I have used three services SendGrid, Amazon SES, and Mandrill on Go4Expert.com and will share the pros and cons of each of them so you can decide which one works best for your needs.
Update: April 8 2016
It’s sad that Mandrill is not available as a standalone SMTP Email Service provider (From 27th April 2016) and is available as a mailchimp addon only. So the below comparison does not hold any good anymore. Amazon SES is better choice among the three.
SparkPost looks promising as an email service provider (Dashboard feels like you are inside MandrillApp). As of now I have to switch back to Amazon SES because I have bounce and spam report notification ready for Amazon SES but will definitely love to try SparkPost soon. (Its even cheaper than Amazon SES.)
Every website needs to send emails. Emails like notifications of successful registrations or password reset emails or any such emails.
Normally website use the hosting server to send such emails but then sending bulk emails from your own server means you overload your server for sending emails and that may mean that for the time it sends those emails, your server may become slow in response to users.
Webmasters tend to cron the email sending process when the traffic on the server is minimum but that also means that you have to take care of email bounces and complains.
So to avoid such bounce and complain loops, there are third party email providers where you can just use uniform API for such bounce and spam reports. I have used three services aka SendGrid, Amazon SES, and Mandrill and I will share the pros and cons of each of them so you can decide which one works best for your needs.
Make a note that to be able to send emails using third party, you should have bounce rate of less than 5% and spam reports under 0.1% to be on the good side of reputations with all the three Email Service Provider.
Pricing Structure
SendGrid pricing structure for transactional email is too complex. For sending higher number of emails and opting for better package, the price per email just skyrockets. Not sure why but it is weird.
So for sending first 40,000 Emails, the pricing is $9.95 but for 100,000 where it should have been under $25 but the pricing is $79.95.
Quota
For Mandrill there is a limit to the number of emails you can send every hour and as you send more emails that have low bounce rate and low spam complains, your limit increases exponentially.
For Amazon, if you hit the 10,000 emails every 24 hours, your quota increases automatically.
For SendGrid, I don’t think there is any quota and I sent almost 60,000 emails after couple of days of my signup. My account was set for review after 13,000 emails were dispatched but then I could get the review thing sorted with the support and once the senior support staff reviewed the account and I could get the email queue delivered.
Notifications
We have more than 50,000 registered users in Go4Expert.com and over a period of time some of the users email addresses becomes invalid and so having an API handler for email bounces and spam complains is a must.
Amazon’s Simple Notification Service or SNS can be tied to Amazon’s Simple Email Service or SES for notification of email Bounces and Spam complains.
Mandrill provides Webhooks for notification of Bounce and Spam complains. Mandrill also provides notification about email sent as well as opened though open notification works only for HTML emails as expected.
SendGrid does not offer such Notifications on free, lite and bronze packages and only provides for Silver package and above which was a big headache of doing things manually. SendGrid provides list of email in CSV format that bounced or reported as spam and so I had to create a script to read the list and do the email cleanup. Though I created the list, I had to get the CSV file exported and import into my list to get the email Cleanup. Too much manual process whereas I like to keep things as automated as possible.
SMTP and Account Security
SMTP username and password for your SendGrid account is same as your Sendgrid.com account login details which is kind of not acceptable to me because I add my SMTP details on my website and that information is visible to the developers and so they can login to my SendGrid account and look at the email reports and other such details.
Mandrill and Amazon SES have Key based login details which you can safely use on your website for sending emails and revoke the access to sending emails using SMTP whenever you want or generate a new Access key. For SendGrid you have to change your account password.
Mandrill also provides reports on keys as password used for sending emails. Similar functionality can be achieved in Amazon SES by creating different IAM logins.
Update: I just found that SendGrid also supports Multiple Login Credentials but I am not sure about reports for each of those account as yet.
Deliverability
I found the deliverability of SendGrid to be not at par.
I sent 59,464 emails using SendGrid and on 10th May 2014, I sent all of those emails but the user response was not as expected. I just sent out 30,000 emails from Mandrill today i.e. May 25th 2014 and I see very good response to the emails sent. Though there is no concrete statistics to prove the deliverability but the 30,000 emails sent through Mandrill are actually subset of emails sent through SendGrid on May 10th and I saw that lot of those emails had spam auto-response activated and I did not get any such auto-response when sent through SendGrid.
So it could be that emails from SendGrid either were not delivered or they may have ended in spam or junk folder. I think it is more of a later than of former because SendGrid does not support SPF and option for Domain keys is not very helpful either. They don’t provide any keys that I need to add into my domains DNS to white label SendGrid for sending emails for my domain like Amazon SES and Mandrill does.
Support
Amazon and Mandrill’s support is not as quick as SendGrid. To contact link in Mandrill, I had to go to twitter and tweet about it
@shabbirbhimani Glad to help! Can reach out via email – help at mandrill dot com with any questions you may have.
ā Mandrill (@mandrillapp) May 19, 2014
But SendGrid support is available 24×7 for chat.
Dashboard Interface
I would rate Mandrill ‘s Dashboard as best among the three and then may be SendGrid and last Amazon. As you send emails, Mandrill dashboard can show you hourly reports of how many emails are being sent each hour from your account.
