ClickSend aims to help businesses communicate with their customers and staff in the moments that matter on the channels, they use every day. ClickSend is designed to power billions of messages worldwide and offers a full suite of communications products from SMS and rich messaging to letters and fax all done via online dashboard or API.
$0.01
Per email for at least 25,000 emails
Sinch Mailgun
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
Mailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.
ClickSend supports live chats, where instant messaging is done for both formal or informal discussions. Besides, proper management of tasks, from the simplified ones to the complex ones, and every player is well assigned. The option of bar code in this application ensures there is the automation of many tasks and reduces paperwork.
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.
You can add list of users just by uploading numbers CSV or by uploading detailed CSV.
You can generate quick campaigns just like in email, save templates with URLs, send immediately, or schedule for a certain date and hour. They have analytics, shared, and private numbers. I like that it is super straightforward.
You can make automated campaings that will be sent every time a new user joins a list. This you can do with 3rd-party integrations such as your own app or Zapier since ClickSend already has this integration.
Super cheap and it's what I like most. You pay for SMS in bulk with really competitive prices. Most SMS companies want to charge by the number of users, and when you have 32,000 active users or +130,000 users it just becomes expensive so ClickSend is the SMS solution.
In general, using ClickSend is quick and the learning curve for new users is flat since it's almost the same as an email marketing tool just for SMS and compressed.
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)
It could be more up-to-date and could offer some extra features that other competitors do like templating and better querying and filtering. As it is right now most things are easy to use but seem rather barebones next to Mandrill. The API is easy to implement thanks to the great documentation which is why I recommend Mailgun so often.
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.
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.
In general, support is good. Actually they usually write to you about things like when you upload your first contacts, send your first campaign, or when you forget to put the opt-out option. Of course, they are automated emails but it happens that if you reply to one of them a real support agent will attend to your case. If you have any doubt you can write directly to support by email. I'm not sure if they are using Zendesk or any other kind of program but they usually answer in less than 2 hours. Still, the option of an actual real-time chat is missing.
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.
ClickSend is okay but limited in functionality as compared to HighLevel. HighLevel has more functionality and it is at a reasonable price point everyone. Apart from that support are the same for most platform and it is really great to have something that is easy to start using. Most important decision that someone have to make is what they want in these software.
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
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.
The ROI is time. More time focused, less time distracted with a mobile device.
Early days, however the customer survey and marketing campaigns will hopefully yield results.
Customer adherence to appointments and/or rescheduling for missed appointments has drastically increased with the use of reminder and follow-up SMS options that normally wouldn't be used as often on a mobile device.
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.
