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  1. Stackups
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  3. Email Services
  4. Transactional Email
  5. Mailgun vs SparkPost

Mailgun vs SparkPost

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Mailgun
Mailgun
Stacks7.8K
Followers4.2K
Votes656
SparkPost
SparkPost
Stacks135
Followers115
Votes14

Mailgun vs SparkPost: What are the differences?

Introduction:

Mailgun and SparkPost are both email delivery services that offer reliable and scalable solutions for sending transactional and marketing emails. While they have similar goals, there are key differences that set them apart. Below are the six key differences between Mailgun and SparkPost.

  1. Pricing and Plans: Mailgun offers a flexible pricing structure based on the number of monthly messages, allowing users to choose a plan that aligns with their volume requirements. On the other hand, SparkPost has tiered pricing plans that include features like dedicated IP addresses and advanced analytics, which may be more suitable for businesses with specific needs or higher email volumes.

  2. Email Validation and Verification: Mailgun provides an email validation API that allows users to verify the delivery status of an email address, reducing bounce rates and improving deliverability. SparkPost also offers similar email validation features but goes a step further by providing real-time email verification through integrations with third-party services, allowing users to validate email addresses at the point of entry.

  3. Email Templates and Personalization: Mailgun allows users to create and manage email templates using their simple templating language, enabling easy customization and personalization of emails. SparkPost, on the other hand, offers a more advanced template engine that supports conditional logic, loops, dynamic content, and data binding, providing greater flexibility in creating highly personalized and dynamic email campaigns.

  4. Advanced Email Analytics and Reporting: SparkPost offers comprehensive real-time email analytics and reporting, providing detailed insights on email engagement, delivery rates, bounces, opens, and clicks. In comparison, Mailgun provides basic email analytics, including delivery statuses and event tracking, but lacks the advanced reporting capabilities offered by SparkPost.

  5. Deliverability Management: SparkPost places a strong emphasis on deliverability management, providing users with tools and features to monitor and improve their email deliverability rates. This includes features such as engagement tracking, spam complaint reporting, and IP reputation monitoring. Mailgun offers similar deliverability management features but to a lesser extent, focusing more on the technical aspects of email delivery.

  6. API and Integration Flexibility: Both Mailgun and SparkPost provide robust APIs for seamless integration with existing systems and applications. However, SparkPost offers a wider range of integrations with popular marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, making it more suitable for businesses that rely heavily on these systems for their email marketing campaigns.

In summary, Mailgun and SparkPost differ in their pricing plans, email validation capabilities, email templating and personalization features, email analytics and reporting, deliverability management focus, and integration options. Ultimately, the choice between Mailgun and SparkPost depends on the specific needs and priorities of an organization when it comes to email delivery and marketing.

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Advice on Mailgun, SparkPost

Slawomir
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
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
Klaus
Klaus

Jan 22, 2020

Needs advice

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?

101k views101k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Mailgun
Mailgun
SparkPost
SparkPost

Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.

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.

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
Quick and easy SMTP or REST API integration; Free trial;Real-time & predictive analytics;Performance and scalability;Superior deliverability;Powerful templating language;Message event log webhooks and API;Email relay webhooks;Subaccounts;Advanced security options;Comprehensive REST API and documentation; Pre-built client libraries;Excellent support;Developer hub
Statistics
Stacks
7.8K
Stacks
135
Followers
4.2K
Followers
115
Votes
656
Votes
14
Pros & Cons
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
  • 10
    I could start sending real emails in less than 5 mins
  • 2
    Email don't end up in spam after DNS verification
  • 1
    Flexible, robust API
  • 1
    Very easy to integrate with Laravel
Cons
  • 1
    Spam trap reports are suspicious b/c all users opted in
  • 1
    Only free for 100 emails/day
  • 1
    New dedicated ip blacklisted by some clients
  • 1
    Support won't answer mail (9h so far)
  • 1
    Suspended paid acount without warning or reason
Integrations
AppFog
AppFog
Magento
Magento
Ghost
Ghost
Heroku
Heroku
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Sendicate
Sendicate
WordPress
WordPress
cloudControl
cloudControl
Parse
Parse
sendwithus
sendwithus
Moxtra
Moxtra
Elixir
Elixir
Zapier
Zapier
C#
C#
sendwithus
sendwithus
Iterable
Iterable
WordPress
WordPress
Django
Django
Python
Python
PHP
PHP

What are some alternatives to Mailgun, SparkPost?

Mandrill

Mandrill

Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

Twilio SendGrid

Twilio SendGrid

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.

Amazon SES

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

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

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

Mailjet

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.

Mailtrap

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

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

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.

Resend

Resend

It is a modern email sending platform focused on providing the best developer experience. Build, test, and deliver transactional emails at scale.

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