Mailgun vs Mandrill vs Twilio SendGrid

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Mailgun

7.9K
4.2K
+ 1
656
Mandrill

4.4K
1.6K
+ 1
926
Twilio SendGrid

10.8K
5.4K
+ 1
720

Mailgun vs Mandrill vs SendGrid: What are the differences?

Comparing Mailgun, Mandrill, and SendGrid for Email Delivery

  1. Sending Capacity: Mailgun, Mandrill, and SendGrid differ in terms of their sending capacity. Mailgun allows users to send up to 10,000 emails per month for free, whereas Mandrill used to offer 2,000 free sends per month but is now an add-on for paid Mailchimp accounts. SendGrid, on the other hand, offers a flexible pricing structure that allows users to choose a plan based on their sending volume, starting from a free tier that offers up to 100 emails per day.

  2. Feature Set: Another key difference between these three email delivery services lies in their feature set. Mailgun provides advanced features like inbound routing, email tracking, and list management, making it a good choice for developers and businesses seeking a comprehensive solution. Mandrill, now integrated into Mailchimp, focuses on ease of use and simplicity, with a user-friendly interface and straightforward email templates. SendGrid offers features like event webhooks, email templates, and A/B testing, catering to businesses with more advanced email delivery requirements.

  3. Email Templates: When it comes to email templates, there are notable differences between the services. Mailgun provides a templating system that allows users to create customizable email templates with variables and conditional logic, enabling dynamic content creation. Mandrill, now part of Mailchimp, offers a drag-and-drop email builder that simplifies the process of creating visually appealing email templates. SendGrid provides a range of pre-designed templates to choose from, making it convenient for users who require quick and easy template creation.

  4. Integration Options: The integration options for these email delivery services also differ. Mailgun offers extensive documentation and libraries for popular programming languages, enabling easy integration into applications. Mandrill, being integrated into Mailchimp, provides seamless integration with the Mailchimp platform and related plugins. SendGrid offers robust API documentation and SDKs for multiple programming languages, allowing users to effortlessly integrate the service into their applications.

  5. Deliverability Metrics: Another important aspect to consider is the deliverability of emails. Mailgun provides detailed deliverability analytics, including delivery rates, opens, clicks, and bounces, providing insights into the success of email campaigns. Mandrill tracks engagement metrics like open and click rates, providing essential feedback for email campaigns. SendGrid also offers comprehensive email analytics, including engagement data and spam reports, ensuring users have the necessary information to optimize their email delivery.

  6. Support and Documentation: Support and documentation play a crucial role in the usability of these services. Mailgun provides comprehensive documentation, developer libraries, and responsive support through chat and email, ensuring users have the resources they need. Mandrill offers support through the Mailchimp support team, with a comprehensive knowledge base and community forum. SendGrid provides extensive documentation, access to developer libraries, and 24/7 support through various channels, including chat, email, and phone.

In summary, Mailgun, Mandrill, and SendGrid differ in terms of their sending capacity, feature set, email templates, integration options, deliverability metrics, and support/documentation provided. The choice between these services depends on individual requirements, such as sending volume, desired feature set, ease of use, and level of support needed.

Advice on Mailgun, Mandrill, and Twilio SendGrid

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?

See more
Replies (4)
Justini Powell
Lead Developer at Watermark Community Church · | 4 upvotes · 86.2K views
Recommends
on
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

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.

See more
Mika Henriksson
Coder at mhenrixon Consulting · | 4 upvotes · 86.1K views
Recommends
on
PostmarkPostmark

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!

See more
Vit Ulicny
Recommends
on
MandrillMandrill

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.

See more
Aric Fedida
Founder, CTO at ASK Technologies Inc · | 1 upvotes · 85.5K views
Recommends
on
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

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:

  1. 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).
  2. Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
  3. 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.

See more
Decisions about Mailgun, Mandrill, and Twilio SendGrid

We chose Postmark as our transactional email service for several reasons:

  • Laser-focus (at the time) on transactional email - their success/speed/reliability with delivering transactional email is amazing. Note, they have now branched out and offer marketing/broadcast email services too.

  • Developer-friendly - Awesome docs and resources. Their Rail gem integrates directly with ActionMailer so nearly all of our code worked without changes.

  • Servers - You can set up "Servers" for different mail streams/workflows to keep things separate and easy to review.

  • Bootstrapped - Wildbit (who makes Postmark) is bootstrapped just like the Friendliest.app and they offer a service credit to other bootstrapped startups.

See more
Imelda Garcia

We did a quick test on the reliability of these three common email services, sending a few emails an hour at random intervals.

Unfortunately, none of them had 100% availability over the 30 day test. I don't understand why this is so hard?

Mailgun performed the best with the most reliability and fastest response times. Mandrill was notably bad.

See more
Slawomir Pucia
Head of Product at Coresender · | 5 upvotes · 79.1K views

Of course we chose Coresender to send our own transactional emails :) So I thought I'll let you know how we use it.

