Going Transactional with Mandrill
February 27, 2017
Going Transactional with Mandrill
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Mandrill
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.
- As our user base grew to 5 million users that needed transactional messaging Mandrill easily scaled to sending 100/sec message rates.
Being first a MailChimp customer, moving to using Mandrill as a transactional API based solution was an easy and obvious solution. At the time of evaluation Mandrill's API was far superior to SendGrid's API.