Campaign Monitor by Marigold vs. Sinch Mailgun

Campaign Monitor by Marigold is great at both scaling up as you grow (i.e. for a startup or if you're starting fresh on building a subscriber list) and providing more than just basic templates and tooling. We vetted across a lot of different options to account for where we were starting and where we hope to grow into with our opt-in email marketing, and Campaign Monitor stood out.

Incentivized

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

• Campaign Monitor’s support is great. They have a great help page built out to help answer all your questions, and if you do have a question or issue that needs extra support, their support team responds within a couple hours to help resolve the issue.
• The email builder is very clean and easy to use. It makes A/B testing, personalization, and dynamic content easy to implement.
• I appreciate the insights reporting that Campaign Monitor provides. We use that regularly for our quarterly reporting to track list growth, as well as campaign performance from a high level.
• The automation is very straight forward and has truly transformed our marketing. The learning curve is pretty low, so my entire team knows how to use it to create and edit automated email journeys.

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

• I'd prefer a central contact list with tags, rather than multiple lists. I can have one person on 5 lists and that counts as 5 subscribers.
• While the email builder is very good, I'd prefer more customisation options.
• Updates they make are good, but are perhaps a little slow.
• I'd like better mobile compatibility. I get that might not be possible for the email builder (although aiming for that would be great) but for lists, reports etc there's no reason that shouldn't be mobile-compatible or have a mobile app.

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

It flexes with us both because of the tiered pricing, and due to the comprehensive tools available. We're able to go from one newsletter to many, and few automations to many very easily while not paying for a Cadillac when what we need is a sturdy crossover.

Incentivized

It's a very user friendly tool and a highly intuitive interface. It's really clearly thought out, so from a users perspective it feels very simple. By comparison, we've also used Mailchimp, and when comparing one to the other, the Mailchimp dashboard is far less logical and intuitive.

Incentivized

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

There have only been a couple of instances where it's been down and this has typically been middle of the night type situations that were planned downtime so they could work on maintenance. They provide notice well ahead of these instances. I've never noticed a surprise outage.

Incentivized

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

I have noticed no slow page loads within the design interface or reports. It's all quick, even with list uploads which are notorious for being clunky in other systems. It's all been quick and easy for us.

Incentivized

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

We haven't had to use support yet.

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

The ability to track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns in real-time is what makes Campaign Monitor interesting to use. All the vital features that we need to run professionally designed email campaigns that look wonderful on any device so that we boost our business are included in this platform.

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

It is so easy to use, and the things you'd want to have as you scale and get to a more complex email marketing approach are all there. From automations to lots of mobile responsive templates, it's easy to set up what you need and then customize for your brand.

Incentivized

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

I did not use the professional services

Incentivized

• Private-label reports that are visually appealing and easy for clients to understand
• The 'Worldview' map feature is a MAJOR setting point and hit with clients, as they can watch a realtime map of their emails being opened in specific locations across the world, and instantly see when a recipient clicks a link in their email.

Incentivized

• 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