Mandrill is undoubtedly a great SMTP service provider which is being used by millions all around the globe. However, out of those millions, at least 100k are disappointed by its minimum email sending limit of 25k email.
Also, it has got a really complex pricing with the concept of some credits and blocks for email sending which can seriously give you a nightmare!
One of the major drawbacks that I found in Mandrill is that its credits are sold in blocks of 25,000 emails. However, if you want to send 1,20,00 emails, you will have to purchase 5 blocks. And eventually, at the end of the billing cycle, all your unused credits will lapse.
That is why today we are going to discuss those SMTP service providers that are the best alternative for Mandrill in the truest sense.
You will be able to optimize your marketing strategy & improve the deliverability of your emails in a much better way with the help of these Mandrill alternatives.
“A Quick Comparison Between Mandrill Alternatives”
| Services | Pricing | Emails | Multiple Domain | Ratings |
| Pabbly Email Marketing | $29/M | Unlimited | ✕ | 4.8/5.0 |
| SendinBlue | $25/M | 40,000 | ✕ | 4.3/5.0 |
| Pepipost | $25/M | 1,50,000 | ✓ | 4.2/5.0 |
| Mailgun | $20/M | 50,000 | ✓ | 4.6/5.0 |
| SendGrid | $29.95/M | 1,00,000 | ✕ | 3.8/5.0 |
In addition to this, following Mandrill alternatives supports bulk emailing & also provides you with real-time analytics of sent emails.
Now let us find out the additional facilities of these Mandrill alternatives in detail.
Before proceeding, we would like you to read these amazing blogs as well:
1.Pabbly Email Marketing
Pabbly Email Marketing is a premium email marketing service with native SMTP service. This service here has topped the list because of its cheapest pricing. Yes, you can afford a fully-featured email marketing service in the price of an SMTP service.
Pabbly Email Marketing targets 99.9% email delivery. Moreover, it provides email validation to protect your emails against spoofing and spamming.
Features
- List Cleaning feature for cleaning your email list against the addresses that result in spam, suspended or bounce.
- List Management feature to manage all your email contacts and their respective details from a single end.
- Email Tracking for tracking sent, clicked, open as well as unsubscribe details of your emails.
- Multiple integrations such as Zapier, Google Analytics for properly analyzing email campaigns.
- List Segmentation to send emails to even no-open email subscribers.
Pricing Plan
Free – The basic starter plan will cost $0/month for connecting 3 SMTPs.
Rookie – This plan will cost $29/month for adding automatic follow-ups.
Pro – The Pro plan can cost $49/month and adds up the live support feature.
Advanced – This plan is highly scalable for increasing the number of subscribers above 50K. It offers a pricing plan of $99/month along with addition MX checker.
2. SendinBlue SMTP
SendinBlue SMTP is a popular relay service provider that is predominantly used for sending transactional and marketing emails and SMS.
Besides this, SendinBlue also lets you track different email campaigns and provides reports on open rate, click rate, bounce, etc.
Features
- SendinBlue provides an informative dashboard for managing your transactional emails of registrations or purchases etc. You can have comprehensive logs about various real-time metrics like an overview of deliverability, opens, and click-throughs/day, per week or per month.
- In addition to multiple accurate stats about each email sent, the SMTP dashboard also facilitates you to configure the email sending settings to ensure optimum deliverability.
- It also lets you configure webhooks to get notifications based on the occurrence of certain events like emails sent, bounce, clicked, etc. in email delivery.
- You can integrate SendinBlue SMTP through various modes such as conventional setting SMTP settings in terms of server, port, username and password, SendinBlue PHP Library, postfix configuration or using API documentation.
Pricing Plan
Free Plan – This plan allows you to send 300 emails/day per month to unlimited contacts without spending a penny.
Lite Plan – It lets you send 40,000 emails a month with no daily sending limit at just $7/M.
Premium Plan 1 – You will be able to send 1,20,000 emails at $ 66/M and avail features like landing page builder, unlimited automation workflows etc.
Premium Plan 2 – The second premium plan allows you to send 3,50,000 emails a month in just $173/M. Besides all the features of Premium Plan 1, it also facilitates you with free dedicated IP.
Note: – To send emails above 3,50,000 per month, you can opt the Enterprise Plan and contact the sales team to know its cost estimation.
