Customer.io vs. Postmark

Talking from the perspective of a marketer at a SaaS with average. 50K email subscribers, Customer IO has been an excellent tool for us. Our requirements include sending users newsletters, marketing emails, and transactional emails, running lead-nurturing campaigns, and more. For a comprehensive use case like ours, CustomerIO is great. While it also has a learning curve, when you have such requirements, it’s worth it. I don’t think CustomerIO is the best fit if you have basic requirements like only weekly newsletter emails.

Incentivized

If email deliverability is important, then Postmark is king. I've used all sorts of providers, with dedicated IPs and without. Postmark has always had the best deliverability and has resulted in the least amount of customer service time wasted dealing with users who simply did not receive an important email from us. It is pricier than other options, but it's well worth it if deliverability is at all important to you.

Incentivized

• Managing users, attributes and events. You are easily able to modify any user, based on their ID, and add or remove attributes, assign events to them. That makes it very easy to segment later and to assign them to several campaigns based on behavior. Just a warning: this integration isn't so easy (at least it wasn't for us).
• Creating workflows of campaigns is very easy. You can quickly create behavioral campaigns based on attributes, segments and add elements to the workflow. You can send an email, then wait, then send another, then exit the campaign if they converted, etc. The workflow is easy to configure and very powerful for automation.
• We don't use many email templates (we make them in MJML) but it's very easy to add senders, to change templates and in general to test designs.
• Deliverability works very well, at least for us. It sends emails pretty fast and without issues.
• Exporting is very quick and easy. Importing wasn't a feature until recently, but it works well too.
• Seeing activity it's also useful. In general, logs are awesome (be it of a customer, of activity on the site, email sends, etc.).
• We don't use environments, but it might be very useful for a bigger company.

Incentivized

• Great, helpful customer support (rarely needed)
• Reliable product
• Well thought out interface, easy setup
• Great ongoing visibility into status of emails sent through Postmark

• Price is quite expensive for Premium or once you get into high volumes of contacts.
• Depending on how you'll use it, it may require some help from developers to set up.
• Despite the support being great, you have to email them, there's not chat feature.

• Not many cons since it's pretty straightforward, and if email delivery service was often impacted, we'd most likely find a new provider.

Incentivized

Super intuitive and easy interface to start off with. There are not a lot of guides and the documentation is helpful but not super extensive, but even if you're a little technical, you can easily figure most of the things out by yourself. Everything is super easy to start with and the platform does not overwhelm you with a lot of options, or data.

Incentivized

The only thing that confused me initially was that if you don't put a specific sender email into the Wordpress plugin settings (I use Postmark exclusively with Wordpress site), it won't send emails. I thought that having selected the option to send via any @domain.com email, I wouldn't need to fill out a specific email to send from, but that isn't the case. I sorted that out quickly with support.

My experience with their support team has always been great. Very quick to respond, have an online chat, and are very helpful. They helped me resolve any issues I've had every time in a professional and knowledgeable manner. We've now switched to another tool, and I can't even compare the service level we get there to customer.io

Incentivized

Postmark has been an excellent solution for our business needs. We have been with them for years and have no intention of changing providers anytime soon. Support was excellent as we were getting started and their API documentation made implementation quick and easy

Incentivized

Customer.io was really the first pure, full-featured drip email program on the market and as far as I know, it's still the simplest and best overall for that specific function. SendGrid has also added drip campaign features, but I would seriously evaluate Customer.io against any other drip email provider because they really have all the key elements you need to make it work.

Incentivized

We felt Postmark's focus on transactional emails and their use of shared domain reputation made them stand out. We also like their user interface and ability to have many virtual email servers. Pricing was competitive and after a trial we saw a big increase in deliverability rates. Therefore it was an easy decision to use Postmark over other providers.

Incentivized

• Positive impact on the sales side. I'm not sure about the specific ROI (you have to include the designer and the time it takes to set up) but you certainly get back the investment in a few months, once you are able to scale your email marketing.
• Customer experience is way better by having more segmented, contextual and accurate messages sent to them.
• Integration is costly and it will take several days or weeks to be fully achieved. Expect to invest some money on this.

Incentivized

• It is really "set and forget." I have not had any issues that I've needed to deal with. It just works.

Incentivized