

Ask HN: Sendgrid or Mandrill? - nilmonibasak

For transactional email which one do you prefer and why?
======
dangrossman
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
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
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.

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timjahn
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
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
Ah, we didn't need dedicated IPs so not familiar with those costs.

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TheDom
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.

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

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gordjw
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.

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davismwfl
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.

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Legion
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.

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

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hellskitchendev
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.

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rokhayakebe
MailGun.

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adelivet
You should have a look at Mailjet too.

