Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) vs. SMTP Email Relay Solutions

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.5 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.
$0
per month
SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
SMTP Email Relay Solutions is a transactional email service formerly from SharpSpring and now a J2 Global company.
$25
per month
Pricing
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
per month
Essentials
$9.99
per month
Standard
$14.99
per month
Premium
$299
per month
ESSENTIAL
$25
per month
STARTER
$80
per month
GROWTH
$300
per month
BUSINESS
$500
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Small Businesses
Postmark
Postmark
Score 9.3 out of 10
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Postmark
Postmark
Score 9.3 out of 10
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.5 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(15 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.7
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)SMTP Email Relay Solutions
Likelihood to Recommend
Mailchimp
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
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Ziff Davis Inc
It works great as an onsite relay to provide email sending functionality without having to pass through the firewall in order to reach the Office 365 gateway. This is particularly evident when using older programs. A lot of the older, no longer developed, programs will only allow a hard coded port to send email. Office 365 uses a non-standard SMTP port for security. This does not allow the hard coded SMTP ports to use this service. Exchange gives you the control to change those ports and securely use the standards without compromise.
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Pros
Mailchimp
  • 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.
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Ziff Davis Inc
  • It allows us to send email through the secure email gateway.
  • We are able to track and scan all email communications
  • It provides a way for legacy and current applications to send out notification and mass email communications.
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Cons
Mailchimp
  • 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.
  • No free tier.
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Ziff Davis Inc
  • As with any technology on a server, we sometimes see issues with downtime related to network changes or firewall updates.
  • It can be a challenge to work with some of our older applications when the TLS feature is used.
  • I wish there was a more direct way to reliably use SMTP for mass email sends without the fear of being blacklisted.
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Usability
Mailchimp
Mailchimp does a good job of documenting the service
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Ziff Davis Inc
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Mailchimp
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.
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Ziff Davis Inc
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Mailchimp
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
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Ziff Davis Inc
Office 365 does use secure non-standard ports for SMTP connectivity causing a problem with older programs. SMTP Email Delivery from Exchange solves this problem by giving the network admin full control over ports and specific program connections. While we do use both Office 365 and the SMTP Email Delivery we find that a mix is needed in order to meet all expectations for our end users. The majority of our SMTP communications, for users, go through Office 365 while the majority of our applications and servers do go through the SMTP Email Delivery service.
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Return on Investment
Mailchimp
  • It helped us to grow our customer database substantially in the last quarter.
  • Last week we reached 62% customer engagement in our campaign. This is very good customer engagement for our projects.
  • In the last quarter we achieved our target by 135%.
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Ziff Davis Inc
  • It's the easiest way to send mail out. No worries about complex configurations.
  • It can be finicky when used in a hybrid Office 365 environment to get the proper pathways secured and working.
  • I wish there were a better way to send out mass emails, on-site, without our domain or server IP being blacklisted.
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