Overview

Twilio SendGrid

Stacks10.8K

Followers5.7K

Votes720

Mailgun

Stacks7.9K

Followers4.2K

Votes656

Mandrill

Stacks4.4K

Followers1.6K

Votes926

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.

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 are some alternatives to SendGrid vs Mandrill vs Mailgun?

SparkPost - The most advanced transactional email delivery service in the cloud
Mailjet - Email delivery made easy
Postmark - Email delivery for web apps - done right

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Advice on Twilio SendGrid, Mailgun, Mandrill

Kevin

Jun 29, 2021

Decided

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.

48.2k views48.2k

Comments

Slawomir

Head of Product at Coresender

Oct 15, 2020

Decided

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.

88.5k views88.5k

Comments

Imelda

Engineer at pounce3 Project Management

Dec 9, 2020

Decided

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.

30.9k views30.9k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Twilio SendGrid	Mailgun	Mandrill
Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.	Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.	Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.
Open Tracking;Click Tracking;Unsubscribe Tracking;SMTP Relay;SMTP API;Web API;DKIM;SPF;Reputation Monitoring;ISP Monitoring;Domain Level Load Balancing;ISP Deliverability Outreach;Return Path Certified Partner;Support via Phone, Chat, Email, Online Support Portal	Optimized Queue;Scheduled Delivery;MIME Assembly;Test Mode;ESP Feedback Handling;Unsubscribe Handling;Spam Complaint Handling;Bounce Handling;HTTP POST to your App;Routing w RegEx Filters;Parsing to UTF-8;Signature Separation;Quoted Reply Separation;Wildcard Domains;Spam Filtering;Live Logs;Message Tagging;Event Webhooks;Open/Click Tracking;Unsubscribe Tracking;Complaint Tracking;Bounce Tracking;Mailing Lists;Template Variables;A/B Testing;Link Performance;Geo Performance;Recipient Level Data;SMTP or HTTP API;Clean IP Addresses;SPF Authentication;DKIM Authentication;SSL/TLS;Scales on Demand	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.
Statistics
Stacks 10.8K	Stacks 7.9K	Stacks 4.4K
Followers 5.7K	Followers 4.2K	Followers 1.6K
Votes 720	Votes 656	Votes 926
Pros & Cons
Pros 190 Easy setup 137 Cheap and simple 107 Easy email integration! 86 Reliable 58 Well-documented Cons 3 Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific 1 Shared IP blacklist removal takes months 0 Shares IP blacklist removal	Pros 178 Quick email integration 148 Free plan 91 Easy setup 67 Ridiculously reliable 53 Extensive apis Cons 2 Cost 2 No HTTPS tracking links supported 1 Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun 1 Cannot create multiple api keys	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
Integrations
Microsoft Azure Twilio Rackspace Cloud Servers Heroku Parse Google Compute Engine Google App Engine CloudBees Red Hat OpenShift Keen	AppFog Magento Ghost Heroku Rackspace Cloud Servers Sendicate WordPress cloudControl Parse sendwithus	Parse sendwithus

What are some alternatives to Twilio SendGrid, Mailgun, Mandrill?

Amazon SES

Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2.

sendwithus

Send email from your app with a simple API call, Sendwithus manages the rest. Templates, testing, data management, segments, and analytics are all accessible through a friendly dashboard.

Postmark

Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.

Mailjet

Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: scalable, agile and flexible. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.

SparkPost

SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.

Mailtrap

We offer one platform that covers all email-related needs in one place: testing, sending, and in-depth tracking to control how email infrastructure works and performs.

Apostle.io

Transactional emails are the forgotten step child of internet marketers. Apostle.io empowers marketers to manage transactional emails themselves, as they would their list based campaigns. Preview, Update, Analyse and Test your transactional email all in one place.

Nodemailer

It is a single module with zero dependencies – code is easily auditable. The email delivery is Secure using TLS/STARTTLS. You can use HTML content, as well as plain text alternative.