Sinch Mailgun vs. SparkPost

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Sinch Mailgun
Score 6.3 out of 10
N/A
Mailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.
$35
per month
SparkPost
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
The SparkPost Email Delivery Platform is built to help businesses deliver more value. Its features include real-time analysis of email delivery and customer engagement as well as personalized email templates. Users can also pick from any of the numerous APIs to integrate into communication. SparkPost is designed to provide all users need to power businesses for greater growth.
$30
per month
Pricing
Sinch MailgunSparkPost
Editions & Modules
Foundation
$35
per month
Growth
$80
per month
Scale
$90
per month
Flex
Free
Starter
$30
per month
Premier
$75
per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Sinch MailgunSparkPost
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
Sinch MailgunSparkPost
Considered Both Products
Sinch Mailgun
Chose Sinch Mailgun
MailGun is more expensive than SparkPost and about the same price-wise as SendGrid. MailGun had a notably easy set-up process, since they are the first SMTP service we signed up with, and their support has been very helpful in identifying deliverability issues, providing …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
I am in Email marketing space over 8 years. And Sinch Mailgun was far most the worst experience I got. Not suggested.
Chose Sinch Mailgun
I've tried SES. It had spotty deliverability and AWS has fiddly docs and apis. I tried a few others and while some worked well, they had neither the exposure or maturity to make me confident in using them in a production app. Out of all the products that I have tried that offer …
SparkPost
Chose SparkPost
I selected SparkPost based on the following factors:
  • low-cost basic subscription
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Sinch MailgunSparkPost
Small Businesses
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.5 out of 10
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.5 out of 10
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

Everest (Return Path + 250ok)
Everest (Return Path + 250ok)
Score 7.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Sinch MailgunSparkPost
Likelihood to Recommend
4.1
(27 ratings)
1.1
(5 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.4
(7 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Sinch MailgunSparkPost
Likelihood to Recommend
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
Mailgun's pay-as-you-go pricing structure is fantastic, especially if you don't need to send that much email. The pricing, including the free tier, is much more generous than what you can get with some pricier providers, like SendGrid. I mainly just use Mailgun as an SMTP server for web services, and the service has been set-up-and-forget, which is great because I never even have to log onto the Mailgun website and do any work. Mailing list support also looks great for rolling-your-own and not relying on more expensive mailing list services.
Read full review
SparkPost
Our early experiences with SparkPost were great; we were looking for a low-cost (or no-cost) solution to our email messaging needs, and SparkPost had the best low-cost option: 100,000 messages per month for free, guaranteed for life. Even though our team has experience with other APIs, we chose SparkPost because it felt like the best value. Our experience with it was great. Two years ago, they discontinued their free option but sent the existing users the following message: "When you signed up, we promised that if we ever changed the terms of our 100K free plan, we would continue to honor the original plan for the life of the account. I would like to reaffirm this promise: while this plan is no longer available to new customers, you are grandfathered into this level of free sending volume." The following year, apparently following a change in leadership, they decided to "deprecate" existing free plans, dropping us down from 100,000 messages per month to 500, the lowest of any email API service I'm aware of. No recognition of the broken promise, the reneged guarantee, just a 20% off coupon. This atrocious behavior that reeks of a new culture of squeezing as much money as possible out of its users and has coincided with a steady deterioration of functionality and customer service. At this point, I have no idea why anyone would pay more for a worse service that treats its users so poorly when you could use SendGrid or a similar competitor for a lower price and way more features.
Read full review
Pros
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
  • Its SMTP is very easy to use and it integrates easy with all CMS and frameworks.
  • It allows you to have a record of the incoming/outgoing emails and get useful statistics about them.
  • Thanks to their 5000 free emails per month, it is a very good option to startups and small companies.
Read full review
SparkPost
  • Good Documentation
  • Developer focused
  • Supports sub-accounts
  • Good support
  • Integrates with Laravel out of the box
Read full review
Cons
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
  • No built-in templating features (This was a bit sad after coming from Mandrill which excelled at this)
  • Dashboard UI (although easy to use) is a bit dated in appearance
  • Logs are cumbersome compared to Mandrill
  • Setting up TLD (top level domain) names (things like .online or .church) that are not common require an email to tech support (this is annoying)
  • Sometimes can be slow in delivery
  • Shared IP addresses can be SPAM filtered or delayed (requires an email to support to have a new one assigned - Note: this can be mitigated by buying a dedicated one for a monthly fee)
Read full review
SparkPost
  • I really like SparkPost, it was really useful to achieve our goals
Read full review
Usability
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
It could be more up-to-date and could offer some extra features that other competitors do like templating and better querying and filtering. As it is right now most things are easy to use but seem rather barebones next to Mandrill. The API is easy to implement thanks to the great documentation which is why I recommend Mailgun so often.
Read full review
SparkPost
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.
Read full review
SparkPost
No answers on this topic
Performance
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.
Read full review
SparkPost
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
You can't seem to get ANY support until you shell out hundreds of dollars per month. I even did this when we could not deliver mail with Mailgun, and the response was slow and inadequate. Nor would they refund my money. I'll never be a customer of Mailgun again.
Read full review
SparkPost
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
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
To be honest, the tools are quite similar and again I dont recommend using them as a standalone products, but they power the work we do via CRMs and our marketing campaigns. Mailgun integrates slightly better which it is why it is the preferred choice for our agency, as it integrations options seem to be better
Read full review
SparkPost
ExactTarget, Marketo CRM. These are completely different types of systems, but their email element is similar.
Read full review
Scalability
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.
Read full review
SparkPost
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
  • By not investing in our mail server, we have saved huge amount of money and time. For configuration and installation of an email server on Linux-based server, we would have to hire a network administrator.
  • If email delivery is an issue in a hosting provider, another solution is to switch the hosting. Fortunately with Mailgun, we didn't need to try different hosts and experiment which one works best for emails. We can stick to our existing web hosting provider and would not need to change it just for the sake of improving email deliverability.
  • The pricing of Mailgun is very cheap and straightforward. First 10K emails are free every month and that's a big advantage for our organization because our volume of emails is rarely more than 10K per month.
Read full review
SparkPost
  • It has helped us with our IP health and making sure that we avoid spam traps
  • Very high deliverability and automatic retrying once they have the event
Read full review
ScreenShots