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Mailgun vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Introduction
Mailgun and SendGrid are both cloud-based email delivery platforms that offer APIs for sending and receiving emails. While both services are reliable and widely used, there are several key differences between them in terms of features, pricing, and customer support.
Pricing: One of the key differences between Mailgun and SendGrid is their pricing structure. Mailgun offers a flexible pricing model based on the number of emails sent, while SendGrid offers tiered pricing based on the number of emails sent per month. This means that businesses with varying email volumes may find one service more cost-effective than the other, depending on their specific needs.
Email Validation: Another difference is the email validation feature. Mailgun provides built-in email validation APIs that help identify invalid email addresses before sending the emails, minimizing bounce backs and increasing deliverability. On the other hand, SendGrid does not offer this specific feature as part of their platform.
SMTP Relay: Both Mailgun and SendGrid allow users to send emails through SMTP relay. However, Mailgun offers an additional feature called "Inbound Routing" that enables users to route incoming emails to different destinations based on specific rules, providing more flexibility in managing incoming email traffic.
Email Tracking: Mailgun and SendGrid provide email tracking capabilities, allowing users to track delivery, opens, clicks, and unsubscribes. However, Mailgun offers more advanced tracking features, such as the ability to track email events in real-time using webhooks and websockets. This can be particularly useful for businesses that require real-time analytics and event-driven workflows.
Email Templates: SendGrid offers a comprehensive email template engine that simplifies the creation and management of email templates. It provides a drag-and-drop editor, pre-designed templates, and dynamic content capabilities. Mailgun, on the other hand, does not offer a built-in email template editor, requiring users to create and manage templates through their own HTML or API integrations.
Customer Support: Customer support is another area where Mailgun and SendGrid differ. Mailgun offers 24/7 technical support via phone and email, with guaranteed response times, while SendGrid offers a variety of support options, including chat, email, and community forums. The level and responsiveness of customer support may vary depending on the specific plan or package chosen.
In summary, Mailgun and SendGrid differ in terms of pricing structure, email validation, SMTP relay features, email tracking capabilities, email template management, and customer support options. Choosing between the two platforms will depend on the specific needs and requirements of the business, as well as the importance placed on these key differences.
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.