  • We set up separate sending accounts for all company needs, eg. transactional emails, monitoring alerts, time to inbox. We even configured our office printers to send emails through Coresender.

  • We have a real-time and extremely usable view into what emails go through each account, so each time anybody reports an email not arriving we're able to assist them in a few seconds

  • We utilize our message timeline feature, so we can learn eg. if people are clicking on password reset links

  • We always know how many of our onboarding emails are being opened which helps us improve them

  • Finally, we have full controll over our suppressions lists, so we can add (and remove!) from them whenever necessary.

To sum up, at Coresender we're eating our own dogfood and it helps us stay connected to the product and understand our customers better.

See more
Migrated
from
MailgunMailgun
to
PostmarkPostmark
at

While building our authentication system, we originally picked Mailgun. However, emails took minutes to arrive and some of them didn't get delivered - or got delivered to spam.

We started looking for a new provider, and settled on Postmark. We love that they track time-to-inbox, it makes me feel they really care about going above and beyond to provide a good service.

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Mailgun
Pros of Mandrill
Pros of Twilio SendGrid
  • 178
    Quick email integration
  • 148
    Free plan
  • 91
    Easy setup
  • 67
    Ridiculously reliable
  • 53
    Extensive apis
  • 30
    Great for parsing inbound emails
  • 25
    Nice UI
  • 22
    Developer-centric
  • 15
    Excellent customer support
  • 12
    Heroku Add-on
  • 4
    Easy to view logs of sent emails
  • 4
    Email mailbox management for developers
  • 2
    Great PHP library
  • 2
    Great documentation
  • 2
    Great customer support, love rackspace
  • 1
    Better than sendgrid not ask too many question
  • 189
    Simple installation
  • 141
    Great api
  • 123
    Generous free allowance to get you started
  • 114
    Cheap and simple
  • 99
    Trackable
  • 59
    Well-documented
  • 54
    Doesn't go to spam
  • 47
    Great for mailchimp users
  • 32
    Webhooks
  • 28
    Client libraries
  • 7
    Heroku Add-on
  • 6
    Easy to use
  • 5
    Meaningful Metrics
  • 5
    Free
  • 3
    Advanced Tagging and Reports
  • 3
    Mobile Access
  • 3
    Status Update
  • 2
    Very chimp-like
  • 2
    Great Documentation
  • 2
    love this service
  • 1
    Free Plan
  • 1
    Webhooks for bounce mail
  • 190
    Easy setup
  • 137
    Cheap and simple
  • 107
    Easy email integration!
  • 86
    Reliable
  • 58
    Well-documented
  • 28
    Generous free allowance to get you started
  • 25
    Trackable
  • 21
    Heroku add-on
  • 15
    Azure add-on
  • 13
    Better support for third party integrations
  • 6
    Simple installation
  • 6
    Free plan
  • 4
    Helpful evangelist staff
  • 4
    Great client libraries
  • 3
    Great support
  • 3
    Better customer support than the competition
  • 3
    Great add-ons
  • 2
    Nice dashboard
  • 2
    Scalable
  • 1
    Web editor for templates
  • 1
    Cool setup
  • 1
    Within integration
  • 1
    Easy set up
  • 1
    Free
  • 1
    Great customer support
  • 1
    Google cloud messaging

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Mailgun
Cons of Mandrill
Cons of Twilio SendGrid
  • 2
    Cost
  • 2
    No HTTPS tracking links supported
  • 1
    Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun
  • 1
    Cannot create multiple api keys
  • 1
    Really hard to pull analytics out via api
  • 3
    Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific
  • 1
    Shared IP blacklist removal takes months
  • 0
    Shares IP blacklist removal

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is Mailgun?

Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.

What is Mandrill?

Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

What is Twilio SendGrid?

Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Why do developers choose SendGrid vs Mandrill vs Mailgun?

  • SendGrid is known for being reliable, well-documented, easy to set up, cheap, and simple.
  • Mandrill is loved by MailChimp users; it’s been appreciated for its webhooks, great API, simple installation, and client libraries.
  • Mailgun is called “ridiculously reliable.” Fans appreciate its quick email integration, easy setup, extensive APIs, nice UI, and free plan option.
What companies use Mailgun?
What companies use Mandrill?
What companies use Twilio SendGrid?

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Mailgun?
What tools integrate with Mandrill?
What tools integrate with Twilio SendGrid?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

Blog Posts

GitHubPythonReact+42
49
40684
GitHubDockerAmazon EC2+23
12
6559
JavaScriptGitHubPython+42
53
21791
Jun 19 2015 at 6:37AM

ReadMe.io

JavaScriptGitHubNode.js+25
12
2344
What are some alternatives to Mailgun, Mandrill, and Twilio SendGrid?
Postmark
Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.
Mailchimp
MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It's like your own personal publishing platform.
Mailjet
Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: scalable, agile and flexible. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.
SparkPost
SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.
SendinBlue
It is a digital marketing toolbox that's built to scale and adapt with you as you grow. You can save time and boost performance by automating your segmentation and marketing messages.
See all alternatives