Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
$0
per month
Mailtrap
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Mailtrap is a modern email platform for developer and product teams that send emails at scale. It is designed to send emails with a focus on high deliverability rates, fast delivery, and protecting sender reputation. The service includes 24/7 technical support. The benefits of using Mailtrap, as described by the vendor include: High deliverability & fast delivery: 99.99% platform uptime, dedicated IPs, auto warm-up, and throttling. Multi-tenant accounts…
$15
per month per user
Pricing
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Mailtrap
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
per month
Essentials
$13
per month
Standard
$20
per month
Premium
$350
per month
Email API/SMTP Basic
$15
per month
Email Sandbox Basic
$17
per month
Email Sandbox Team
$42
per month
Email API/SMTP Business
$85
per month
Email Sandbox Business
$123
per month
Email Sandbox Enterprise
$498
per month
Email API/MTP Enterprise
$750
per month
Email API/SMTP Custom
By request
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Mailtrap
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Each tier's price mentioned in the table is its starting point - they vary based on the amount of emails per month. Also, Email Sandbox has an annual pricing option.
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
As I said, Mailtrap is particularly well-suited for software development teams working on email functionality within their applications. All the automation and intuitive environment helped us create a workflow that's almost set and forget.
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.
Flexible for engineering teams. Mailtrap works well in environments where multiple developers are responsible for email functionality.
We're on the Enterprise plan which allows for customizations for our needs. For example, we had a request not to record email bodies for privacy reasons, and Mailtrap enabled that pretty fast.
The user experience is awesome. The platform is easy to use and the support team responds fast and helps us out with any questions.
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.
It did the job for us and we were happy with the delivery rates of the email, analytics and customisation available while integrating it within our platform.
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.
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
sendgrid is powerful for email delivery, but Mailtrap's dedicated testing environment and focus on development teams made it the clear choice for our needs. Its ability to simulate various email scenarios without affecting real users is unmatched. Plus, their sending is reliable, regardless of your volume.