API Documentation
I would say Amazon has the best documentation but then Amazon’s documentation at times becomes too much of information to get simple things done.
Mandrill also has quite a vast documentation but as I did not had the option to develop API for SendGrid; I don’t think it would be fair to rate SendGrid’s API documentation by me.
Cost Structure
The pricing for Amazon SES is a flat fee of $0.10 per thousand and for Mandrill it is $0.20 per thousand after the free quota of 12,000 emails per month. The pricing structure for SendGrid, Amazon SES and Mandrill is as follows:
| Emails Per Month | 40,000 | 100,000 | 250,000 |
| Amazon SES * | $4 | $10 | $25 |
| SendGrid | $9.95 | $79.95 | $199.95 |
| Mandrill | $5.60 | $17.60 | $47.6 |
* Price Assuming SNS is in the free quota of 1 million notifications per month.
Final Verdict
Iād say Amazon SES is a very cost effective option but if you are ready to pay slightly more Mandrill is the right way forward. SendGrid may be a good choice for those who may be want to opt for Marketing emails but that would make more sense to be comparing SendGrid to MailChimp, AWeber or GetResponse.
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Terrible attitude & support!
Please see below the response of the company while I was trying to open a new account:
”
Our provisioning process is done in order to protect our system as well as inboxes around the world from potential spam email. We perform many checks to determine the validity of our new customers and unfortunately some of those checks have triggered scores that are historically indicative of high risk. Our Provisioning Team will not be able to provision your account for this reason.
In regards to billing, as your account has not been activated, no payment has been processed against your credit card.
We thank you for your consideration and we wish you the best in your future endeavors.
”
When I’ve contacted the company and explained that I’m a real person, with proven professional background and even supplied LinkedIn link, the response remained the same.
VERY VERY DISAPPOINTING, especially because there is no reason for such an attitude – pure discrimination, shame.
Looks really good @nachocoll:disqus and I have been using SES as well and looks really nice.
Hi Shabbir,
This was very helpful. I was very interested by your comments in the deliverability section of your article. I have been using Sendgrid for email marketing and transactional for two years and been very frustrated with the marketing results. We send to business contacts (B2B). My lists are extremely clean and I send to a list of 70,000. We have dedicated IP accounts with Sendgrid with good reputation percentages. However, I’ve noticed that after the first few thousand we stop getting personal replies, out of office replies, specific promotion signups, etc. and other outside actions. It gets worse as the sending continues. Yet we have analyzed sendrids results and the open rates are consistent from from first 5000 to last 5000. We’ve decided that something is not right. Our sense is that the emails are just not being delivered at all, and the reported open rates are not accurate. This seems supported by Sendgrid not allowing you to download activity, making it tough to analyze what happened (we’re not technical so we had to cut and paste the activity pages to excel). What are your thoughts on this, and do you have a recommendation of a competitor that does not manipulate your sending behind the scenes?
@stephendelvecchia:disqus,
I don’t see any I had any such issues with Mandrill and if you prefer to be using them as an addon to mailchimp, you can still use them. Also SparkPost is also inline with mandrill but then I am not sure about their deliverability because I don’t have personal experience with them.
If you have a clean list, my suggestion would be to use Amason SES as they have quite a good deliverability but then they are quite strict on bounce and spam complains as well.
Thanks
Shabbir
Shabbir, I have purchased ArpReach for my email marketing needs. Now considering how to set it up. Mandrill is not an option anymore. I guess I should go or Amazon SES. I’m not a coder – just advanced computer user. been around WordPress for quite a while but don’t know anything about servers. Any idea how complicated it is to set up and maintain ArpReach/Amazon SES combo for non-geeky person?
@uldiszalcmanis:disqus, I am not an ArpReach expert but I see they have guidelines for Amazon SES – http://support.arpreach.com/support/solutions/articles/74761-setting-up-amazon-ses
So should not be very difficult to maintain but then setup should be slightly advance level needed.
thanks Shabbir. Appreciate your response
The pleasure is all mine @uldiszalcmanis:disqus
Hi there, going to Amazon SES (yes, from Mandrill too), and I’m just worried on deliverability. I’ve seen some bad comments on the net about that for amazon, any experience for SES?
@nachocoll:disqus, I have been using Amazon SES on my blog shabbir.in and have not seen much of an issue with deliverability from my members area. Will be moving other sites to Amazon SES soon. Is working on the bounce and spam reports loop.
Thanks for comments, I started using SES too, and will start sending 50k emails per day next week (welcome’s, alerts, etc) – I will post some results to share ^_^
you need to be care full with bounces and complaints .Amazon is very strict with that
Yeah, Mandrill, no longer an option, for anyone considering it after reading this article. They are going to force all of its free users to inmediately move to a paid account on mailchimp (minimum usd20) or get their accounts permanently disabled by april 2016.
