Mailchimp Transactional Email Reviews

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.

Pros

Mandrill (now interated inside Mailchimp) has been a solid and reliable transactional email provider, with great delivery rates, very slow spam scores and ultra-fast reception speed. It provides useful and flexible reports and great dashboards too.

Cons

In order to keep it's spam reputation high it takes some effort to set up a new email domain in Mandrill. You have to prove you own the DNS and configure a SPF/DKIM record.

Pros

Transactional Emails is really necessary in today's world, we get a much better open rate and much better interaction when we use this system rather than a simple mass email message. Totally recommend this set up, and it has the the facilities to set up everything pretty easily.

The API documentation is robust, and their service uptime is great, it does what is advertised.

Cons

The fact that I need to have a mailchimp paid account and to get into Mandrill through Mailchimp is a little weird, but it's minor in the grand scheme of things. I don't use Mailchimp, our marketing department uses an alternative, but our developers use Mandrill.

Pros

I run a busy social network. Around 6,000 users total, and 300-400 online at any given time. Due to this, I needed a transactional email service that had great deliver-ability for invitations, verifications, password changes, etc. Mandrill was recommended to me, and we were completely happy with the service. Unfortunately, when they bundled Mandrill into Mailchimp, we couldn't afford it anymore.

Cons

Unfortunately, bundling services did no favors. What previously was affordable for us no longer was. While the service is great, the way the change was implemented was sudden, leaving companies little time or recourse to find other options quickly. That solidified my decision to leave- most companies would grandfather in existing members, offer a lower rate, something. They simply provided us with addresses for other services, losing customers in the process.

Pros

Very fast delivery with exceptional delivery rates;
Does a great job keeping reputation high;
Very nice dashboards and reporting;
Ability to segregate into sub-accounts;
Very easy to integrate with MTA's and API clients;
Great documentation;

Cons

Domain validation could be made simpler;
Roles and permissions should be more flexible;
Once Mandrill got integrated with Mailchimp the pricing model became less attractive;

Pros

As a SaaS company, we have customers that use our product and depend on automated emails to get information about their account on a daily or weekly basis. Mailchimp allows us to quickly flag whenever something has gone wrong in our system due to abnormal spikes / lapses in emails sent. It also allows our Customer facing team to see how clients are interacting with automated emails (opens, clicks, etc.) with the helpful ability to resend emails that were missed or accidentally deleted.

Cons

The interface can be laggy to load, and not super intuitive how everything is laid out. Overall minor UX improvements could make a big difference between using this tool occasionally to troubleshoot issues, vs. using it more regularly to get proactive insights and reporting.

Pros

It's very powerful and as simple to use as its alternatives. Integrations make it very powerful and the pricing is fair. This is a no brainer alternative or first choice when looking for transactional email service.

Cons

There's not many improvement opportunities to talk about in transactional email. When it works it works, and Mandrill works as expected.

Pros

Very easy to setup and use. If you need to send mail with your application this is one of the best and quickest ways to do it.

Cons

I have used it before they required a MailChimp account and that is too bad that you need a MailChimp account to use Mandrill now.

Pros

We were using our local vendor for Transactional Email Services there was inbox email delivery issue mostly I was getting complain from my users that there invoice through emails is not reaching on time and sometime it's in spam. One of my friends recommended Mandrill and it's really amazing. Great IP Pool with a high inbox delivery reputation flexible API for integration and real-time email delivery.

Cons

First of all I need to login in Mailchimp account to access Mandrill which is very irritating and secondly there pricing is very high.

Pros

It is not so frequent to see and API focused on statistics. I liked the dashboard of the email campaign filled with stats.

Cons

There is so much competition with email sending API and large player are in the game. But I liked the add-ons compared to other API which most of the time only focus on sending emails, and nothing more.

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.

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.

Pros

Mandrill is a powerful application that has proven useful for transactional email. They offer an API, decent reporting and storage of track/click data for 30 days.

Cons

As part of Mailchimp they now require both a Mailchimp and Mandrill subscription. I have no problem paying for Mandrill but I'm not a fan of this billing requirement as I don't need Mailchimp. Secondly, in the 2-3 years that I have been using Mandrill I have not seen a single feature release. I find this unusual. True, it works great as-is, but there are definitely areas that can be improved or features that can be added.

Pros

The API is easy to use and the setup is fast. Rather cheap plans when you get started (but gets expensive soon)

Cons

The archive of messages is way too limited! I don't require to keep track of the message content of all our messages, but for our business we must keep track of whether the emails have been sent/read/rejected or not, and there is no way to achieve this even on a higher plan. We'll have to build a workaround with webhooks or find another tool that offers it

Pros

Mandrill is great to backtrack on emails that my company has sent out. We have the ability to view if the email was delivered, bounced, and how many times it has been sent + opened and clicked on. The features of mandrill are great for the company because we rely heavily on mandrill in order to see that.

Cons

At this moment, I can't think of a negative effect of mandrill. It is very easy to use and easy to maneuver around.

Pros

The pricing is good. We have been using it for years and the only reason we are keeping it is because we don't the pain of switching over to another vendor.

Cons

The reporting features are very weak and we don't like that we have to access MailChimp to get over into the Mandrill dashboard.

Pros

It's got a terrific api that can send programmatic emails (like transactional emails) with ease. Great deliverability.

Cons

The UI is incredibly dated. It doesn't look like it's had any love in 5 years. Still, it works and that's what counts.

Pros

Customizable templates allow fields to be populated automatically base on predetermined algorithm. Set it up and the rest is a breeze.

Cons

Spam is always an issue. Mailing lists get old. People get annoyed. It's a tough business.

Pros

I like the ease of Mandrill, there isn't anything to complicated. Type , search , done!!

Cons

I don't think there are any issues I have ever had with Mandrill in the 3.5 years that I have been using it.

Pros

Transactional emails made easy. Emails are cheap, and a good admin interface to have visibility in to what has been sent or blocked

Cons

More robust block rules would be nice. Blocked emails need to be manually removed. I understand why mandrill does this, but would be easier if there could be custom rules

Pros

Templating system is quite versatile with the ability to send parameters with the emails using the API

Cons

- Mandrill doesn't store past emails for backup, even as a paid option
- the UI seems 10 years old, and not user friendly

Pros

Easy to use dashboard for administration
Easy to integrate with any existing code
Straight forward implementation

Cons

Logs are only kept for a few weeks
The dashboard looks outdated
Hard to perform advance searches over logs

Pros

- Very user-friendly interface
- Analytics is great to track customers activities on emails.
- Good Dashboards

Cons

- it can be confusing to manage emails from different domains. This could be clearer in the application UI/UX.

Pros

Almost all of the functionality can be controlled through the dashboard, as opposed to some of Mandrill's competitors which require use of the API for configuration.

Cons

The price - Mandrill used to be free, but has since moved to a model which requires a pro subscription to Mailchimp (even if it's not going to be used) plus a cost based on the amount of emails needed each month.