In this post, I will provide you with the 7 best Mandrill alternatives or competitors. Before going further, let’s understand what is Mandrill why we need Mandrill alternatives.
All online businesses, small or big, engage with their customers via email. You will find many email marketing software available that make the email delivery process hassle-free.
A few examples of such services are Mailchimp, Active Campaign, SendinBlue, etc.
All the above-mentioned platforms are complete email marketing service providers, however, Mandrill was only a transactional email service provider.
Now you might be wondering, what are transactional emails?
Transactional emails are action-driven email automation. When a user takes action on your website or web application, depending on the action, an email service triggers a personalized email to the user. These are called transactional emails.
Examples of transactional emails are an account creation email, password reset email, verification email, product purchase confirmation email, abandoned cart email, order tracking email, etc.
Now we have our basics clear, let us get back to the main topic.
What is Mandrill?
Mailchimp developed Mandrill as a stand-alone product in 2012. It is a popular transactional email service provider that helps you send customized emails to your customers.
You can connect your website or mobile application with Mandrill. You can integrate with this email API (application programming interface) and customize the functions as per your needs.
An email marketer always wishes that their emails reach the recipient’s inbox instead of the spam or promotion folder. Mandrill is using SPF and DKIM records that make sure your email is received by the recipient’s inbox folder securely.
With Mandrill’s SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) server, you can send transactional emails without any restrictions.
Mandrill comes with various preset transactional email templates. You only need to add your email content and set the triggers.
Mandrill lets you gain insight into your email sending performance. You can see:
- Sent emails.
- Your email reputation.
- Delivery rates.
- Bounce rates.
- Data like country, state, operating system, and operating browser of your email list.
- Inbound and outbound email data such as open and click rates, deliverability.
- Statistics of emails being sent per day, per month.
- And many more.
Now, before moving on to Mandrill alternatives, let us understand why we need an alternative to Mandrill.
1. High Price
Mandrill used to be an independent and separate email API service provider.
But in 2016, Mailchimp merged it back into its offerings as a paid add-on. The brand name also changed from “Mandrill” to “Mailchimp Transactional Email.”
This resulted in an increased expense for the users, as the Mailchimp Transactional Email add-on (formerly known as Mandrill) is only available in the standard and higher Mailchimp plans.
Mailchimp’s standard plans stand at 15 USD per month for 500 contacts, and then the price increases with your number of contacts.
In each block, they let you send 25,000 emails. In the image below, you can see the block pricing details.
To know about Mailchimp’s transactional email limits, visit the FAQ section.
2. Dependency on Mailchimp
To use Mandrill, a Mailchimp paid account is a must, which annoys marketers and developers. Mailchimp is a popular brand in the email marketing industry, but it is not everyone’s favorite due to its various limitations and high price.
Without investing more time in Mandrill or Mailchimp, let us skip to the part where I discuss the 7 best Mandrill alternatives available to us.
Below are the 7 best Mandrill alternatives.
7 Best Mandrill Alternatives
#1. Amazon SES
Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is the email service component of Amazon Web Service (AWS), a cloud computing platform from Amazon.
With Amazon SES, you can send all marketing, transactional, and bulk emails at a very cost-effective price.
Amazon SES is famous for its transactional email service as it provides good features at budget-friendly prices.
Though it can work as a standalone email service, you can integrate it with other AWS services like Amazon EC2 for a smoother work experience.
Features
Authentication and Security: Authentication is crucial for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to identify the sender’s email credibility before they let you into the recipient’s end. Amazon SES supports the standard authentication mechanisms SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance).So, your email data is secured, and you can expect high deliverability.
IP Addresses: Amazon SES provides both shared and dedicated IP addresses to ensure deliverability is not compromised at any cost. Additionally, they let you bring your own IP addresses for sending emails.
Sending Options: Do not worry about the sending limit. Amazon has its SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server and Amazon SES API for you to integrate and send emails the way you want to send.
You can see the full metrics of your open, clicked, bounced, and rejected emails, etc. You can store the email sent data in the Amazon S3 bucket and review the data using Amazon Kinesis Analytics.
Amazon SES consoles have a reputation dashboard that shows the entirety of bounced emails and complaints metrics to track the issues affecting your email delivery. Amazon SES, by default, publishes the bounce insights to Amazon Cloudwatch, which is used for creating alert notifications for you to take the appropriate action.