3. Moosend SMTP – Mandrill alternatives
Moosend offers a fully manageable SMTP tool for you to enhance your email marketing campaign. Thus it helps to grow the inbox placement rate of your transactional emails using a world-class infrastructure.
Furthermore, it comes with the simplest user interface & automates the entire process of sending out emails for growing your business.
Features
- It provides a drag and drop editor that you can use to customize transactional emails within minutes that look stunning on all the device.
- It empowers you to track real-time statistics for each e-mail that is sent through the Moosend SMTP service.
- This service is helpful for the business owners as it provides a clear picture of the transactional emails’ performance and hence tracks them.
- Moosend offers advanced security traits and manages its SMTP servers on an hourly basis with TLS encryption across all the messages which are exchanged.
Pricing
For upto 1,000 Subscribers – This is a free monthly plan with unlimited email campaigns per month.
Upto 10,000 Subscribers – For unlimited email campaigning per month, this plan comes at $55.
This is for upto 1,00,000 Subscribers – This plan is offered at $ 390 per month and unlimited features.
For 10,00,000 Subscribers – This plan comes with advanced features at $3,650 per month.
Note: Moosend offers 6 months as well as yearly plans where you can save 15% & 20% respectively. It also has Pay-as-you-go plans for all the occasional senders and is priced per email.
4. Pepipost – Mandrill alternatives
You can easily integrate this SMTP relay service to your applications like Outlook, CRM, Thunderbird etc. and send bulk emails of varied transaction alerts, forum notifications, travel receipts, & shopping cart emails.
The servers are flexible enough to support high or low email volumes and ensure high inbox delivery.
Features
- You just need to add the sending domain to white-label & authenticate the domains in order to send emails.
- You can create a suppression list (or import if you have used some other email service provider previously) that contains email addresses & domains that you wish to permanently exclude from future emails you send using our service.
- The email analytics report lets you have a live summary report of various information stats such as email delivery rate, spam reports, bounce, open, and click metrics.
- You can add up to 15 sub-users accounts for different domains and allocate individual email credits to each sub-user. This process helps to simplify the account management effectively.
Pricing Plan
First Plan – By purchasing this plan, you can send 1,00,000 emails in just $15/month.
Second Plan – For the requirement of sending 5,00,000, you can go with this plan and pay only $145 a month.
Third Plan – You can send 10,00,000 emails to the clients by paying an affordable price of $245/month for this plan.
Note:- Every plan has its own price/1000 extra emails on final billing.
5. SendPulse – Mandrill alternatives
Seamlessly integrate this SMTP server into your CMS, CRM, or other systems to send emails.
You can now confidently use a reliable IP address to boost your sender reputation and avoid blacklisting of your IP.
It also comes with a detailed API documentation to assist you in configuring the SMTP server.
Features
- This SMTP service provider lets you authenticate your company domain by using the special cryptographic signatures SPF and DKIM. Such validations reduce the risk of your messages being marked as spam.
- It also provides you with 2 reports with statistics for your email campaign (number of mailings sent out, delivered messages, conversions, spam reports) and a delivery error chart.
- Further, it also helps you to maintain a mailing list of active subscribers by creating a separate list of unsubscribers or blocked email addresses.
- It also ensures super fast mailing speed irrespective of the size of emails & attachments included.
Pricing Plan
Basic plan – To start with, this plan allows you to send 12000 emails/month for free. Furthermore, its pricing scheme starts for sending 25,000 emails a month in $7.07/mo and so on.
Pro Plan – You can send 1,00,000 emails/month at an affordable price of $61.81 a month using this plan.
Enterprise Plan – With this advanced plan, you can send 5,00,000 emails at $221.81/M. The same plan also offers you to send 10,00,000 emails in $428.44/month.
Note:– All of these prices are calculated on the basis of the yearly basis.
6. Mailjet – Mandrill alternatives
Mailjet is a leading email service providers whose robust delivery infrastructure routes numerous emails to the respective inbox.
You can integrate this SMTP server easily with any system as its set up takes just a few minutes.
Moreover, Mailjet allows automating your email campaigns very easily. This will take just a few configurations like creating a trigger, adding emails, and defining delays between different emails.
Features
- Mailjet provides a dynamic dashboard that gives you real-time statistics about various key performance indicators like opens, clicks, spam rate, unsubscribes rate etc.
- The service also provides a facility of A/B testing for comparing the email campaigns & analyzing the email performance.
