expensive2
- Poor API1
- Charged based on subscribers as opposed to emails sent1
Cons of Mailgun
- Cost2
- No HTTPS tracking links supported2
- Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun1
- Cannot create multiple api keys1
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