Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) vs. SMTP Email Relay Solutions

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
$0
per month
SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
SMTP Email Relay Solutions is a transactional email service formerly from SharpSpring and now a J2 Global company.
$25
per month
Pricing
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
per month
Essentials
$13
per month
Standard
$20
per month
Premium
$350
per month
ESSENTIAL
$25
per month
STARTER
$80
per month
GROWTH
$300
per month
BUSINESS
$500
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Considered Both Products
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
We were already using Mailchimp email marketing product and then while exploring different solutions, we went ahead with Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) only considering our requirements which has mix of reliability and pricing. Few things that stand out with Mailchimp …
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Here the Mailchimp is user understandable whereas in the Zift it gets complicated to use so that is the drawback of this tool.
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
I haven't personally used Sendgrid or Klaviyo before because we had been using Mandrill already. When I joined the company, however, I believe it's overall functionality paired with their price point was more competitive than other solutions out there at the time. With how …
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
I used MailKitchen for some time but I was not satisfied with its results. The unsubscribe rate was very high in that tool, though I don't know the reason for that. So I changed it. I found Mandrill good for my business because its unsubscribe rate is almost negligible and the …
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Best technical market reviews and more options available. Mandrill is a cheaper option and easy to manage. It is an excellent option for small and medium business.
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
What I like better about Mandrill than Mailgun is that Mandrill has integrated Template management. You can issue an email to be sent with a template and submit merge variables along with the email data. Doing this with Mailgun means you have to roll your own template …
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
They're both fairly comparable, though MailChimp made you jump through a few more hoops to use the service, though these were put in place to maintain server integrity in order to reduce bounce rates. I haven't seen a difference, so this was really more of a pain point than …
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Amazon SES was a service we evaluated before eventually landing on Mandrill. SES is very affordable, but some of our less technically-inclined employees found it difficult to use. We also found the API to be lacking in meeting our needs. And as an existing paid MailChimp …
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
So we actually work with clients across all of the platforms listed above, but Mandrill has a huge ease of use bonus in its favor, especially when working with clients who are setting up a Cart Recovery style marketing campaign for the first time or are looking for a bit of a …
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
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 …
Chose Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Being first a MailChimp customer, moving to using Mandrill as a transactional API based solution was an easy and obvious solution. At the time of evaluation Mandrill's API was far superior to SendGrid's API.
SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Chose SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Office 365 does use secure non-standard ports for SMTP connectivity causing a problem with older programs. SMTP Email Delivery from Exchange solves this problem by giving the network admin full control over ports and specific program connections. While we do use both Office …
Best Alternatives
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Small Businesses
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

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User Ratings
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.7
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Likelihood to Recommend
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
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SMTP Email Relay Solutions is a great service if you are in a field where sending out bulk information, such as monthly statements to clients, invoices, or any back-to-back emails that would normally get flagged for "spam" is required.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • It allows us to send email through the secure email gateway.
  • We are able to track and scan all email communications
  • It provides a way for legacy and current applications to send out notification and mass email communications.
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Cons
  • 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.
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  • As with any technology on a server, we sometimes see issues with downtime related to network changes or firewall updates.
  • It can be a challenge to work with some of our older applications when the TLS feature is used.
  • I wish there was a more direct way to reliably use SMTP for mass email sends without the fear of being blacklisted.
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Usability
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.
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I have yet to encounter any hiccups with their services. I send a large volume of emails monthly and have yet to experience any delay in my work.
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Support Rating
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.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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.
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Office 365 does use secure non-standard ports for SMTP connectivity causing a problem with older programs. SMTP Email Delivery from Exchange solves this problem by giving the network admin full control over ports and specific program connections. While we do use both Office 365 and the SMTP Email Delivery we find that a mix is needed in order to meet all expectations for our end users. The majority of our SMTP communications, for users, go through Office 365 while the majority of our applications and servers do go through the SMTP Email Delivery service.
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Return on Investment
  • 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.
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  • It's the easiest way to send mail out. No worries about complex configurations.
  • It can be finicky when used in a hybrid Office 365 environment to get the proper pathways secured and working.
  • I wish there were a better way to send out mass emails, on-site, without our domain or server IP being blacklisted.
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