Integration: Amazon SES integrates well with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS IAM, AWS Lambda, Amazon Route 53, Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, and other third-party software. They have well-documented APIs to help you.
Amazon SES Pricing
Amazon SES’s pricing alone is one big, giant reason to replace Mandrill.
The dedicated IP is at 24.95 USD/IP/month.
I would recommend you go to the pricing page of Amazon SES to find out about incoming chunk details, deliverability dashboard rate, and calculate the monthly charges for using Amazon SES.
Other Users
Companies like Netflix, Reddit, and Duolingo are featured customers of Amazon SES.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- High deliverability.
- Low-cost price with quality features.
- No separate maintenance is required once you have it all set up.
- Email receiving.
- Content personalization.
- You get to test the email in the Amazon Mailbox Simulator.
Cons
- Not user-friendly.
- Technical skills are required to use the platform effectively.
- It is just an email sending platform and not an overall marketing platform.
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) Ratings
56 users gave a good score of 8.8 out of 10.Moving forward, the next Mandrill alternative is:
Let’s move to the next Mandrill alternative.
#2. Mailjet
Mailjet is a cloud-based, all-in-one email marketing solution founded in 2010 by Wilfried Durand and Julien Tartarin in Nantes, France. With the help of Mailjet, you can run both campaigns and deliver personalized emails to your users based on their actions on your site.
Features
A/B Testing: When we hear about A/B testing, we think about two variants of one email. But Mailjet lets you send 10 variants of your email to your recipients and helps you analyze their performance, and provides metrics to choose the best option.
Intuitive Email Builder: Marketers who do not have technical knowledge can use Mailjet’s email builder, which is simply a drag and drop builder. You can customize the email templates as per your vision.
Email Templates: Mailjet comes with prebuilt email templates to meet your needs. You can choose from a prebuilt template or can code your own designs. All the designs are mobile responsive.
Live Collaboration: With Mailjet, you can collaborate with your team to design emails.
Network Status: You can check the uptime, past incidents, and 90-day status history of Mailjet’s marketing solution from here.
Always look for this when you are evaluating choices for your email communication. Mailjet’s uptime history and status are quite good.
Mailjet Pricing Plans
Mailjet has both free and paid plans. Let us first talk about the free plan.Mailjet’s Free Plan
In the free plan, you can store unlimited contacts, unlike Mailchimp, however Mailjet has a limitation on the number of emails per send. The limit is 200 emails per day, which is 6,000 emails per month.
In the free plan, you get SMTP Relays, APIs, and Webhooks along with an advanced email editor and basic stats like open, click, and non-delivery reports.
Mailjet’s Paid Plan
Mailjet has three paid plans: Essential, Premium and Custom. The Essential and Premium plans let you send 15,000 emails per month with no daily sending limit, and they cost 15 and 25 USD.
If you increase the number of emails sent per month, your cost will stand as follows:
- 150,000 emails per month (No daily sending limit) – Essential Plan – 35 USD per month
- 250,000 emails per month (No daily sending limit) – Premium Plan – 50 USD per month
For every additional 1,000 emails sent, some charges would be billed to you.
Please check the image below to see the per thousand email send rate.
If you need more than 50,000 emails, you would then need the Premium plan.
- 110,0000 emails per month (No daily sending limit) -Premium Plan-95 USD per month
- 225,0000 emails per month (No daily sending limit) -Premium Plan-225 USD per month
- 3500,000 emails per month (No daily sending limit) -Premium Plan-425 USD per month
You can find their offerings in the image given below.
Support
I did not find an email address to write to them, though I filled in the contact form.
They do claim that they provide 24*7 technical support.
Other Users
Big companies like Microsoft, DHL, KIA, and American Express have chosen Mailjet for their email marketing solution, along with 130,000 other companies.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- A/B testing.
- Transactional SMS support, unlike Mailchimp.
- ISO 27001 Certified, unlike Mailchimp.
- Free unlimited contact storage; with Mailchimp, you have to pay.
- Live collaboration, unlike Mailchimp.
Cons
- Limited automation
- Limited segmentation
Mailjet’s Ratings
Mailjet is given a decent score of 7.9 out of 10 by 30 users.
Let’s move to the next Mandrill competitor.
#3. Twilio SendGrid
SendGrid was established in 2008. It is an email marketing software designed to keep both marketers and developers in mind. Twilio, a cloud computing platform acquired SendGrid in 2018, and its name changed from “SendGrid” to “Twilio SendGrid.”
