Brevo vs. Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)

Brevo is an excellent email subscriber service provider for startups, small businesses, and budget-conscious users. BUT it's real strength is that as your business scales, so too does Brevo's services. As mentioned in my review, when compared to over-hyped, and super-expensive AWeber, Brevo wins out in every singly department. Not every 1000, 10000, etc. sub list generates thousands in revenue. So why do other companies charge as if it's a large profitable corporation based on the sub number thresholds? Brevo is reasonably priced without sacrificing solid service. HIGHLY recommended.

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

Incentivized

• Sendinblue allows you to send emails that do not arrive in spam
• Sendinblue, through its security measures and filters, helps keep contact databases well organized and up to date
• Sendinblue offers an easy-to-use newsletter creation tool and, in case of lack of inspiration, many templates

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• not easy to move/duplicate sections. much easier to just drag and drop. still working this out.
• don't like the logo or text included with the newsletter sign up form. have now upgraded, but think this should not be included for lower pricing plans
• not getting issues completely answered by support team. currently have an issue with email sign up not working on mobile. have been told it is not working, but not given any suggestions on how to fix this.
• have had unusual issue come up with a link. On 2 separate occasions, with 2 separate newsletters that went out, and 2 different images/articles/links, the link was wrong. Even though we checked it, previewed it and sent test email before we sent out these newsletters and these links were correct. It is the section at the bottom of our current newsletter. On both these occasions, when the customer has forwarded the email they received to us, the link was was to an old link - and it was the same old link on both occasions. We have asked for this to be looked into and are waiting on reply. We are going to try to delete this section this week and re-create. It is not a good look for us.
• We have another issue with how our newsletter is previewing in Outlook. The images and the text are not lining up - not on every section, but on 2 sections out of the 5 sections. Also, the Read Full Article text in the button is not showing properly. Again, not a professional look for us which we are not happy with.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

SendinBlue is providing an excellent value to my business by simplifying and speeding up the way that we interact with our customers

Incentivized

Very user-friendly. I don't know how to code, but the program allows me to create visually appealing things with numerous options. Fairly intuitive. I have used it for a few years and have been happy. Works well for what we need.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have never had any planned outages in the time I have been using the software and have had no issues with accessing it.

Everything loads very quickly, it saves as you go along so you're unlikely to loose work if your computer fails. Reports are there immediately too so you're able to act quickly on customer engagement.

These people helped me identify errors when setting up DKIM and were more than helpful in trying to diagnose low open rates with a few campaigns identifying where improvement can be made and how to more effectively manage contact lists. The support is excellent.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If you follow all the steps of the setup process they give you, any one can set this up in about 1 - 2 hours.

Incentivized

On the outbound campaign side, Brevo is pretty no-frills, but it's more than good enough if you want to be out of the Intuit ecosystem and don't want to fuss with Constant Contact's legacy vibe. Brevo is superlative email with marketing tacked on rather than vice versa. If you don't need a lot of marketing support, they're a fine option.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

They have multiple options for upgrading bigger senders or if you need more emails sent in a month.

• The ROI has been very positive - We have been able to bring the entire process in-house to the marketing department
• We are saving time and money by not involving outside contractors
• We save resources by not involving I.T.
• The amount of time we save by being able to create the email from concept to completion, all by one person, is astronomical.
• We save some cost by using the Sendinblue stock image options

• 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.

Incentivized