- Furthermore, it also gives you an option of segmenting your contact list so that you can target your email campaign to the specific group of customers.
- Mailjet provides many other features like email personalization, parsing incoming emails, real-time collaboration with the team on campaign etc.
Pricing Plan
There are 3 kinds of pricing schemes offered to you with a slight difference in the cost. You will keep on getting a lot of enhanced features with every advanced plan that you choose.
First Plan – It is absolutely free and will aid you to send 6,000 emails/month with a limit of 200 emails/day.
Second Plan – You can send 30,000 emails/month by using the Basic Plan in $9.65/month. For sending the same amount of emails, its Premium Plan will charge you $17.95/month with additional features like segmentation, A/B testing etc.
Third Plan – Basic Plan will cost you $74.95 to send 150,000 emails/month. Likewise, the Premium Plan can be purchased for $96.95/month to send the same number of emails along with features like marketing automation, multi-user collaboration etc.
Fourth Plan – If you opt Baic Plan to send 4,50,000 emails every month, you need to pay only $166.95 a month. Else, if you purchase the Premium Plan, to send 450,000 emails you will be charged $229.95/month.
Note:–
1. The Enterprise Plan has other advanced features & to know the cost details for sending emails, you can contact the sales team.
2. These prices are calculated on the basis of monthly billing whereas annual billing would differ in the pricing of every plan.
7. Mailgun
Mailgun offers one of the finest cloud-based SMTP services which allows you to send marketing and transactional emails to your entire mailing list.
The set up is really quick and simple, you just need to add and verify your domain name, choose between a dedicated or shared IP address, and set up your SMTP server to start sending emails.
It also provides email address validation service for the emails of your mailing list.
Further, Mailgun analytics help you analyze your email campaigns via A/B tests to understand the effectiveness of the campaigns.
Features
- It provides domain authentication via SPF, DMARC, and DKIM to increase the overall email deliverability success rate.
- With its inbound parsing technique, you can process the incoming emails. In addition to this, you can also route the spams easily.
- Moreover, you can integrate the email address validation API into your web forms to lower bounce rates and reduce spam complaints.
- You will also get a detailed report of marketing and transactional emails. Whereas, the control panel lets you monitor email events like delivery failures, clicks, and unsubscribes.
Pricing Plan
Starter Plan – It delivers up to 100,000 emails in a month for $79/mo only.
Second Plan – You can send up to 500,000 emails per month at just $325/month.
Advanced Plan – Professionals can send 10,00,000 emails/month which will cost only $515 a month.
Note: – With Mailgun, you can send up to 10,000 emails a month absolutely free.
8. SendGrid
Sendgrid is an SMTP service which is time-saving, scalable, and comes with great delivery expertise.
It provides absolute inbox delivery of promotional, shipping notifications, newsletter, password resets emails like no other service can offer.
Features
- To use this SMTP Relay service for sending emails you just have to modify few basic SMTP configurations in terms of credentials, hostname, port number etc.
- SendGrid has got extended functionality in its SMTP service to provide additional tracking of events related to the sent messages like bounce, click, open and a lot more.
- It also offers web API integration besides SMTP. The Web API is faster and lets you manage user unsubscribes, IPs, email templates etc.
- Additionally, you are facilitated with a suppression list containing the email addresses that you want to exclude permanently from sending emails.
Pricing Plan
Free Plan – You can send 40,000 emails for your first 30 days of usage absolutely free with this plan.
Essential Plan – It will cost you only $9.95/mo and you can easily send 1,00,000 emails per month.
Pro Plan – You will be charged only $79.95 a month for this plan and you can send emails from 1,00,000 up to 1.5 million per month.
Premium Plan – Buy this plan to send emails more than 1.5 million and enquire its cost estimation from the sales team.
9. Amazon SES
Amazon SES is a highly popular cloud-based emailing service that allows online retailers, application developers, and digital marketing organizations to send or receive merchandising, subscription, transactional, and notification emails.
You can seamlessly integrate the SMTP interface with the applications, or you can also configure the existing email server to use this SMTP relay.
Further, you just need your SMTP username and password, the SMTP endpoint name, and the port number to connect to the Amazon SES SMTP interface.
Amazon SES provides you with emails compliance with DMARC through SPF, DKIM, or both to provide utmost authentication.
Features
- Amazon SES lets you send email messages up to 10 MB in size having images and attachments as a part of the message.
