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Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)

Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)

Overview

What is Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)?

Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.

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Recent Reviews

Mandrill Power!

9 out of 10
August 02, 2017
Incentivized
We use Madrill for automated email sending from internal and external resources generated by task and actions in our software service. If …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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Free

$0

Cloud
per month

Essentials

$9.99

Cloud
per month

Standard

$14.99

Cloud
per month

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://mailchimp.com/pricing/transacti…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Details

What is Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)?

Mailchimp Transactional Email enables developers to send hyper-personalized emails that reach inboxes.

- API or SMTP
- Start quickly
- Flexible with sending and inbound options


Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) Features

  • Supported: Deliverability - reach inbox, not spam.
  • Supported: Analytics - Dashboard, export API or webhook.
  • Supported: Award winning support.
  • Supported: Flexibility with white-labeling.
  • Supported: A/B Test and comparative reporting.
  • Supported: Rules Engine for inbound and outbound messages.
  • Supported: Templating engine with conditional content.
  • Supported: Use handlebars or merge tags for content.

Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) Competitors

Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesWorldwide

Frequently Asked Questions

Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.

Sinch Mailgun and Brevo are common alternatives for Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill).

The most common users of Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(59)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-15 of 15)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I generally use mail chimp for creating email campaigns and running them for the lead generation, promotions, conducting webinars, and use for our prospective customers. It is easy to use and has a variety of themes and types of campaigns to choose from. The best of the tool is we can easily get the output of the campaign which helps us to choose which plan can be stuck on.
  • It has a good interface and user experience
  • It is easy to create a template choosing a variety of themes and options.
  • We can have easy out put of a particular campaign.
  • Any user can adjust it easily.
  • There is nothing that needs to be improved but it has to take care of its price where it is some what higher than its competitors.
  • Where it can also makes some themes and options for the paid users more flexibly.
It is really the best in its area as a email marketing tool and we use it in this aspect.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Mailchimp Transactional Email Mandrill to send all of our transactional emails for our fitness studios. These emails include receipts, booking reservation confirmations/cancellations, class notices, etc. We use it in conjunction with our booking and reservation platform Marian tek for our fitness studios.
  • Automation of transactional emails
  • Send rates
  • General functionality
  • Creating templates is done with html, would be easier with a better interface ie drag and drop.
  • General dashboard interface is not very good looking or inviting.
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill) is well suited for basic automated emails that a business needs to send to their clients when their clients purchase a product or service, appointment/reservation reminders, etc. I would not use it for any sort of one-off email or really any sort of marketing purposes at all.
Jared DeLong | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Kindful is a donor management system (CRM) for nonprofits. Therefore, customers can set up automatic confirmation emails to be sent to their donors, setup acknowledgment emails to thank donors for their gifts, send out emailed tax summaries at the end of the year and also send internal scheduled reports. Mandrill is the internal emailing system we use to send all of these types of emails within our platform.
  • Mandrill's interface is simple to navigate and very intuitive.
  • Domain masking is very simple to set-up and the verification process is fast.
  • Our system adds a notification when a donor has opened an email; however, we've found inconsistencies with the system where a donor may have opened an email, but Mandrill hasn't sent that notification to our app.
  • For the scenario above, when we've reached out to their support, the response has been that it is what it is. I'd like to see the supports take be focusing on improving the platform rather than saying it is what it is.
Mandrill is excellent for platforms looking for a third-party app to manage all email communication. It's able to handle an incredibly large amount of emails and sends out those emails very fast. It does take some training to understand the platform entirely, so if you're a smaller organization looking for an email marketing tool, then you'd most likely want to use Mailchimp, which owns Mandrill.
Micah Jones | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the MailChimp service known as Mandrill in our software that is used by our customers. It is the service that the software uses to send alerts to our customers' customers. It solves the issue of the customers having to provide their own email sending services.
  • Manages large amounts of addresses
  • Monitors addresses for suitability
  • The setup for integrations requires in-depth API experience and knowledge
Mandrill is well-suited for integrations with software APIs to address the need of sending large amounts of email.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Mandrill for real-time transactional emails from a backend SAAS platform. We use Mailchimp Templates to create highly formatted emails with custom triggers and variable content fields then deploy the templates to Mandrill, where they are actively used for sending thousands of emails to our users every day. We send about 200,000 real-time emails every month to active users.
  • Continuity of service is great. We have been happy with the uptime.
  • Speed, the emails are sent instantly.
  • Set it and forget it, once you have it set up, it works.
  • Integration with Mailchimp Templates makes it easy to design and change email formats.
  • The user interface is basic, dated.
  • Sometimes hard to find what you are looking for, some features are buried.
