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Mailgun vs Mailjet vs Mandrill: What are the differences?
Introduction:
In this Markdown code, we will explore the key differences between Mailgun, Mailjet, and Mandrill for use in a website.
Pricing Model: Mailgun has a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where customers are charged based on the number of emails sent. Mailjet offers both pay-as-you-go and monthly subscription plans with various features included in each. Mandrill, on the other hand, operates on a monthly subscription basis which includes a certain number of emails per month.
API Integration: Mailgun provides a robust API that allows developers to easily integrate email functions into their applications. Mailjet also offers a powerful API that enables seamless email integration. Mandrill, being a part of Mailchimp, provides an API that is closely integrated with Mailchimp's services for a streamlined user experience.
Deliverability Rate: Mailgun boasts a high deliverability rate, ensuring that emails sent through their service reach the recipient's inbox efficiently. Mailjet also focuses on achieving high deliverability rates with advanced features like real-time monitoring and optimization. Mandrill, being a transactional email service, prioritizes email delivery to ensure messages reach the intended recipients promptly.
Email Marketing Features: Mailjet offers robust email marketing features such as advanced segmentation, A/B testing, and marketing automation tools to help users create successful email campaigns. Mailgun primarily focuses on transactional emails but also provides some email marketing features. Mandrill, being part of Mailchimp, offers extensive email marketing tools and integrations to support marketing campaigns.
Customer Support: Mailgun provides comprehensive customer support through documentation, email support, and phone support for quick assistance. Mailjet offers customer support through various channels like email, chat, and phone to address user queries effectively. Mandrill provides support through the Mailchimp support team, ensuring users receive assistance related to both Mandrill and Mailchimp services.
Customization Options: Mailgun allows users to customize their email templates extensively, offering flexibility in design and content. Mailjet also provides customization options for email templates to create personalized and engaging messages. Mandrill offers customization features through Mailchimp's email builder tool, enabling users to design visually appealing emails.
In Summary, the key differences between Mailgun, Mailjet, and Mandrill lie in their pricing models, API integration, deliverability rates, email marketing features, customer support, and customization options.
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.
We chose Postmark as our transactional email service for several reasons:
Laser-focus (at the time) on transactional email - their success/speed/reliability with delivering transactional email is amazing. Note, they have now branched out and offer marketing/broadcast email services too.
Developer-friendly - Awesome docs and resources. Their Rail gem integrates directly with ActionMailer so nearly all of our code worked without changes.
Servers - You can set up "Servers" for different mail streams/workflows to keep things separate and easy to review.
Bootstrapped - Wildbit (who makes Postmark) is bootstrapped just like the Friendliest.app and they offer a service credit to other bootstrapped startups.
We did a quick test on the reliability of these three common email services, sending a few emails an hour at random intervals.
Unfortunately, none of them had 100% availability over the 30 day test. I don't understand why this is so hard?
Mailgun performed the best with the most reliability and fastest response times. Mandrill was notably bad.
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.
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 Mailgun
- Quick email integration178
- Free plan148
- Easy setup91
- Ridiculously reliable67
- Extensive apis53
- Great for parsing inbound emails30
- Nice UI25
- Developer-centric22
- Excellent customer support15
- Heroku Add-on12
- Easy to view logs of sent emails4
- Email mailbox management for developers4
- Great PHP library2
- Great documentation2
- Great customer support, love rackspace2
- Better than sendgrid not ask too many question1
Pros of Mailjet
- Simple7
- Cheap6
- Reliable2
- Setup1
- Integrates with Zapier1
- outsourcing1
Pros of Mandrill
- Simple installation189
- 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 Mailgun
- Cost2
- No HTTPS tracking links supported2
- Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun1
- Cannot create multiple api keys1
Cons of Mailjet
- Support does not respond1
- Support is a joke1
Cons of Mandrill
- Really hard to pull analytics out via api1