Brevo vs. Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)

Brevo is an excellent email subscriber service provider for startups, small businesses, and budget-conscious users. BUT it's real strength is that as your business scales, so too does Brevo's services. As mentioned in my review, when compared to over-hyped, and super-expensive AWeber, Brevo wins out in every singly department. Not every 1000, 10000, etc. sub list generates thousands in revenue. So why do other companies charge as if it's a large profitable corporation based on the sub number thresholds? Brevo is reasonably priced without sacrificing solid service. HIGHLY recommended.

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

Incentivized

• Sendinblue allows you to send emails that do not arrive in spam
• Sendinblue, through its security measures and filters, helps keep contact databases well organized and up to date
• Sendinblue offers an easy-to-use newsletter creation tool and, in case of lack of inspiration, many templates

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• not easy to move/duplicate sections. much easier to just drag and drop. still working this out.
• don't like the logo or text included with the newsletter sign up form. have now upgraded, but think this should not be included for lower pricing plans
• not getting issues completely answered by support team. currently have an issue with email sign up not working on mobile. have been told it is not working, but not given any suggestions on how to fix this.
• have had unusual issue come up with a link. On 2 separate occasions, with 2 separate newsletters that went out, and 2 different images/articles/links, the link was wrong. Even though we checked it, previewed it and sent test email before we sent out these newsletters and these links were correct. It is the section at the bottom of our current newsletter. On both these occasions, when the customer has forwarded the email they received to us, the link was was to an old link - and it was the same old link on both occasions. We have asked for this to be looked into and are waiting on reply. We are going to try to delete this section this week and re-create. It is not a good look for us.
• We have another issue with how our newsletter is previewing in Outlook. The images and the text are not lining up - not on every section, but on 2 sections out of the 5 sections. Also, the Read Full Article text in the button is not showing properly. Again, not a professional look for us which we are not happy with.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

SendinBlue is providing an excellent value to my business by simplifying and speeding up the way that we interact with our customers

Incentivized

I am a web designer and systems admin. I have not found anything with this system that was hard to use. Other systems make it hard to do simple tasks and is very limiting. SendinBlue doesn't limit you.

Incentivized

Mailchimp does a good job of documenting the service

Incentivized

I have never had any planned outages in the time I have been using the software and have had no issues with accessing it.

Everything loads very quickly, it saves as you go along so you're unlikely to loose work if your computer fails. Reports are there immediately too so you're able to act quickly on customer engagement.

These people helped me identify errors when setting up DKIM and were more than helpful in trying to diagnose low open rates with a few campaigns identifying where improvement can be made and how to more effectively manage contact lists. The support is excellent.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If you follow all the steps of the setup process they give you, any one can set this up in about 1 - 2 hours.

Incentivized

I selected Sendinblue because my users and customers don't speak and read English, so the french version of an email solution was the best way to answer them. Since 2017, I always recommended Sendinblue to my customers and partners, even if they use another solution, I convert them and never go back again.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

They have multiple options for upgrading bigger senders or if you need more emails sent in a month.

• The ROI has been very positive - We have been able to bring the entire process in-house to the marketing department
• We are saving time and money by not involving outside contractors
• We save resources by not involving I.T.
• The amount of time we save by being able to create the email from concept to completion, all by one person, is astronomical.
• We save some cost by using the Sendinblue stock image options

• 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%.

Incentivized