- It gives you a sandbox area where you can test the service via sending almost 200 messages/day at the rate of 1 message/second.
- The service comes with 2 more email sending interface other than SMTP, which are Amazon SES console and the Amazon SES API.
- If Amazon SES fails to deliver your message, your email will be returned to you as a bounce. Moreover, it will return with an error message that provides corresponding error code and reason.
Pricing Plan
First Plan – You can avail this pricing scheme in just $5 for sending 50,000 emails to the customers.
Second Plan – If you want to send 100,000 emails/month this service will charge you $10.
Third Plan – Further, for sending 500,000 email in a month you will be charged only $50.
Fourth Plan – To send 1,000,000 emails per month, you will have to pay $100 only.
10. SparkPost – Mandrill alternatives
SparkPost is one of the most popular email delivery services whether your app or websites to send unlimited messages.
Further, these emails could be for activation, welcome/onboarding, product updates etc.
SparkPost offers unmatched inbox delivery to avoid customer churn along with the important real-time metrics.
Features
- You can easily refer various reports on the bounce, delayed, accepted, rejected messages and monitor the email campaign summary via the dashboard.
- This SMTP service also provides you with email templates to create custom & personalized emails for the different use.
- Further, you can also add and manage email addresses in the recipient and suppression list through the admin panel.
- Subsequently, you can create tracking as well as the sending domain, create & manage sub-accounts, and perform a lot more actions.
Pricing Plan
Starter Plan – It is a free plan where you can send 15,000 emails and you will be charged $0.
Second Plan – This plan will allow you to send 150,000 emails every month at just $49/month.
Third Plan- You can avail this service to send 5,00,000 emails in $249/month only for the Standard Plan.
Fourth Plan – If you want to send 10,00,000 to the clients, Standard Plan will cost you only at $474 a month.
Note:– There are 2 more advanced plans, namely, Premium & Enterprise, which will provide you with even more advanced features. You can get in touch with the sales team to know the pricing schemes of these plans.
11. SMTP -Mandrill alternatives
SMTP ensures email landing in the inboxes in the truest sense. It also affirms that the emails get delivered on time of different purposes, be it transactional emails or emails for marketing campaigns.
Features
- SMTP suits different business needs & works with every kind of internet service providers.
- You can easily integrate this email relay service into your custom built or third-party email management software using given API.
- It also provides email delivery data and analytics on the transactional and marketing email opens, bounces, click-through rates, and other performance indicators.
Pricing Plan
Starter Plan – It enables you to send 10,000 emails a month at a reasonable price of $15/month only.
Second Plan – You can go with this plan for sending 1,00,000 emails to the users by spending only $160 per month.
Third Plan – If you need to send emails in bulk say 5,00,000, the advanced pricing plan of this SMTP service will cost you $500 a month.
Fourth Plan – The cost estimation for sending 10,00,000 emails to the clients will charge you $900/monthby purchasing this plan.
12. MailGet SMTP
MailGet SMTP is one of the best SMTP relay service that lets you send emails in bulk for a variety of purposes like transactional, promotional, alerts & notifications, marketing etc.
Another reason why people are using this SMTP service provider in abundance is that it targets high email deliverability to inboxes at the first place.
MailGet SMTP lets you send emails from different domains or “From” addresses via a single account.
Features
- Setting up this cloud-based service is SMTP relay service is a matter of few minutes as the live support system is available round the clock to guide you in its setup.
- It follows SPF protocol of email validation against email spoofing and also prevents spammers to send messages on behalf of your domain to provide best email authentication.
- Further, the embedded DKIM signatures ensure high deliverability & inboxing rate to another level.
- Moreover, this SMTP relay service communicates with Whitelisted servers only to establish a connection with authorized servers only.
Pricing Plan
Starter Plan – Send 5000 emails/mo at a nominal charge of $5 per month only.
Pro Plan – You can send 100,000 emails/mo at just $49 per month with this pricing plan.
Advance Plan – This pricing scheme is available at $349 per month where you can send 500,000 emails/mo.
Conclusion
The blog describes some of the best Mandrill alternatives that are used in abundance by professional which are absolutely easy to integrate.
Secondly, every SMTP relay service is cost-effective & you would find each of them worth paying the amount they charge.
Now you can confidently choose the best Mandrill alternative that suits your emails campaigns requirement.
On wrapping up, we invite you to post your suggestions or queries (if any) in the below section.
Thanks for reading