  • It would be nice to be able to make minor tweaks or changes within Mandrill, but you need to go back to Mailchimp, edit and redeploy to Mandrill.
Mandrill is well suited for SAAS Software platforms requiring complex real-time emails to be sent to validated users. Using Mailchimp as the design environment makes it easy to design and deploy email templates by most users. You can have Marketing or UX designers do the email templates and then have your dev team push the data/content and triggers to Mandrill.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In my company, this software is required for marketing purposes, and our marketing team uses it extensively. On some occasions, our sales team also uses its services to communicate with our clients regarding real estate projects. This software helps us in transactional email campaigns.
  • It has a user-friendly interface. A non-technical user can also operate it easily.
  • Its analytical feature gives wide details of customers engagement with the campaigns.
  • Its HTML editor is very easy to work with.
  • Its integration with MailChimp is slightly difficult to understand for a non-technical user.
  • A bit expensive for new and small scale businesses.
  • Sometimes I found a delay in sending the campaign.
This is one of the best softwares for transactional emails. After integrating with MailChimp, it gave me the best results in real estate projects promotions. In my business, we have clients across the globe, and with both of these email services, we reach our prospective customers in real time and, with the detailed analysis of customers' engagement, we plan our future campaigns.
Kewyn Medina | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Mandrill is used in our company as our main SMTP relay service to send all our automatic notifications for portals and applications. It helps us to track and control, in a very detailed way, all the different portal interactions with end users.
  • Sub-account control
  • Account and sub-accounts reputation
  • Sent email reporting and logging
  • More enterprise configuration so we could have roles and administration options
  • Option to edit the "user sending" for the account
  • Domain validation
It is great :
  • As an SMTP relay option to use in all platforms and systems without OS and configuration limitations.
  • Helps you keep control over hard bounces and soft bounces.
  • Great dashboard to check in a glance your account status.
It is not appropriate in scenarios where you need to send massive campaigns.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have used Mandrill for our internal email sending and also transactional emails. We have it wired up to our CRM and it has always been a trustworthy solution for sending emails. Mandrill has a great user interface and developer experience with integrations into many other online and web solutions. Even though we started using it when it was free, we decided to remain on the platform during and after the transition to paid because we were so comfortable and tied to their platform.
  • Search and Logs of Sent Emails
  • Integrations and Client Libraries
  • Templates and Merge Fields (almost as flexible as MailChimp)
  • API is fantastic.
  • Pricing, although fair, is unfortunately tied into MailChimp and not a standalone service anymore.
  • Sometimes support is iffy via their ticket system.
I would say that this question is conditional. If you already have MailChimp and are happy with it and need Transactional email, then Mandrill is a no-brainer. Outside of already being a MailChimp Customer, it's a little harder to recommend. The service is fantastic for what it provides and It is hard to fault it when we rely on it so much and it has never let us down.
Kyle Reichelt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company was tasked with building a coupon campaign for a large recycling firm, which required an affordable transactional email provider.
  • The integration with our proprietary platform was seamless, and the emails were delivered reliably with very low bounce-rates.
  • The UI is clean and intuitive. It's a snap to create custom email templates.
  • Their documentation is extremely well made and laid out.
  • We weren't pleased when they switched from a freemium model to require that you also use MailChimp; however, MailChimp itself is my preferred email service, so this wasn't a significant hindrance.
  • They could have a more robust set of analytics available on-site, as opposed to leaving it to Google Analytics to do the heavy lifting, but it's hard to fault them for not trying to re-invent the wheel here.
It is completely appropriate as a transactional service if you're already using MailChimp for marketing. If you're not already using MailChimp, then you're probably going to want to look at another service like Mailgun.
Vitalija Golceva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Mandrill for automated email sending. It doesn't require much attention as it is reliable and works without interruptions. It is easy to check statuses of the sent emails in Mandrill quickly.
  • Easy to use
  • Reliable
  • Great API
  • You can only use Mandrill if you have a Mailchimp account
  • Analytic part could be stronger
Mandrill is great for your transactional emails as it is easy to use, highly reliable and a powerful tool.
August 02, 2017

Mandrill Power!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Madrill for automated email sending from internal and external resources generated by task and actions in our software service. If we need to send someone a password reset email, the action is carried out by Mandrill once the request has been made. This also allows for our team to track the emails sent as well. There are a number of functions that our software provides that include email sending. Mandrill gets this done and gives us eyes on delivery and receiving.
  • Mandrill is reliable. We rarely find that the information in Mandrill is incorrect.
  • Mandrill emails can be tracked from start to finish. We can have full view of the lifespan of an email sent using Mandrill.
  • Automation is game changing for our team. The ability to have email action generated from a prompt on our site is awesome!
  • We've had moments (very few), where emails have gotten "clogged" up and not sent out. Once the issue was resolved, the emails eventually were sent out.
  • Would love to see the metrics made less clunky.
  • Kind of a bummer that you can't get Mandrill on its own. You have to buy mailchimp first.
Mandrill is great for using the API features to create automated email functions for our system's users. It's completely white labeled to our product, making it smooth and easy for our users. We have the ability to track all emails sent, as well as customize any email sent and what triggers the emails to send.

