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MailChimp vs Mandrill: What are the differences?
Developers describe MailChimp as "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. On the other hand, Mandrill is detailed as "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.
MailChimp and Mandrill are primarily classified as "Email Marketing" and "Transactional Email" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by MailChimp are:
- Facebook Integration
- AutoConnect Templates
- Full Featured API
On the other hand, Mandrill provides the following key features:
- 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.
"Smooth setup & ui", "Mailing list" and "Robust e-mail creation" are the key factors why developers consider MailChimp; whereas "Simple installation", "Great api" and "Generous free allowance to get you started" are the primary reasons why Mandrill is favored.
According to the StackShare community, Mandrill has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2313 company stacks & 208 developers stacks; compared to MailChimp, which is listed in 1666 company stacks and 670 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?
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.
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!
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.
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 Mandrill
- Simple installation188
- Great api141
- Generous free allowance to get you started123
- Cheap and simple114
- Trackable99
- Well-documented59
- Doesn't go to spam54
- Great for mailchimp users47
- Webhooks32
- Client libraries28
- Heroku Add-on7
- Easy to use6
- Meaningful Metrics5
- Free5
- Advanced Tagging and Reports3
- Mobile Access3
- Status Update3
- Very chimp-like2
- Great Documentation2
- love this service2
- Free Plan1
- Webhooks for bounce mail1
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Cons of Mailchimp
- Super expensive2
- Poor API1
- Charged based on subscribers as opposed to emails sent1
Cons of Mandrill
- Really hard to pull analytics out via api1
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