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Mailgun vs Mandrill: What are the differences?
Introduction
Mailgun and Mandrill are both transactional email services that offer reliable email delivery for businesses. While they have similar functionalities, there are key differences between Mailgun and Mandrill that set them apart. In this comparison, we will highlight these differences to help you choose the right email service provider for your needs.
Pricing Structure: One of the main differences between Mailgun and Mandrill is their pricing structure. Mailgun offers a flexible pricing plan based on the number of emails sent, allowing you to start with a free plan and then scale up as your business grows. On the other hand, Mandrill has a tiered pricing structure based on the number of emails sent per month, with no free plan available. This makes Mailgun a more cost-effective option for businesses with varying email sending volumes.
Email Sending Limits: Another difference between Mailgun and Mandrill is their email sending limits. Mailgun has a higher daily email sending limit, allowing you to send a larger number of emails per day. Mandrill, on the other hand, has lower daily email sending limits compared to Mailgun. If you have high email sending needs, Mailgun is a better choice as it provides more flexibility in terms of volume.
Email Deliverability: When it comes to email deliverability, both Mailgun and Mandrill have strong reputations. However, Mailgun has a slightly better reputation for delivering emails to the inbox. With Mailgun, you can expect higher deliverability rates and fewer emails ending up in spam folders. If email deliverability is a top priority for your business, Mailgun is the preferred option.
Ease of Integration: Both Mailgun and Mandrill offer easy integration with popular programming languages and frameworks. However, Mailgun provides more comprehensive documentation and libraries for different programming languages, making it easier to integrate with your existing software stack. If you require seamless integration with your current systems, Mailgun is the recommended choice.
Advanced Email Deliverability Features: Mailgun offers advanced email deliverability features such as dedicated IP addresses, domain reputation management, and bounce handling. These features allow you to have more control over your email deliverability and manage any issues that may arise. Mandrill, on the other hand, offers limited deliverability features compared to Mailgun. If you require advanced email deliverability management, Mailgun is the ideal choice.
Customer Support: Lastly, customer support is an important consideration when choosing an email service provider. Both Mailgun and Mandrill offer customer support, but Mailgun has a reputation for providing faster response times and more personalized support. If prompt and reliable customer support is crucial for your business, Mailgun is the recommended option.
In summary, Mailgun and Mandrill differ in their pricing structure, email sending limits, email deliverability, ease of integration, advanced email deliverability features, and customer support. Mailgun offers a flexible pricing plan, higher email sending limits, better email deliverability, easier integration, advanced deliverability features, and more reliable customer support compared to Mandrill. Choose Mailgun if you prioritize cost-effectiveness, scalability, email deliverability, integration, advanced features, and customer support.
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 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 Mandrill
- Really hard to pull analytics out via api1
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