If you have no use for MailChimp, Madrill is a little on the pricey side, since it's not available "a la carte". The interface is a bit clunky, but it gets the job done and is very reliable.
Darren Douglas Lee | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Mandrill has a great API that allowed our microservice based system to enable email communication on a transactional basis. Tools to monitor and debug as well as consistent availablity made it a great solution for third party email functionality.
  • Dependable - we never encountered down time with the service in the three I developed against it.
  • Scalable - our typical use was several messages a second to bursts of 100/s. This level of requests was easily processed by the system. There were rare cases where there were delays of upwards of 10 minutes for messages to be delivered but it was always very rare.
  • Well documented - the API has very good documentation. It's a bit quirky in some implementations but the documentation makes it easy to implement.
  • Logging - understandably due to the volume of messages the system processes it would be a challenge to log messages older than the current few hours. But it would be ideal if there were webhooks for error events to allow for the creation of custom error notifications.
  • UI - A slick admin UI but very limited in some areas.
  • MailChimp - it's unfortunate that Mandrill has been brought back from its autonomous state to now being just a part of the large MailChimp suite of email products. I worry it's going to get lost if it's not a part of the MailChimp vision.
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.
Jim Rubenstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Mandrill is used 100% by our engineering department. Most everyone else probably doesn't know what it is or how it works, unless they've heard engineers talking about it.

Our use-case for mandrill is to send transactional e-mails to users as needed across our several platforms. Examples would be email invitations to resources in our application, forgot password/password reset requests, individual account updates and alerts, etc. We also use it to send higher volume marketing messages that are triggered by specific actions taken on our properties. Mandrill makes it easy to integrate to your existing software and send these types of emails quickly.

  • Ease of integration.
  • Availability of API logs and email send history.
  • Email deliverability.
  • 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.

Mandrill has got a lot of features that most people will find perfectly adequate. Their deliverability is great, and their management interface (while not visually stunning) provides all the information and configuration options you're likely going to need. For these reasons, it's a good option for most people.

My main complaints have to do with how they changed their billing practices in 2016, removing the free tier, and bundling the service with a paid MailChimp subscription. If you're not already paying for a MailChimp subscription, there are other services that offer 12,000-25,000 emails, per month, for free.

My other gripe is the rate-limit issue. If for any reason users start complaining about your messages, your rate limit (number of messages you can send per hour) will be slashed dramatically. This is for a good reason, but the limits look to be very strict, and they have no issue with taking your account from 10,000 messages an hour to 150 messages an hour. This can absolutely kill a SaaS provider, and they are 100% unwilling to make concessions.

Josh Holloway | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our business used Mandrill as an outbound email infrastructure for our entire organization. Our primary use case was as a robust transactional email platform for sending notifications and newsletters to new and existing users. We used the Mandrill API and SMTP services and integrated them in with Wordpress and a custom-built form engine to send messages to users and internally to our own team as notifications. Mandrill replaced a free but flaky transactional email platform with one that was much more reliable and easy to troubleshoot and report on.
  • 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.
  • Mandrill used to be a standalone service, but now requires a paid MailChimp account to use. This is unfortunate for users of other email platforms.
  • Mandrill's analytics sometimes leave a bit to be desired. The interface is nice and clean, but drilling down into deep analytics can be cumbersome.
  • Mandrill lacks a mobile app similar to the ones offered by competing transaction email platforms.
If you are already a paid MailChimp user or considering moving to that platform, Mandrill is an obvious choice for your transactional email approach thanks to its high reliability, ease of use, and powerful debugging tools. If you're not an existing MailChimp customer, however, the additional cost of a MailChimp account plus Mandrill message blocks can be prohibitively expensive versus other platforms, but should not be ruled out completely.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Mandrill is the platform we use to send Cart Recovery and other transactional emails for clients who use MailChimp. Prior to its integration directly into the MailChimp account, we used it for clients across Email Service Providers. Depending on the level of service, this could be implementation of Mandrill, usage assistance/education, or even direct control of the account and campaigns on behalf of the client.
  • Enables transactional email sending via MailChimp which opens up a ton of communication opportunities via Order Confirmation, Cart Recovery, or other transactional emails.
  • Monitors sub-accounts send reputation and notifies of high bounce/rejection rates.
  • Has a very friendly, usable UI and enables smaller companies to dedicate resources to transactional emails without as much setup work as other transactional platforms.
  • The platform is now limited to only MailChimp users whereas before it was open to anyone.
  • There's not a lot of support for advanced merge tag usage or using dynamic data in transactional emails.
Well obviously Mandrill is well suited if you are a MailChimp client looking to send transactional emails. The most obvious benefit is the ability to send things like Cart Recovery emails, which are large revenue generating campaigns, to anyone who abandons a cart, not just people who are subscribed in your MailChimp account. Without Mandrill, MailChimp would have no way of accomplishing that type of transactional email.
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