Top Mandrill Alternatives

Introduction

A product of Mailchimp, Mandrill, is a transactional email service. It is mostly used in the form of API by Mailchimp users.

Loaded by the powerful support from Mailchimp, Mandrill has been utilized by many businesses and users with Mailchimp. The main areas covered by Mandrill are all types of transactional Emails like welcome emails, authentication reset email, order status emails, etc.

We can even send private one-on-one mails, E-commerce, and automated emails with Mandrill. It is a paid add-on. Other than that, Mandrill works almost similar to Mailchimp.

Services by Mandrill

The processes in Mandrill are a bit different. While Mailchimp offers cost-free to pay-as-you-go subscriber plans, Mandrill is restricted to paid plans.

It sells the plans in a block of 25k Emails — the lowest being 20 blocks for $20, and highest at 161+ blocks for $10/block. The leftover blocks expire at the month-end, and so it is better to use them as soon as possible.

It is also a recipient based messaging system, making you store the recipient data in your own programs and then forwarding it with API request or with an SMTP trigger. And so, it has the prerequisite that you know about basic HTML and API systems.

For SMTP, we need to integrate the SMTP credentials in Mandrill, whereas for APIs, a separate app can be used. Also, you need to be a paid subscriber of Mailchimp to access these services.

Mandrill’s optimized delivery system is globally accessible, has features like dedicated IP warmup, IP pooling, multiple domains per account, and automatic feedback registration.

The In-Depth Analytics include activity logs, tagging, tracking, split testing, webhooks, metadata, and detailed reports.

It even has dynamic content & templates, with CSS linings, spam tests, logic & data merging. Some more tools for tracking domains, text/HTML conversion, custom reverse DNS, and rules engine are used at the core.

A valid certification of DKIM & SPF records is mandatory for Mandrill. This is for protection against unknown domains.

Conclusion

While Mailchimp is your day to day mail service for average users, Mandrill offers better services for SMTP and API integrated mailing systems, being used by top companies like Cisco, Adobe, Seagate, Canon, etc.