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Mandrill vs Nodemailer: What are the differences?
Introduction
Here, we will discuss the key differences between Mandrill and Nodemailer - two popular email delivery services.
Pricing and Usage: One major difference between Mandrill and Nodemailer is their pricing structure and usage. Mandrill is a paid email delivery service, where users are charged based on the number of emails sent. In contrast, Nodemailer is an open-source library that allows users to send emails directly from their own server without any additional charges.
Ease of Use: Mandrill provides a user-friendly interface and a straightforward setup process, making it suitable for users who are not familiar with programming or server management. On the other hand, Nodemailer requires some programming knowledge and server configuration, making it more suitable for developers and advanced users.
Customization and Flexibility: Nodemailer offers more customization and flexibility compared to Mandrill. With Nodemailer, users have full control over the email content and can easily integrate with other libraries or frameworks. Mandrill, on the other hand, has a limited set of predefined templates and features, limiting the level of customization.
Deliverability and Reputation: Mandrill has built a strong reputation over the years for delivering emails to the inbox and maintaining good sender reputation. They have strict anti-spam policies and provide deliverability analytics to help users monitor their email performance. Nodemailer's deliverability depends on the user's server configuration and IP reputation, making it more challenging to maintain a high inbox placement rate.
Integration and Ecosystem: Nodemailer integrates seamlessly with popular frameworks and libraries, such as Node.js, Express, and popular email services like Gmail and Outlook. It has a wide range of plugins and modules available to enhance its functionality. Mandrill, on the other hand, has its own API and integrations specific to its service, limiting the range of platforms it can easily integrate with.
Support and Documentation: Mandrill provides dedicated support and a comprehensive documentation to help users troubleshoot issues and answer queries. They offer assistance in case of any delivery problems. While Nodemailer has an active community and documentation, the level of support may vary as it relies more on community contributions and online resources.
In summary, Mandrill is a paid email delivery service with easy setup, limited customization, and excellent deliverability reputation, while Nodemailer is an open-source library that offers more customization and flexibility, but relies on the user's server configuration for deliverability and lacks dedicated 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.
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 Nodemailer
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Cons of Mandrill
- Really hard to pull analytics out via api1
Cons of Nodemailer
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