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Mailgun vs Mandrill vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Comparing Mailgun, Mandrill, and SendGrid for Email Delivery
Sending Capacity: Mailgun, Mandrill, and SendGrid differ in terms of their sending capacity. Mailgun allows users to send up to 10,000 emails per month for free, whereas Mandrill used to offer 2,000 free sends per month but is now an add-on for paid Mailchimp accounts. SendGrid, on the other hand, offers a flexible pricing structure that allows users to choose a plan based on their sending volume, starting from a free tier that offers up to 100 emails per day.
Feature Set: Another key difference between these three email delivery services lies in their feature set. Mailgun provides advanced features like inbound routing, email tracking, and list management, making it a good choice for developers and businesses seeking a comprehensive solution. Mandrill, now integrated into Mailchimp, focuses on ease of use and simplicity, with a user-friendly interface and straightforward email templates. SendGrid offers features like event webhooks, email templates, and A/B testing, catering to businesses with more advanced email delivery requirements.
Email Templates: When it comes to email templates, there are notable differences between the services. Mailgun provides a templating system that allows users to create customizable email templates with variables and conditional logic, enabling dynamic content creation. Mandrill, now part of Mailchimp, offers a drag-and-drop email builder that simplifies the process of creating visually appealing email templates. SendGrid provides a range of pre-designed templates to choose from, making it convenient for users who require quick and easy template creation.
Integration Options: The integration options for these email delivery services also differ. Mailgun offers extensive documentation and libraries for popular programming languages, enabling easy integration into applications. Mandrill, being integrated into Mailchimp, provides seamless integration with the Mailchimp platform and related plugins. SendGrid offers robust API documentation and SDKs for multiple programming languages, allowing users to effortlessly integrate the service into their applications.
Deliverability Metrics: Another important aspect to consider is the deliverability of emails. Mailgun provides detailed deliverability analytics, including delivery rates, opens, clicks, and bounces, providing insights into the success of email campaigns. Mandrill tracks engagement metrics like open and click rates, providing essential feedback for email campaigns. SendGrid also offers comprehensive email analytics, including engagement data and spam reports, ensuring users have the necessary information to optimize their email delivery.
Support and Documentation: Support and documentation play a crucial role in the usability of these services. Mailgun provides comprehensive documentation, developer libraries, and responsive support through chat and email, ensuring users have the resources they need. Mandrill offers support through the Mailchimp support team, with a comprehensive knowledge base and community forum. SendGrid provides extensive documentation, access to developer libraries, and 24/7 support through various channels, including chat, email, and phone.
In summary, Mailgun, Mandrill, and SendGrid differ in terms of their sending capacity, feature set, email templates, integration options, deliverability metrics, and support/documentation provided. The choice between these services depends on individual requirements, such as sending volume, desired feature set, ease of use, and level of support needed.
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
Pros of Twilio SendGrid
- Easy setup190
- Cheap and simple137
- Easy email integration!107
- Reliable86
- Well-documented58
- Generous free allowance to get you started28
- Trackable25
- Heroku add-on21
- Azure add-on15
- Better support for third party integrations13
- Simple installation6
- Free plan6
- Helpful evangelist staff4
- Great client libraries4
- Great support3
- Better customer support than the competition3
- Great add-ons3
- Nice dashboard2
- Scalable2
- Web editor for templates1
- Cool setup1
- Within integration1
- Easy set up1
- Free1
- Great customer support1
- Google cloud messaging1
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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
Cons of Twilio SendGrid
- Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific3
- Shared IP blacklist removal takes months1
- Shares IP blacklist removal0
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What is Mailgun?
What is Mandrill?
What is Twilio SendGrid?
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Why do developers choose SendGrid vs Mandrill vs Mailgun?
- SendGrid is known for being reliable, well-documented, easy to set up, cheap, and simple.
- Mandrill is loved by MailChimp users; it’s been appreciated for its webhooks, great API, simple installation, and client libraries.
- Mailgun is called “ridiculously reliable.” Fans appreciate its quick email integration, easy setup, extensive APIs, nice UI, and free plan option.
What companies use Twilio SendGrid?
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