JangoMail is an email marketing platform. Companies use JangoMail to send marketing emails, transactional emails, and person-to-person emails. JangoMail offers a feature-rich application, 24/7 support, inbox delivery, integration with most CRM's, reporting and a low price guarantee.
$25
per month
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
JangoMail is only good for sending mass email and nothing more. While its interface is simple to use, it doesn't have a good amount of features attached to it. That probably explains why it's quite cheap compared to other mailing services. It's lacking features and additional functionalities. It's a cheap alternative mainly for sending mass email though, which is nice for a company that sells product to consumers like us.
Any system that requires transactional email message functionality as an external service. The benefits of a well managed and vetted server to maintain reputation as well as being reliability is well worth the effort needed to integrate towards the API specs
Mandrill is extremely reliable. We switched from using a platform that was very hit-or-miss, but we never had a single deliverability issue with Mandrill's transactional API. Every email was sent reliably and quickly.
Mandrill's reporting and debugging features made it easy to ensure that all our messages were getting delivered to the right place in a timely manner. In fact, Mandrill's tools were so robust that we used it as an end-around way of debugging another failing service we were using.
Mandrill is a very affordable add-on to an existing MailChimp account. Adding an extra layer of reliability was a no-brainer, and made the cost essentially negligible to our organization.
So far I haven't had any troubles, or problems with JangoMail. I'd love to just paste a WORD doc into the HTML window, but I am not going to risk having the links broken. So I preformat my copy with the long links and then insert them in the HTML window and make them look pretty.
JangoMail's "add additional fields" in the into the body of the email is not very transparent, but when you add additional features and that depth of functionally then there is going to be a higher learning curve. I have not explored all of their tutorials.....and they have a great blog to explore also.
This is not a big thing but maybe a clock could be installed to show that the email is being sent and that there is x amount of time until the "report" is ready to view. There is a no man's land time that as a user you are not sure if the mail got delivered or is being delivered.
The rate-limit system can be troubling. If you are switching providers and already have a large e-mail volume, you're going to want to transition slowly. The per-hour send limits are initially very low, and if you have any deliverability or complaint hiccups, they will plummet quickly. The Mandrill support staff is very helpful in this area - they will not (and claim that they can not) manipulate send limits for any account at any time for any reason.
Billing is combined in with a paid MailChimp subscription, which didn't used to be the case.
I haven't personally reached out to their support team, but the feedback I've heard from our tech support and engineering teams have been that their response to questions has often been they either are unsure or that Mandrill is what it is. For example, when our customers weren't able to see opens and clicks for all emails sent, and we reached out to their support, the response was it is what it is, and they'll send a notification to our app if they can.
I selected JangoMail because I wanted to try something new. Usually I find myself using YAMM which is Yet Another Mail Merge but using a new interface was refreshing and it was also very easy to learn and use. I would definitely use it again in the future and recommend to others
So we actually work with clients across all of the platforms listed above, but Mandrill has a huge ease of use bonus in its favor, especially when working with clients who are setting up a Cart Recovery style marketing campaign for the first time or are looking for a bit of a fire-and-forget setup. With more sophisticated clients (on the scale of global ecommerce companies), who have a larger subscriber/customer base and in-house design teams, we find that Mandrill usually isn't enough
