Litmus from Validity vs. SparkPost (discontinued) vs. Everest (Return Path + 250ok)

Proofing your emails is necessary. This is a tool that allows you to see how your email not only renders on multiple devices but how it performs. Some email building platforms will tell you their drag and drop templates are ready to go, however they stop short of analyzing accessibility, checking links, load speed among other things. I've also experienced drag and drop template issues as new email clients are released. Litmus provides peace of mind that you did your due diligence on crafting your email. While Litmus does provide some reporting you will not see every typical analytic an email report offers. However, you can use your Litmus data to enhance your email reports which in turn creates a robust view of email performance.

Incentivized

SparkPost is great for automated sending of transactional emails. It appears to be designed for developers—it does not allow the creation and sending of emails from within the SparkPost user interface. If you're building a software system that needs to send emails, SparkPost is a great choice, but it is not a CRM.

Incentivized

Every new or established brand should be using Everest. It doesn't matter what you're trying to say in your emails—if they're not reaching the inbox, no one is listening or reading. Everest gives you the insight you need to understand your inbox placement, reputation and so much more.

• The AQ and Approval Process is very seamless. We have a brand team of 20 people, and there are mostly five emails being deployed every day across 3 Hotels and 30 restaurants.
• The Preview of the email template on all devices, ranging from mobile phones to laptops and iPads, which we can also check based on ISPs like Gmail, Outlook, and AOL, is a very good feature that we use for each email.
• The Analytics tools we use for each email to create a tracking link to insert into our email for a send is a great feature. It helps us to see the email performance based on ISP clients.
• For every edits, we receive an email on our inbox, which is very helpful.

Incentivized

• Email Deliverability
• Last 10 day insights for reporting on email system health
• Individually viewing users on the suppression list and quickly take off or put back on.
• API

Incentivized

• Inbox placement data using seed list: It tells you about your inbox placements, spam, missing, and complaints. Very useful data that tells you that you are on the road!
• Sender score for all I.Ps: Tells you quickly about your I.P score, helps you work fast as you know everything is fine, saves a lot of time.
• Online support: Support from specialist, have an expert to guide in tough times to suggest options or to support your action strategy.

Incentivized

• When creating a tracking code, I would like to see a button that says "Create New" without having to return to the main page.
• When creating a tracking code, I would like to have no expiration option.
• There is a little bit more personalization for the personalization content (being able to access the code HTML and not only the snippet).

Incentivized

• A horrifying about-face on pricing after guaranteeing a lifetime rate.
• A steep drop in customer care and customer service quality.
• Increased prices compared to competitors.
• Clumsy email templating system.
• Lack of integration with other messaging systems.

Incentivized

• A good tutorial on how to leverage it would be helpful. Navigating is easy, but there's a lot of information and it takes a while to understand what everything means.
• The reporting feature is intimidating, creating anew one isn't as user-friendly as the rest of the interface.
• I understand what seeds are, but for new users, a very basic tutorial on what they are and why they are used would be helpful. Right now you have to have a baseline understanding of them before using it.

Incentivized

I love using Litmus and find that it has been a huge component of the success of our email campaigns. I can't say enough great things about the platform, and I have seen firsthand how it has saved me time building and sending fully optimized email campaigns. I would absolutely renew again.

Return Path helps us stay ahead of the curve and are a partner in helping us optimize our email program. They also keep us up-to-date on email laws and the changing ecosystem so that we are prepared and ready for changes, whether they're behavioral, legal or technology-driven. I definitely consider Return Path a necessary ingredient to sustaining a healthy email program.

Incentivized

Litmus has integrations that make the software an integrated part of my work every day. Being able to test right within my email builder is just brilliant. Daily I also use the web interface to review analytics and spam testing. Overall it is one of the pieces of software I use daily without any complaints or issues.

Incentivized

I find it fairly easy to use, though the interface is a bit clunky and I may be missing some revolutionary use because it's lost in the clutter.