This email solution supports both transactional and campaigns emails.
SendGrid is backed by SMTP (Sender Mail Transfer Protocol) service, Email API, and fine integration infrastructure.
SendGrid might be the Mandrill alternative you are searching for.
Features
Deliverability: Deliverability is one of the main concerns of an email sender.
SendGrid’s full set of authentication, i.e., SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) take care of the deliverability rate of your emails.
Email Templates: Like Mailchimp, you get many email templates, you can design a template from scratch, and it can be built with a drag and drop builder (what is an email marketing tool without a drag and drop builder anyway?).
Sender Reputation: Your sender reputation determines if your emails reach your recipients’ inboxes or spam. To make sure the sender’s reputation is high, SendGrid provides both shared and dedicated IPs.
Email Validation API: SendGrid provides Email Validation API so that you can detect the invalid email addresses in your list to protect the sender’s reputation score.
Network Status: SendGrid allows you to see the network status at all times. So, when SendGrid is stuck anywhere, visit the status page to see if everything is running operationally.
SendGrid Pricing Plans
SendGrid has two pricing plans. One is for the Email API plan, and the other is for marketing campaigns.
Both plans have free offers.
The Email API plan has Free, Essentials, Pro (Popular), and Custom options.
You get 100 emails per day for forever in the free plan, with features including APIs, SMTP Relay, Webhooks, Delivery Optimization Tools, Dynamic Template Editor, Insightful Analytics, and Ticket Support.
Email API Essentials Plan Pricing:
- For 40,000 emails/month – 14.95 USD per month
- For 100,000 emails/month – 29.95 USD per month
Email API Pro Plan Pricing:
- 100,000 emails per month – 89.95 USD per month
- 300,000 emails per month – 249 USD per month
- 700,000 emails per month – 449 USD per month
- 1,500,000 emails per month – 749 USD per month
To see the paid plan features, please see the image below. And to view the marketing campaign plans, please visit this page.
Support
SendGrid’s support is good compared to Mailchimp’s. You get phone, email, and chat support from SendGrid (depending on which plan you are on). You can also enhance your knowledge about the platform using the knowledge library.
Other Users
Companies like Uber, Spotify, Airbnb, and Yelp are some of the top customers who use SendGrid for their email sending needs, along with 80,000 other customers.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Email API is developer-friendly.
- High deliverability rate.
- Analytics and testing facility.
- Easy setup.
- Whole email marketing solution.
- Integration.
- Phone, chat, and ticket support.
- Sub-user management.
Cons
- The interface is not very user-friendly.
- The Essentials plan in the Email API does not support sub-user management or email validation. You have to upgrade to the Pro plan to have these features, which costs 89.95 USD for 100,000 emails per month.
SendGrid’s Ratings
SendGrid has a decent above-average rating of 7.6 out of 10 from 118 reviewers.
#4. SendinBlue
Sendinblue is one of the best marketing software available to us. Sendinblue’s pricing, unlimited contacts, and simple interface draw a lot of users to them.
Sendinblue is adequate to be a single email marketing solution for your business.
Sendinblue charges for the number of emails sent and not the number of contacts you have, so this is unlike Mailchimp.
Features
Speed: Two important factors that are extremely crucial in transactional email are 1. Reaching inboxes; and 2. Reaching inboxes faster.
Sendinblue is quite good in both factors. Sendinblue’s broad SMTP infrastructure is designed and worked upon to ensure your emails are landing in your customers’ inboxes in the blink of an eye. They get the emails delivered in less than a second. 99% of emails get delivered in under 20 seconds.
Email Templates: Design your transactional template the way you want.
Sendinblue comes with several decent-looking templates. They also provide you with a drag and drop editor and an HTML space if you want to create something of your own.
Real-time Statistics: Like Mandrill, you can see the analytics on how your emails are performing in your customers’ inboxes. You get a full overview from email delivery to open rates metrics.
Network Status: On Sendinblue, you can expect transparency of the performances of the tools. You can quickly look at the status.
The uptime of their SMTP and API are mostly near 99.99%
SendinBlue Pricing Plans
There is a forever-free plan available in Sendinblue.
In the free plan, they let you send 300 emails daily, and there is no contact limit on Sendinblue, even in the free plan.
- If you have 10,000 emails to send in a month, it will cost you 25 USD, and if you need to send 20,000 emails, it will cost 65 USD.
