4 ms·

Ask HN: Sendgrid or Mandrill?

14 points by nilmonibasak 11y ago

For transactional email which one do you prefer and why?

TheDom 11y ago
At my previous company we used Mandrill and were extremely happy with it. I like their Web UI a lot. I never used Sendgrid though so I can't compare the two.
davismwfl 11y ago
We use Mandrill and AWS to send transactional emails. Have never used Sendgrid so I can't comment on its capabilities. But I can say Mandrill has been really good overall and the webhooks make things really easy to tie in.
codegeek 11y ago
Haven't used Sendgrid but Mandrill works great for transactional emails. First 12,000 emails are free as well.
dangrossman 11y ago
I've used both in production and ended up moving everything to Mandrill in the end. Three main reasons: (1) It's easier to take care of my e-mail related customer support issues with Mandrill. They're typically things like investigating missing notification mails or identifying the causes of large daily volume changes. Mandrill's reports and features, like tagging mails with sub-accounts to separate them by app, makes these things very quickly investigated and resolved. (2) Sendgrid customer support did things that were unsettling to me. One of my users was having trouble receiving e-mails from one of my services. He decided to debug that on his own using e-mail headers and talked to Sendgrid directly. As a result, a Sendgrid support agent went into my account and changed a setting without my authorization. The purpose was benign (to get e-mails delivered to this one mailbox), but I was not at all happy with changes being made by someone other than me. What if I had blacklisted that recipient on purpose? (3) Mandrill/MailChimp is older and bigger. E-mail delivery is a relationship business; getting mail through to major ISPs and webmail clients on a daily basis is about reputation and knowing who to talk to when something gets trapped in a filter/blacklist incorrectly. MailChimp's staff has been working with Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc for 14 years. They deliver the newsletters for innumerable recognizable brand names. SendGrid's been around since only 2009 and only handles transactional mail; they don't have the same relationship depth or the same clientele.
- davismwfl 11y ago
  Wow #2 would bug me. Its good they are willing to help an end client, but they should never change your account without discussing it with you first. Out of curiosity, how did Sendgrid compare to Mandrill with deliverability? You mention the point about Mailchimp having the deep relationships (which is one reason I have stuck with them for most emails), but did you see that benefit quantifiably, via less delivered mail with Sendgrid or some other metric?
  - dangrossman 11y ago
    I never had any systemic deliverability problems with either one. I did have a weird issue with only SendGrid where I'd receive spam reports from AOL mailboxes that, when I reached out personally, said they had never clicked the spam button in their mail client.
timjahn 11y ago
Use Sendgrid for my previous company (http://matchist.com http://matchist.com) and using Mandrill for my new one (http://getdonald.com http://getdonald.com). We used Sendgrid because in additional to transactional email, we needed parsing and events. Sendgrid was just the biggest name at the time so I chose it. All the Sendgrid competitors offer the same functionality for lower prices now, so there's little reason to choose Sendgrid today, in my opinion.
- taf2 11y ago
  I can't find another email provider to give out dedicated IP addresses for less than sendgrid. We whitelabel a lot of our service so this is a significant cost.
  - timjahn 11y ago
    Ah, we didn't need dedicated IPs so not familiar with those costs.
rokhayakebe 11y ago
MailGun.
adelivet 11y ago
You should have a look at Mailjet too.
Legion 11y ago
At my company, we switched from Sendgrid to Mandrill when we ran into some deliverability problems with Sendgrid that we could not identify a cause for, but which magically disappeared once Mandrill was doing the sending.
gordjw 11y ago
I use Mandrill with Mailpoet (wp plugin), and have nothing but good things to say about them. You didn't ask, but we compared them with AWS, and the big problem with AWS was that we had to throttle our own SMTP output. Mandrill will rate limit for you.
hellskitchendev 11y ago
Neither, I really like Mailgun for their receiving email API. Their dev tools make everything really easy to set up and use. For outgoing email, Amazon SES works for me and is cheap.
ffumarola 11y ago
My previous company migrated from Sendgrid and Mailgun to Mandrill exclusively. Great service, good pricing, great customer support, good reporting, pretty strong all around.

