Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
$0
per month
Vonage Communications APIs
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Vonage APIs (formerly Nexmo and TokBox) help growing startups and agile enterprises enhance customer experience and realize new business outcomes at scale. With a comprehensive suite of communication channels, a global platform, and expert support, users can abstract the complexity of communications and innovate faster.
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
While there are likely a variety of scenarios that would work well with Vonage [Communications APIs (formerly Nexmo)], implementations that need transactional message and response actions are a great fit. Our experience with transactional messaging has been really good and we are continuing to look at opportunities to expand our usage of this part of their service.
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.
I like the delivery speed, it's very instantaneous. As soon as the delivery status changes on the website, the message gets delivered. The rates are also cheap and affordable.
The accuracy of the services and the non-stop supportive team.
Simple API, easy to integrate with existing notification functionality in your Laravel apps.
Ease of implementation. We needed less than one month to go live.
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.
The overall usability of Vonage [Communications APIs (formerly Nexmo)] system for message delivery is sufficient for our implementation. Some improvements and additional reporting options in the account administration interface would increase our utilization of the post-delivery data further in order to provide further value-added features for our clients.
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.
The product feels a bit like a black box since it's built to be an off-the-shelf solution so sometimes it feels like the only way to really understand it is to talk to an engineer directly as the documentation is so-so.
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
Nexmo is the best platform in the industry for sure. We don't use all the features that the API provides but we are really satisfied with the ones we use. We are sure this is the best solution in the market if you need to solve the communication in real time with your customers. When we have to build a new website we are going to support the solution with Nexmo.