- For 100,000 emails per month, the charges are 99 USD per month.
- To send 500,000 emails per month, the cost stands at 379 USD per month.
Support
Sendinblue’s response time is fast. I contacted them via email, and I am not one of their users. They got back to my query within 2 hours. To be exact, the response time was 1 hour 20 minutes.
You can contact them through the email address contact@sendinblue.com, or write to them by filling out the contact form on their website.
Other Users
They have a user base of 170,000 in 165 countries.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- User friendly.
- Marketing automation.
- Email segmentation.
- A/B testing.
- Facebook ads.
- SMS marketing.
- Lower price for more features.
Cons
- Limited integrations.
Sendinblue’s Ratings
Sendinblue gets an above-average rating of 6.9 out of 10, rated by 101 users.
#5. Mailgun
Mailgun is a cloud-based email service that was founded in 2010. This platform was created with developers in mind. This email sending service is used to deliver bulk and transactional emails and supports inbound emails just like Mailchimp Transactional Email.
Like Mandrill or other transactional email service providers, Mailgun is determined to make sure your email delivery rate is good, and they do not get dropped in the spam folder.
Features
Analytics: Mailgun’s analytics support helps you measure your performance. From segmented tags to A/B testing to detailed logs of the past 30 days, you can review your email sending with these data and make the right call to improve.
Integration: You can send personalized emails to your customers by integrating your web application with Mailgun.
Sender Reputation: Having a good sending score is important, as this score gives a signal to popular mailbox providers. Mailgun’s shared IP and dedicated IP offering makes sure your emails hold a decent score.
To learn about sender reputation, I recommend you read this.
Mailgun Pricing Plans
Mailgun has four pricing plans: Flex, Foundation, Growth, and Scale. You can see the prices with the features in the image below. You can send 5,000 free emails for three months.
Mailgun has four pricing plans:
- Flex: 5,000 free emails per month for 3 months, then only pay for what you send.
- Foundation: The pricing starts at 35 USD per month for 50,000 emails per month.
- Growth: The pricing starts at 80 USD per month for 100,000 emails per month.
- Scale: The pricing starts at 90 USD per month for 100,000 emails per month.
Support
If you need to talk to them, you can get connected through email, chat, or generating a ticket. They are there to support you 24*7.
I wrote to them at sales@mailgun.com with my query, and a dedicated customer executive got back to me in 7 minutes. I was impressed seeing the response time.
You can also get in touch with them by contacting them through the contact form.
Other Users
They have a user base of 225,000+ companies, including big names like DELL and Anheuser Busch.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Dedicated IP addresses.
- Real-time insights.
- Detect changes in your email report.
- They allow you to run A/B tests.
- Email validation.
Cons
- Non-technical users will face difficulties.
- They are not a marketing solution.
- They do not provide email templates.
Mailgun’s Ratings
Mailgun gets a good rating of 8.3 out of 10 rated by 42 users.
#6. Postmark
Postmark, founded in 2010, is next on our list. Postmark offers transactional email services, SMTP, and eMail API services to companies of all kinds and sizes. Your welcome emails, email invites, trial expiration, password reset, and other personalized emails can be set up in Postmark with ease.
Features
Fast Delivery: Emails sent through Postmark are 4 times faster than the other email services that attract prospective email marketers to their service.
Dedicated IPs: Dedicated IPs are important when sending emails for better sender reputation, as I mentioned earlier in this article. However, there is a ‘but’ here.
Postmark thinks it is an excuse for other email providers to upsell intentions when they appeal to their customers to take a dedicated IP for better delivery of their email. Postmark believes that it’s an email service’s responsibility to provide a higher deliverability rate even without a dedicated IP.
For small and mid-volume email senders they provide a shared IP pool with an established good reputation, making sure the deliverability rate is better.
However, they provide you with a dedicated IP only when needed. And for them, it is needed if you are a higher volume email sender.
If you send more than 300,000 emails per month, you are eligible to choose from two different dedicated IPs: 1. Automated Warmup (recommended by them) 2. DIY Warmup (for email pros only).
The price set for a dedicated IP is 50 USD/month. If you are interested in knowing more about Postmark’s Dedicated IP, please visit this page.
Access to History: In Postmark you have access to the old history and data of your sent emails. They store emails and messages for every email sent for 45 days.
