Delivery API for transactional emails
4.5/5 (41 reviews)Mandrill is a reliable, scalable and secure delivery API for transactional emails from websites and applications. Designed for application developers rather than email marketers, Mandrill uses an API and SMTP server optimized for sending emails as fast as possible.
Be certain that your emails will go through spam filters and into inboxes with Mandrill's custom SPF and DKIM records and private IP address/IP pool. Mandrill's webhooks provide notification of bounce rates and spam complaints.
Mandrill offers a dashboard showing detailed statistics, a 30 day, searchable activity log for information about the emails you've sent. Other analytics features include split-testing, comparative reports and custom metadata. With the first 12,000 emails/month for free, Mandrill is an ideal solution for smaller apps and a cost-effective one for larger apps.
Pros
Mandrill provides a simple and well documented API and has libraries and integrations available for many major web frameworks and languages. Making use of it for simple email sends is a fast and easy process, and it provides additional functionality for black lists, white lists, bulk sends, static IPs, etc. Their dashboard makes it extremely simple to see all the emails sent to a given address along with full content and reasons why sends failed or were delayed, which is a great for debugging and testing. They also provide analytics and send, receive, open, click, and bounce rates.
Cons
The service used to be much cheaper, but costs went up sharply when it was reabsorbed back into Mailchimp. Still an excellent service, but harder to recommend without reservation.
Overall, my company loves using Mandrill as a way to send out emails at one time. Our software is not set up like that so having that integrated to ensure everyone can receive our emails at once, makes our company run smoother, which in return, makes us happy!
Pros
My company uses Mandrill to mass send emails for our personality assessments that we provide for our clients! This allows our clients to assess their potentail hires. With this ability we can mass send emails periodically thorughout the day to ensure that each candidate is receving the assessment. We also have the ability to go back and check to see if the email was delivered, if they have opened it, or if they have even clicked to open the email.
Cons
One functionality that I wish moved smoother was resending of an email. When I try to resend an email that failed to deliver, it tends to make my computer run very slowly. I wish it was a bit quicker and it did not force the browser to close. This would allow me to resend the emails when they don't deliver (rare case).
Pros
A transactional email server is setup within minutes and available for you to send out content to your distribution list.
The application provides
- Graphs to show how many emails you're sending each day
- What countries your sending the emails to
- Open rates
- Mail clients used (useful to optimise content)
- Spam rates/unsubscribe rates
- Great delivery rates
Very cost effective.
Cons
A couple of years ago, Mandrill made it a requirement for you to have a Mailchimp subscription in order to use Mandrill. It would have been better in my opinion to keep the two applications independent, just like Sendgrid.
Whilst it doesn't make the cost materially more expensive, it does mean that you have to log into Mandrill via Mailchimp which is annoying.
It allows us to maintain perfect email delivery for all our companies' transactional emails and easily troubleshoot instances where emails were not delivered.
Pros
This application is an addon of MailChimp and is best suited for transactional emails (automated emails, think 'forgot my password' type emails). It allows you to easily manage your sending domains , although you have to verify these before you can send emails. The best feature by far is the ability to view all emails that were sent or failed to arrive, including the contents of the emails and the reason it bounced. This allows us to quickly troubleshoot whenever we get a support ticket regarding an email that did not arrive.
During our 6 months of using this feature, there has been zero downtime.
Cons
It is more expensive than some competitors, but its pricing model is very fair and easy to interpret. It does require you to have at least a monthly subscription with Mailchimp, and if you are not using this it is more expensive.
Pros
Works well, haven't experienced any problems. Has an online GUI where you can easily find emails that were sent, easy to see blacklisted emails. Has a nice statistics page to see how your emails are doing overall. We've been delivering millions of emails in past year without a problem.
Cons
The PHP SDK I used was kinda outdated and it had little options to change the behaviour without manually changing the source. They should update the library to standards that are more current.
GUI where you can view emails, etc. sometimes is a but slow. The search filters could use a face-lift.
Your first 2,000 emails per month are free. After that, you pay on a per-thousand-email basis. Mandrill build discounts into their payment structure, so your per-email pricing automatically decreases as you send more email. Never pay for more than you use.
2,000 free trial emails to start
<li> $9.95/month for up to 25,000 emails/month
<li> $0.20/thousand for the next 1 million emails/month
<li> $0.15/thousand for the next 5 million emails/month
<li> $0.10/thousand for any remaining emails
Below are some frequently asked questions for Mandrill.
Mandrill offers the following pricing plans:
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Free Trial: Not Available
Your first 2,000 emails per month are free. After that, you pay on a per-thousand-email basis. Mandrill build discounts into their payment structure, so your per-email pricing automatically decreases as you send more email. Never pay for more than you use.
2,000 free trial emails to start
<li> $9.95/month for up to 25,000 emails/month
<li> $0.20/thousand for the next 1 million emails/month
<li> $0.15/thousand for the next 5 million emails/month
<li> $0.10/thousand for any remaining emails
Mandrill offers the following features:
Mandrill has the following typical customers:
Freelancers, Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business, Non Profit, Small Business
Mandrill supports the following languages:
English
Mandrill has the following pricing plans:
Free, Subscription
Mandrill supports the following devices:
iPhone
Mandrill integrates with the following applications:
Bitium, ChargeOver, Little Green Light, LoginRadius, Zapier, bpm'online marketing, bpm'online real estate, bpm'online sales, bpm'online service, ecomdash
Mandrill offers the following support options:
FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base, Online Support, Video Tutorials
We were experiencing spikes in bounce and spam rates with AWS's SES. We were able to switch to Mandrill in a single day and immediately saw dramatic improvement. As necessary, we later built out support for bulk sends and black list checking and scrubbing. All in all it was an easy process and a good product.