MailChimp vs Mandrill

Overview

Mandrill

Stacks4.4K

Followers1.6K

Votes926

Mailchimp

Stacks22.9K

Followers12.7K

Votes1.2K

MailChimp vs Mandrill: What are the differences?

MailChimp is a popular email marketing platform tailored for managing campaigns and marketing automation, while Mandrill, an API service by MailChimp, specializes in reliable transactional email delivery for developers, ensuring the timely and personalized dispatch of critical messages. Let's discuss the key differences between them.

Pricing Model: MailChimp offers a freemium pricing model, allowing users to send emails to a limited number of subscribers for free. They also offer paid plans with more features and higher email sending limits. On the other hand, Mandrill operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users pay for the number of emails sent. This can be advantageous for users who send a high volume of emails or have varying email sending needs.
Email Marketing vs Transactional Emails: MailChimp is primarily focused on email marketing campaigns, allowing users to create and send bulk emails to their subscribers. It provides features such as email templates, automation workflows, and advanced analytics to optimize marketing efforts. In contrast, Mandrill is designed for sending transactional emails, such as order confirmations, password resets, and notifications. It offers a robust API for developers to integrate and send personalized transactional emails on behalf of their applications.
User Interface and Ease of Use: MailChimp offers a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop email builders, ready-to-use templates, and intuitive campaign management tools. It is suitable for users with little or no coding experience. Mandrill, on the other hand, provides a more technical interface and is targeted towards developers or users familiar with API integrations. It requires some coding knowledge to fully utilize its capabilities.
Email Deliverability: Both MailChimp and Mandrill have good email deliverability rates, but there are slight differences in their approaches. MailChimp has strict policies and guidelines that users must follow to ensure high deliverability. It provides tools to check email deliverability and monitor spam reports. Mandrill, being a transactional email service, has a focus on high deliverability and provides advanced features like dedicated IP addresses and email authentication methods to improve deliverability.
Automation and Segmentation: MailChimp offers robust automation and segmentation capabilities, allowing users to create personalized email journeys based on customer behavior and preferences. It provides advanced segmentation options and triggers based on subscriber activity. Mandrill, being primarily a transactional email service, does not provide extensive automation and segmentation features like MailChimp. It is more focused on the transactional email sending aspect.
Support and Resources: MailChimp offers comprehensive support through live chat, email support, and a knowledge base with tutorials and resources. They also have a vibrant community forum where users can seek help and advice. Mandrill, being a part of the MailChimp family, shares the same support resources. However, as Mandrill is targeted towards developers, it provides additional technical documentation and resources specifically aimed at developers integrating the Mandrill API.

In summary, MailChimp is suited for users looking for a user-friendly email marketing platform with extensive automation and segmentation capabilities, while Mandrill is more suitable for developers or users who require a robust transactional email sending service with advanced API integration options.

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Advice on Mandrill, Mailchimp

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?

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Comments

Detailed Comparison

Mandrill	Mailchimp
Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.	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.
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.	Facebook Integration;AutoConnect Templates;Full Featured API;Subscriber Analytics;MailChimp Mobile;Email Templates;Template Language;Drag-and-Drop Editor;Multi-user Accounts;Autoresponders;Co-branding;Custom Forms;Data Security and Privacy;Email Delivery;Groups;Image and File Hosting;List Management;Segmentation;Service and Support;Subscriber Preferences;Delivery Doctor;Geolocation;Inbox Inspector;Merge Tags;RSS-to-email;Campaign Archives;Comments;Social Sharing;Reports Overview;Social Stats;A/B Split Testing;List Dashboard
Statistics
Stacks 4.4K	Stacks 22.9K
Followers 1.6K	Followers 12.7K
Votes 926	Votes 1.2K
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 259 Smooth setup & ui 248 Mailing list 148 Robust e-mail creation 120 Integrates with a lot of external services 109 Custom templates Cons 2 Super expensive 1 Charged based on subscribers as opposed to emails sent 1 Poor API
Integrations
Parse sendwithus	Formstack Zendesk Squarespace Insightly Get Satisfaction Hipmob Recurly ClickTale HipChat Shopify

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Mailjet

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