Brevo vs. Sinch Mailgun

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.

Mailgun's pay-as-you-go pricing structure is fantastic, especially if you don't need to send that much email. The pricing, including the free tier, is much more generous than what you can get with some pricier providers, like SendGrid. I mainly just use Mailgun as an SMTP server for web services, and the service has been set-up-and-forget, which is great because I never even have to log onto the Mailgun website and do any work. Mailing list support also looks great for rolling-your-own and not relying on more expensive mailing list services.

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

• Its SMTP is very easy to use and it integrates easy with all CMS and frameworks.
• It allows you to have a record of the incoming/outgoing emails and get useful statistics about them.
• Thanks to their 5000 free emails per month, it is a very good option to startups and small companies.

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

• No built-in templating features (This was a bit sad after coming from Mandrill which excelled at this)
• Dashboard UI (although easy to use) is a bit dated in appearance
• Logs are cumbersome compared to Mandrill
• Setting up TLD (top level domain) names (things like .online or .church) that are not common require an email to tech support (this is annoying)
• Sometimes can be slow in delivery
• Shared IP addresses can be SPAM filtered or delayed (requires an email to support to have a new one assigned - Note: this can be mitigated by buying a dedicated one for a monthly fee)

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

because I tried to entrust the task of mass mailing to inexperienced people who, however, achieved success with relative ease and speed of learning the tools offered by the basic version of Brevo perché ho provato ad affidare il compito di fare mass mailing a persone poco esperte che però hanno raggiunto il successo con relativa facilità e rapidità di apprendimento degli strumenti offerti dalla versione base di Brevo

The time for the initial setup is very quick, since you can start sending (thus developing) from their sandbox in no time. The actual configuration involves, as usual, some DNS changes that may require time but are well explained and documented. Once everything is set up, there are a lot of monitoring tools that you can use to optimize your lists.

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.

There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.

Incentivized

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.

The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.

Incentivized

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

You can't seem to get ANY support until you shell out hundreds of dollars per month. I even did this when we could not deliver mail with Mailgun, and the response was slow and inadequate. Nor would they refund my money. I'll never be a customer of Mailgun again.

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

I selected Sendinblue because my users and customers don't speak and read English, so the french version of an email solution was the best way to answer them. Since 2017, I always recommended Sendinblue to my customers and partners, even if they use another solution, I convert them and never go back again.

Incentivized

To be honest, the tools are quite similar and again I dont recommend using them as a standalone products, but they power the work we do via CRMs and our marketing campaigns. Mailgun integrates slightly better which it is why it is the preferred choice for our agency, as it integrations options seem to be better

Incentivized

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

Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.

Incentivized

• 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

• By not investing in our mail server, we have saved huge amount of money and time. For configuration and installation of an email server on Linux-based server, we would have to hire a network administrator.
• If email delivery is an issue in a hosting provider, another solution is to switch the hosting. Fortunately with Mailgun, we didn't need to try different hosts and experiment which one works best for emails. We can stick to our existing web hosting provider and would not need to change it just for the sake of improving email deliverability.
• The pricing of Mailgun is very cheap and straightforward. First 10K emails are free every month and that's a big advantage for our organization because our volume of emails is rarely more than 10K per month.

Incentivized