Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
$0
per month
Postmark
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Postmark from Wildbit in Philadelphia sends and tracks transactional emails.
$10
per month
Pricing
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Postmark
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
per month
Essentials
$9.99
per month
Standard
$14.99
per month
Premium
$299
per month
10,000 Emails per Month
$10.00
per month
300,000 Emails per Month
$200.00
per month
5,000,000 Emails per Month
$1200.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Postmark
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Postmark
Considered Both Products
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
No answer on this topic
Postmark
Verified User
Employee
Chose Postmark
They are a bit different and, in many cases, it makes sense to use both Postmark and Mandrill. Aside from these two, I don't have experience with other email delivery services. Both tend to be extremely reliable and rarely fail to send and deliver emails. Both are …
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