14 points by nilmonibasak 11y ago

For transactional email which one do you prefer and why?

At my previous company we used Mandrill and were extremely happy with it. I like their Web UI a lot. I never used Sendgrid though so I can't compare the two.

davismwfl 11y ago

We use Mandrill and AWS to send transactional emails. Have never used Sendgrid so I can't comment on its capabilities. But I can say Mandrill has been really good overall and the webhooks make things really easy to tie in.

codegeek 11y ago

Haven't used Sendgrid but Mandrill works great for transactional emails. First 12,000 emails are free as well.

dangrossman 11y ago

I've used both in production and ended up moving everything to Mandrill in the end. Three main reasons: (1) It's easier to take care of my e-mail related customer support issues with Mandrill. They're typically things like investigating missing notification mails or identifying the causes of large daily volume changes. Mandrill's reports and features, like tagging mails with sub-accounts to separate them by app, makes these things very quickly investigated and resolved. (2) Sendgrid customer support did things that were unsettling to me. One of my users was having trouble receiving e-mails from one of my services. He decided to debug that on his own using e-mail headers and talked to Sendgrid directly. As a result, a Sendgrid support agent went into my account and changed a setting without my authorization. The purpose was benign (to get e-mails delivered to this one mailbox), but I was not at all happy with changes being made by someone other than me. What if I had blacklisted that recipient on purpose? (3) Mandrill/MailChimp is older and bigger. E-mail delivery is a relationship business; getting mail through to major ISPs and webmail clients on a daily basis is about reputation and knowing who to talk to when something gets trapped in a filter/blacklist incorrectly. MailChimp's staff has been working with Google/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc for 14 years. They deliver the newsletters for innumerable recognizable brand names. SendGrid's been around since only 2009 and only handles transactional mail; they don't have the same relationship depth or the same clientele.

davismwfl 11y ago
Wow #2 would bug me. Its good they are willing to help an end client, but they should never change your account without discussing it with you first. Out of curiosity, how did Sendgrid compare to Mandrill with deliverability? You mention the point about Mailchimp having the deep relationships (which is one reason I have stuck with them for most emails), but did you see that benefit quantifiably, via less delivered mail with Sendgrid or some other metric?
- dangrossman 11y ago
  I never had any systemic deliverability problems with either one. I did have a weird issue with only SendGrid where I'd receive spam reports from AOL mailboxes that, when I reached out personally, said they had never clicked the spam button in their mail client.

timjahn 11y ago

Use Sendgrid for my previous company (http://matchist.com http://matchist.com) and using Mandrill for my new one (http://getdonald.com http://getdonald.com). We used Sendgrid because in additional to transactional email, we needed parsing and events. Sendgrid was just the biggest name at the time so I chose it. All the Sendgrid competitors offer the same functionality for lower prices now, so there's little reason to choose Sendgrid today, in my opinion.

taf2 11y ago
I can't find another email provider to give out dedicated IP addresses for less than sendgrid. We whitelabel a lot of our service so this is a significant cost.
- timjahn 11y ago
  Ah, we didn't need dedicated IPs so not familiar with those costs.

rokhayakebe 11y ago

MailGun.

adelivet 11y ago

You should have a look at Mailjet too.

Legion 11y ago

At my company, we switched from Sendgrid to Mandrill when we ran into some deliverability problems with Sendgrid that we could not identify a cause for, but which magically disappeared once Mandrill was doing the sending.

gordjw 11y ago

I use Mandrill with Mailpoet (wp plugin), and have nothing but good things to say about them. You didn't ask, but we compared them with AWS, and the big problem with AWS was that we had to throttle our own SMTP output. Mandrill will rate limit for you.

hellskitchendev 11y ago

Neither, I really like Mailgun for their receiving email API. Their dev tools make everything really easy to set up and use. For outgoing email, Amazon SES works for me and is cheap.

ffumarola 11y ago

My previous company migrated from Sendgrid and Mailgun to Mandrill exclusively. Great service, good pricing, great customer support, good reporting, pretty strong all around.