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Gmail vs Mandrill: What are the differences?
Pricing Structure: One of the key differences between Gmail and Mandrill is their pricing structure. While Gmail is typically free for personal use with limited storage, Mandrill is a paid service offering email delivery for businesses with a pay-per-use model or monthly subscription plan depending on the volume of emails sent.
Email Delivery Purpose: Gmail is primarily a web-based email service used for personal and professional communication, while Mandrill is a transactional email API service designed to help businesses send personalized and targeted transactional emails like password resets, order confirmations, and notifications.
Email Delivery Limits: Gmail imposes daily sending limits for both personal and business accounts to prevent spamming, whereas Mandrill allows higher email delivery rates and customization options, making it more suitable for businesses requiring high-volume email delivery.
Integration Options: Gmail is integrated with Google's suite of productivity tools like Google Drive, Calendar, and Hangouts, offering a seamless workflow for personal and professional users. On the other hand, Mandrill provides easy integration with various platforms and programming languages such as PHP, Python, and Ruby for businesses to send transactional emails efficiently.
Analytics and Reporting: Gmail provides basic open and click tracking for emails, while Mandrill offers advanced analytics and reporting features such as delivery status, bounce rate, engagement metrics, and A/B testing capabilities, enabling businesses to monitor and optimize their email delivery performance effectively.
Customization and Branding: Mandrill allows businesses to customize email templates, add company branding, and personalize messages for recipients, whereas Gmail has limited customization options and branding capabilities, making it more suited for standard email communications rather than targeted marketing campaigns.
In Summary, Gmail and Mandrill differ in pricing structure, email delivery purpose, limits, integration options, analytics and reporting, and customization and branding.
For transactional emails, notifications, reminders, etc, I want to make it so writers/designers can set up the emails and maintain them, and then dynamically insert fields, that I then replace when actually sending the mail from code.
I think the ability to use a basic layout template across individual email templates would make things a lot easier (think header, footer, standard typography, etc).
What is best for this? Why would you prefer Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill or something else?
If you need your emails to be sent in a time-sensitive manner, I'd recommend SendGrid. We were using Mailgun and the lag because they aren't "transactional" in nature caused issues for us. SendGrid also has the ability to do dynamic templates and bulk send from their API. I don't know that they have the shared layout ability you mentioned, though.
The only transactional email service that I've been able to stomach is Postmark! It is by far the easiest (and quickest to get feedback from) service that I have come across. While drowning in attempts to debug Mandril, Mailgun and others I get quick feedback from Postmark in what I need to do.
Postmark for the win!
We are using more extensively Mandrill.
It is a ok tool, which gives you the power for emailing with nice set of features.
The templates editing and management is a bit tricky, but this is mostly related to email templates in general, which are hard to create and maintain.
I do not think you can share the parts of the templates. You can have your predefined templates with possibility to insert dynamic content.
They provide a limited possibility to preview and test your templates.
The template editor is text only. For the better editors checkout http://topol.io or https://mosaico.io
Unfortunately, I do not have experience with the other tools and possibilities to manage templates.
At this stage, all of the tools you mentioned do email delivery pretty well. They all support email templates as well. Here are some considerations:
- Twilio owns SendGrid. If you're an existing Twilio customer, in my opinion that's a good reason to use SendGrid over the other solutions. The APIs are solid, and Twilio has excellent developer tools that allow you to create interesting automations (which is important for scaling).
- Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
- Mailgun is a tool on its own. Like the other two, it supports mail templates and is built to be controlled almost exclusively via APIs.
SendGrid and Mandrill have pretty nice WYSIWIG template editors as part of their platform. Not so sure about Mailgun.
So for me the considerations would be: 1. How easy is it for you to integrate with their API? How complete is their API in terms of your own specific needs? 2. Prices: Which one works best for my budget? 3. Am I OK with editing the templates elsewhere (or even by hand), and then pasting the code into Mailgun? Or do I want the comfort of Mandrill or Sendgrid with their WYSIWYG editors?
Personally I'd go with Twilio, simply because it's such a massive ecosystem they are less likely to go bankrupt, and their APIs are rock solid.
Pros of Gmail
- Its free21
- User-friendly7
- Nice UI2
- Snooze2
Pros of Mandrill
- Simple installation189
- Great api141
- Generous free allowance to get you started123
- Cheap and simple114
- Trackable99
- Well-documented59
- Doesn't go to spam54
- Great for mailchimp users47
- Webhooks32
- Client libraries28
- Heroku Add-on7
- Easy to use6
- Meaningful Metrics5
- Free5
- Advanced Tagging and Reports3
- Mobile Access3
- Status Update3
- Very chimp-like2
- Great Documentation2
- love this service2
- Free Plan1
- Webhooks for bounce mail1
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Cons of Gmail
- Can't unsend, add open trackers or read recipients4
Cons of Mandrill
- Really hard to pull analytics out via api1
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