Postmark vs. SparkPost (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

SparkPost is great for automated sending of transactional emails. It appears to be designed for developers—it does not allow the creation and sending of emails from within the SparkPost user interface. If you're building a software system that needs to send emails, SparkPost is a great choice, but it is not a CRM.

Incentivized

• Excellent real time tracking of production server.
• Automated reporting is very nice. Great to not have to pull reports manually.
• User management is very easy.
• Cost effective.

Incentivized

• Email Deliverability
• Last 10 day insights for reporting on email system health
• Individually viewing users on the suppression list and quickly take off or put back on.
• API

Incentivized

• Not many cons since it's pretty straightforward, and if email delivery service was often impacted, we'd most likely find a new provider.

Incentivized

• A horrifying about-face on pricing after guaranteeing a lifetime rate.
• A steep drop in customer care and customer service quality.
• Increased prices compared to competitors.
• Clumsy email templating system.
• Lack of integration with other messaging systems.

Incentivized

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.

Fortunately, the support is not often needed, but when it is, they are available and ready to dive into your needs and often your customer's needs. It's a bad day when you have to call your email delivery service provider, it means that your own customers most likely are calling your support team, and you're calling to see what the issue is. Postmark makes this process simple, and they own their mistakes. Always nice to see that.

Incentivized

Would give it a zero if I could. Their customer service used to be incredible; fast response times, really hands-on with their users, and a pretty regular feedback process. They sent me an awesome t-shirt that became part of my go-to climbing gear. But for the past year, their response times went way down, their customer service was less helpful and generally a lot more rude, and they haven't asked for customer input once since their leadership change

Incentivized

In my opinion, sendgrid is complete garbage compared to Postmark, it's not even a comparison. I had issues with emails being sent to spam using sendgrid IPs. The dashboard is inferior, the setup is fairly comparable in difficulty, and ongoing visibility is inferior.

I'd say SparkPost is probably the worst option of the three email API products I've used. It has the worst customer service, the fewest features, and costs significantly more than SendGrid, even though SendGrid lets you integrate all of Twilio's other features into a broader set of communications media. In addition, the API and documentation were easy enough to use and integrate, but the templating system has also caused a lot of headaches for us.

Incentivized

• It is really "set and forget." I have not had any issues that I've needed to deal with. It just works.

Incentivized

• We used at the first time the free version which worked awesome.
• We didn't have to spend our time writing all the features that SparkPost has included.
• The dashboard give us all the information that we need to know regarding the status of the emails that have been sent from the app

Incentivized