Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
$0
per month
Postmark
Score 5.1 out of 10
N/A
Postmark is a fast, reliable email delivery service designed for transactional emails. It ensures high deliverability, scalability, and real-time email tracking, providing developers with the tools to send critical notifications securely and efficiently.
Any system that requires transactional email message functionality as an external service. The benefits of a well managed and vetted server to maintain reputation as well as being reliability is well worth the effort needed to integrate towards the API specs
If email deliverability is important, then Postmark is king. I've used all sorts of providers, with dedicated IPs and without. Postmark has always had the best deliverability and has resulted in the least amount of customer service time wasted dealing with users who simply did not receive an important email from us. It is pricier than other options, but it's well worth it if deliverability is at all important to you.
Enables transactional email sending via MailChimp which opens up a ton of communication opportunities via Order Confirmation, Cart Recovery, or other transactional emails.
Monitors sub-accounts send reputation and notifies of high bounce/rejection rates.
Has a very friendly, usable UI and enables smaller companies to dedicate resources to transactional emails without as much setup work as other transactional platforms.
Our system adds a notification when a donor has opened an email; however, we've found inconsistencies with the system where a donor may have opened an email, but Mandrill hasn't sent that notification to our app.
For the scenario above, when we've reached out to their support, the response has been that it is what it is. I'd like to see the supports take be focusing on improving the platform rather than saying it is what it is.
It did the job for us and we were happy with the delivery rates of the email, analytics and customisation available while integrating it within our platform.
The only thing that confused me initially was that if you don't put a specific sender email into the Wordpress plugin settings (I use Postmark exclusively with Wordpress site), it won't send emails. I thought that having selected the option to send via any @domain.com email, I wouldn't need to fill out a specific email to send from, but that isn't the case. I sorted that out quickly with support.
We haven't had to use support. The platform uptime is pretty much 100%, and any time we've had an issue, the staff has responded quickly, but honestly, the last time we had to contact Mandrill's support was probably well over a year ago. Once you're up and running, it works.
Fortunately, the support is not often needed, but when it is, they are available and ready to dive into your needs and often your customer's needs. It's a bad day when you have to call your email delivery service provider, it means that your own customers most likely are calling your support team, and you're calling to see what the issue is. Postmark makes this process simple, and they own their mistakes. Always nice to see that.
Sendgrid offers a lot of the same features as Mandrill, but goes a lot further in helping you achieve maximum deliverability for your e-mails. They have a respectable free tier for sending as well as receiving emails, and their paid tiers are very reasonably priced. I don't have as much experience with Mailgun, but they were acquired some-time ago by Rackspace and Rackspace has a reputation for buying companies and not investing additional resources into them. So, at the time of evaluation (a few years ago) their feature sophistication was lagging behind Mandrill and Sengrid.
In my opinion, sendgrid is complete garbage compared to Postmark, it's not even a comparison. I had issues with emails being sent to spam using sendgrid IPs. The dashboard is inferior, the setup is fairly comparable in difficulty, and ongoing visibility is inferior.
Mandrill ensured high deliverability for messages sent to marketing leads in our customer funnel. This was incredibly important for making sure we captured leads early and often.
Mandrill was a solid and efficient way to send transactional notification messages to customers using our web-based payment system. With online payments, quick response is key, and Mandrill absolutely delivered.
Mandrill messages meant that our internal team always received notifications about leads, new sales, or problems with our systems in a timely manner. As a small startup, moving quickly was essential and we couldn't afford to miss a beat. Mandrill made sure we didn't.