Incentivized

We have never had a problem with Litmus being unavailable so I would say their availability is fantastic. There might have been one time years ago that the site was down briefly but it also might have been a server issue on my end. Either way, Litmus was back up and running in a very short time

Incentivized

As with all technology, there are inevitably use-cases where you are unable to get to your original goal without some good old-fashioned experimenting. Some situations will (and are) more urgent which complicates an effective integration of a new process or a new team using an existing process but the "issues" are regularly resolved by re-starting the process specific to when Litmus is introduced to a project. If it doesn't come out the way you're anticipating, run it again and verify there is an issue before declaring all is lost

Incentivized

I am always so so impressed with the litmus support team. They are not only prompt but attentive and offer very personalised responses and support

Incentivized

Would give it a zero if I could. Their customer service used to be incredible; fast response times, really hands-on with their users, and a pretty regular feedback process. They sent me an awesome t-shirt that became part of my go-to climbing gear. But for the past year, their response times went way down, their customer service was less helpful and generally a lot more rude, and they haven't asked for customer input once since their leadership change

Incentivized

Absolutely fantastic support. It runs circles around the competition. They regularly reach out and chat, even if it's just to see if there's any issues we need to discuss. They clearly want the business and don't forget you once you sign the contract which is an issue with other similar services.

Incentivized

I had internal training for how to use, not lead by litmus. Unsure if there was any external training which took place before my time

Incentivized

It has all the required information.

Incentivized

I didn’t really personally participate much in the implementation of Litmus, but from what I observed during the process, it was a smooth process with minimal disruptions. The team was able to get up and running quickly, and the platform’s user-friendly interface made onboarding fairly easy for everyone involved from the start.

Incentivized

I joined my company after the implementation was nearly complete. We used the Return Path tool as we slowly increased our send volume in Marketing Cloud to monitor IP reputation and inbox placement.

Incentivized

I selected Litmus because it provides an all-in-one powerful tool to update content, collaborate with teams, and analyse data seamlessly. This saves a big amount of time for the whole team. The insights are more granular allowing us to focus deeper into improvements. The preview tools is one of the most important features we heavily rely on, as we can see how emails are previewed across multiple devices. Speed is also a major factor. Being an organisation sending out many emails, we are happy with the speed and efficiency of accessing and organising emails.

Incentivized

I'd say SparkPost is probably the worst option of the three email API products I've used. It has the worst customer service, the fewest features, and costs significantly more than SendGrid, even though SendGrid lets you integrate all of Twilio's other features into a broader set of communications media. In addition, the API and documentation were easy enough to use and integrate, but the templating system has also caused a lot of headaches for us.

Incentivized

Like I said before, Return Path is really the budget bundle. You get a lot of service for how much you pay. Since I am currently at an early stage startup, we could not afford Litmus, so having Return Path is crucial. The partnership with Salesforce also allowed us to get it at pretty low cost.

Incentivized

With our enterprise account, scalability is not an issue. I have not yet seen or heard of significant issues with user access, API connections for integrations etc. This includes down time for "Scheduled Maintenance" as some providers call them, Litmus has the technology backing to support a global team with a 24-hour workday across regions

Incentivized

• Litmus has been a huge time-saver for our email designer. We send around 40–50 emails a week in over 10 different markets, so manually testing each one just isn’t realistic. With Litmus, she can skip the testing process and spend more time optimizing our emails for better customer engagement.
• We’re just starting to explore Litmus’ personalization features, and they’re already proving valuable. After identifying a gap in our email personalization, the built-in templates are making it easy to start delivering more tailored, customer-focused content.
• Continuing education through Litmus has been a valuable resource for our team. The articles take a little time to get through, but the insights are always worth it—they’ve helped us turn ideas into real, actionable steps to improve our email strategy and content.

Incentivized

• We used at the first time the free version which worked awesome.
• We didn't have to spend our time writing all the features that SparkPost has included.
• The dashboard give us all the information that we need to know regarding the status of the emails that have been sent from the app

Incentivized

• Return Path has helped me enable better email delivery for our global partners e.g. some of our applications that send email to consumers in Australia or Europe.
• Some of the functions that we utilized with Return Path were proving to be costly based on what the business needs were for us. That is why we cut back on some of the services we utilized.

Incentivized