Insights: What is an email service without showing you the detailed metrics? You get detailed insights into how your emails are performing.
What are the bounce rates? Is it a hard bounce or a soft bounce? What are the open and click rates? When and who opened your email?
Email Templates: Postmark comes with pre-built email templates for common transactional emails like welcome, comment notification, receipt, and password reset. They let you customize the email templates based on your requirements.
You can edit the templates with a front-end visual of the real-time changes.
Uptime: You can see the uptime status and whether all the systems are operational or not from their current status page.
Postmark Pricing Plans
Postmark has free and paid plans.
- The free plan that lets you send 100 emails per month, which I find useless. 100 emails per month are too little.
- Paid plans starts at 10 USD for 10,000 emails sent in a month and 1.25 USD per 1,000 additional emails.
You can calculate the cost separately based on the number of emails you have. The prices are high for a non-email marketing tool.
Support
I contacted them via email at support@postmarkapp.com.
I wrote to them at 17:56 and I got a response, not an automated one but a human support response, at 18:47. They are not wrong when they say they provide top-notch support. But keep in mind that their response time is set at 3 hours from the email being received during business hours.
Other Users
Unicef, Asana, and 1Password will be some of your co-users if you choose to go for Postmark.
Pro and Cons
Pro
- Both transactional email and bulk emails.
- Shared IPs.
- Dedicated IPs.
- Email templates.
- SMTP.
- Rest API.
- Message storage (45 days).
- Deliverability, open and click rates.
- Inbound email.
Cons
- A/B testing is not available as compared to Mandrill.
- No unsubscribes tracking as compared to Mandrill.
- Pricing is expensive as compared to other email service providers.
- You do not have email address validation with Postmark.
Postmark’s Ratings
A good score of 8.6 out of 10 was given by 19 users in TrustRadius.
Let’s move to the last Mandrill alternative.
#7. SparkPost
SparkPost is from Message Services. It is the # 1 email infrastructure provider.
Sparkpost delivers 40% of commercial emails; that is 4 to 5 trillion emails annually. It is the child company of Message Service.
Features
Real-Time Metrics: You can get a close look at your email performance with the help of 42 real-time metrics provided by Sparkpost.
Email Templates: You get a predesigned set of email templates for your transactional emails and messages.
Speed: Sparkpost is the fastest email delivery service. It does not matter how many emails you are sending; the transit time takes less than 2 seconds.
Deliverability: Sparkpost‘s deliverability is the highest in the industry, which makes it a perfect alternative to Mandrill. The deliverability rate is 96%. Their experts keep on working with inbox providers and internet service providers to fix the issues that cause emails to land in the spam folder instead of the main inbox.
Integrations: Documented APIs and libraries guide you on your way to website or application integration with Sparkpost.
99.9% Uptime: They are quite good here: their uptime percentage is 99.9%. You can always check their uptime status.
Do check the history when doing your research.
SparkPost Pricing Plans
Before we speak about the prices, let me tell you that Sparkpost can be used for free as the platform lets you send 500 emails per month for free.
You can glance at the SparkPost pricing plans in the image below. To send 50,000 emails per month, you pay 20 USD, and for additional email sending beyond the limit, you have to pay 1 USD per thousand emails.
If you choose the higher plan, the per thousand rates for extra emails decrease.
SparkPost has four pricing plans:
- Free: You can send 500 emails per month.
- Premier: Pricing starts at 20 USD for 50,000 emails per month.
In all their premier packages, they provide dedicated IP, automated IP warm-up, and prioritized support.
Support
You get document support related to FAQs, API integration, Developer Hub, User Guide, and much more documentation.You can contact them by submitting the website’s contact form. They are available from 6:00 to 17:00 PT on weekdays.You can also opt to join their Slack community and help one another. Their slack community has 9,274 users.
Other Users
Big brands like PayPal, Pinterest, and Twitter use Sparkpost as their email service provider.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Fast delivery.
- Deliverability.
- Email API.
- Inbox tracker.
- Community support.
Cons
- Not user-friendly for those without technical knowledge.
- The free plan allows very few emails.
Sparkpost Ratings
Sparkpost is rated an average 5.5 out of 10 in TrustRadius by 11 users. You can check their detailed reviews here.
Conclusion
I would now like to conclude this article by thanking you for putting in your time in reading this article.
I hope the article helps you find the best Mandrill alternative that you are looking for.
What Mandrill alternative have you selected for your business? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