Completely agree with you on this. It looks like Mandrill has closed on the independent business and now it only works for mailchimp. May be its time to move back to Amazon SES
What is bothering me is that they had gone from being the cheapest to being the most expensive in an instant. Now the “cheapest” plan they are forcing you to switch from free is usd20 with mailchimp.. why on earth would I want a service for suscriptions when I only want a good smtp service?. And now their prices are stupid because there are tons of better alternatives. It’s like they boycoted their own product.
There is nothing more wrong in the industry than when a company forces you to pay for additional services you don’t really need to justify their bussiness.
Hi, thanks for writing this article. I’m glad I stumbled on it.
In short, I’ve felt that over time not all of my purchase confirmation emails and shipping confirmation emails are getting to customers. I stumbled on SendGrid after being impressed with a two tier autoresponder another site sent me. I noticed a link to SendGrid in their email and that started the hunt.
As I understand it each service will send the transactional emails. That’s great.
I’d also like the service I go with to be able to handle abandoned cart emails and product review emails. This would prevent me from using countless apps that are subpar. Can this be done with Mandrill?
Lastly, I’m not a developer and don’t have a clue how to get started with either of these services. Any tips for finding someone that might be able to help?
Thanks again for the informative post.
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
SendGrid, Mandrill and Amazon SES are all email sending framework. So you can send genuine emails using them. What kind of email you send does not matter to them.
So it is your product feature that may know about the cart abandoned process and then can send emails using the above service providers. It can be done with Mandrill as well as by others.
I provide freelancing services and is available for development work just in case you want me to help you with it.
Thanks
Shabbir
Hey Shabbir,
As you mentioned in your article Mandrill has a best interface:
“Mandrill ās Dashboard as best among the three”
so I decided to go with your advice, to go for Mandrill to send newsletter to my list :
1. Do you know any good and reliable WordPress Newletter Autoresponder Plugin?
FYI: I’ve a plan to use autoresponder plugin + along with Madrill Plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wpmandrill/) to send my newsletter emails.
2. Though I’ve a good experience in web stream but in terms of creating list As it’s just my startup, I’m confident but seek your advise:
Is it a good decision in your opinion to start with Mandrill (along with self hosted Autoresponder plugin) instead of using Mailchimp for autoresponder?
FYI: I chose Mandrill to cut the cost because paying $15/mo or just paying $0 for first 12k emails has a huge difference?
3. As per your recommendation I’m going to use Mandrill so is there a way to handle “bounces and spam notifications”? In their features they mentioned they provide
stats about bounce, click etc.. is that enough or do I need any other plugin to make the process more easier?
I consider you a friend because it seems you’re a kind and good person as you share good information so let me share my though which haunts me: How can a
newbie pay $15-$19/mo to autoresponders like mailchimp or getresponse for sending newsletter to his list, when he is not sure when the list can be encashed? It’s just a thought but I’m still confident.
Looking for your wise advice
Thanks in advance
1. No. I don’t use inhouse plugin for Auto responder in WP and I prefer to be using AWeber / GetResponse.
The mandrill plugin you are pointing to is just for sending emails from WP and it just replaces the wp_mail function included with WordPress. It is not an autoresponder.
2. Yes you can use mandrill but then you need a good auto-responder and if you can find one, it is a good idea.
3. Not sure about that plugin and if that handles bounces to unsubscribe and don’t see it in either the notes. You need to be asking them.
Yes I think it is better to be using the self hosted auto-responder when you are starting out and I am totally with you. I have used Sendy ( http://imtips.co/sendy ) before but it works best with SES but should be fairly simple to get it done with Mandrill as well.
I am looking for some other alternatives and will see if I can come up with something for you.
Thanks
Shabbir
Thanks Shabbir for answering.
Looking for your other alternatives….
Thanks
Shabbir,
Great article, really a good article huh
A question arises, can I use transactional email provider like Mandrill or Amazon SES for sending marketing emails?
FYI: I’m actually making list in Learn A Guitar niche so is it fair to send email via any of these Mandrill or Amazon SES rather than using Aweber to cut the cost?
Looking for your reply.
Thanks in advance
Yes you can use such programs to send marketing emails as well and there is no restrictions on the type of emails you send.
All you have to do is make sure you are handling bounces and spam notifications rightly to make your list as clean as possible.
Thanks for relying š
The cost you mention are for only transactional email what about marketing emails?
Ankit, that’s by Mailchimp (Transactional and marketing mails) and not by Mandrill. Mandrill is an email provider.
Sendgrid used to be good but they’ve gone WAY downhill – when I started with them in 2011 they were fantastic but over the past six months their deliverability has gotten worse than sending with free Postfix that’s on my server. This is according to multiple seed-lists included with mailings for an inbox monitoring service. Sendgrid was completely blocked by AOL, and 100% of Hotmail emails and 60% of Yahoo emails went to spam.
Mandrill on the other hand consistently achieves nearly 100% inbox, and at less than a third of the cost of Sendgrid! The catch is that you must maintain extremely clean lists and low bounce & complaint rates.
Ironically, Sendgrid suspended my account for delivery issues. Yet Mandrill can get the same exact content delivered to the same exact list without problems. Both companies use PowerMTA infrastructure so Sendgrid has clearly dropped the ball on managing it.
Complete agree with you on this Frank R