Mandrill reviews

Pluspunten

Mandrill provides a simple and well documented API and has libraries and integrations available for many major web frameworks and languages. Making use of it for simple email sends is a fast and easy process, and it provides additional functionality for black lists, white lists, bulk sends, static IPs, etc. Their dashboard makes it extremely simple to see all the emails sent to a given address along with full content and reasons why sends failed or were delayed, which is a great for debugging and testing. They also provide analytics and send, receive, open, click, and bounce rates.

Minpunten

The service used to be much cheaper, but costs went up sharply when it was reabsorbed back into Mailchimp. Still an excellent service, but harder to recommend without reservation.

Pluspunten

A transactional email server is setup within minutes and available for you to send out content to your distribution list.

The application provides

- Graphs to show how many emails you're sending each day
- What countries your sending the emails to
- Open rates
- Mail clients used (useful to optimise content)
- Spam rates/unsubscribe rates
- Great delivery rates

Very cost effective.

Minpunten

A couple of years ago, Mandrill made it a requirement for you to have a Mailchimp subscription in order to use Mandrill. It would have been better in my opinion to keep the two applications independent, just like Sendgrid.

Whilst it doesn't make the cost materially more expensive, it does mean that you have to log into Mandrill via Mailchimp which is annoying.

Pluspunten

This application is an addon of MailChimp and is best suited for transactional emails (automated emails, think 'forgot my password' type emails). It allows you to easily manage your sending domains , although you have to verify these before you can send emails. The best feature by far is the ability to view all emails that were sent or failed to arrive, including the contents of the emails and the reason it bounced. This allows us to quickly troubleshoot whenever we get a support ticket regarding an email that did not arrive.

During our 6 months of using this feature, there has been zero downtime.

Minpunten

It is more expensive than some competitors, but its pricing model is very fair and easy to interpret. It does require you to have at least a monthly subscription with Mailchimp, and if you are not using this it is more expensive.

Pluspunten

Works well, haven't experienced any problems. Has an online GUI where you can easily find emails that were sent, easy to see blacklisted emails. Has a nice statistics page to see how your emails are doing overall. We've been delivering millions of emails in past year without a problem.

Minpunten

The PHP SDK I used was kinda outdated and it had little options to change the behaviour without manually changing the source. They should update the library to standards that are more current.

GUI where you can view emails, etc. sometimes is a but slow. The search filters could use a face-lift.

Pluspunten

Mandrill is a powerful application that has proven useful for transactional email. They offer an API, decent reporting and storage of track/click data for 30 days.

Minpunten

As part of Mailchimp they now require both a Mailchimp and Mandrill subscription. I have no problem paying for Mandrill but I'm not a fan of this billing requirement as I don't need Mailchimp. Secondly, in the 2-3 years that I have been using Mandrill I have not seen a single feature release. I find this unusual. True, it works great as-is, but there are definitely areas that can be improved or features that can be added.

Pluspunten

Mandrill (now interated inside Mailchimp) has been a solid and reliable transactional email provider, with great delivery rates, very slow spam scores and ultra-fast reception speed. It provides useful and flexible reports and great dashboards too.

Minpunten

In order to keep it's spam reputation high it takes some effort to set up a new email domain in Mandrill. You have to prove you own the DNS and configure a SPF/DKIM record.

Pluspunten

Very fast delivery with exceptional delivery rates;
Does a great job keeping reputation high;
Very nice dashboards and reporting;
Ability to segregate into sub-accounts;
Very easy to integrate with MTA's and API clients;
Great documentation;

Minpunten

Domain validation could be made simpler;
Roles and permissions should be more flexible;
Once Mandrill got integrated with Mailchimp the pricing model became less attractive;

Pluspunten

The API is easy to use and the setup is fast. Rather cheap plans when you get started (but gets expensive soon)

Minpunten

The archive of messages is way too limited! I don't require to keep track of the message content of all our messages, but for our business we must keep track of whether the emails have been sent/read/rejected or not, and there is no way to achieve this even on a higher plan. We'll have to build a workaround with webhooks or find another tool that offers it

Pluspunten

Mandrill is great to backtrack on emails that my company has sent out. We have the ability to view if the email was delivered, bounced, and how many times it has been sent + opened and clicked on. The features of mandrill are great for the company because we rely heavily on mandrill in order to see that.

Minpunten

At this moment, I can't think of a negative effect of mandrill. It is very easy to use and easy to maneuver around.

Pluspunten

Very easy to setup and use. If you need to send mail with your application this is one of the best and quickest ways to do it.

Minpunten

I have used it before they required a MailChimp account and that is too bad that you need a MailChimp account to use Mandrill now.

Pluspunten

The pricing is good. We have been using it for years and the only reason we are keeping it is because we don't the pain of switching over to another vendor.

Minpunten

The reporting features are very weak and we don't like that we have to access MailChimp to get over into the Mandrill dashboard.

Pluspunten

It's got a terrific api that can send programmatic emails (like transactional emails) with ease. Great deliverability.

Minpunten

The UI is incredibly dated. It doesn't look like it's had any love in 5 years. Still, it works and that's what counts.

Pluspunten

Customizable templates allow fields to be populated automatically base on predetermined algorithm. Set it up and the rest is a breeze.

Minpunten

Spam is always an issue. Mailing lists get old. People get annoyed. It's a tough business.

Pluspunten

We were using our local vendor for Transactional Email Services there was inbox email delivery issue mostly I was getting complain from my users that there invoice through emails is not reaching on time and sometime it's in spam. One of my friends recommended Mandrill and it's really amazing. Great IP Pool with a high inbox delivery reputation flexible API for integration and real-time email delivery.

Minpunten

First of all I need to login in Mailchimp account to access Mandrill which is very irritating and secondly there pricing is very high.

Pluspunten

I like the ease of Mandrill, there isn't anything to complicated. Type , search , done!!

Minpunten

I don't think there are any issues I have ever had with Mandrill in the 3.5 years that I have been using it.

Pluspunten

Templating system is quite versatile with the ability to send parameters with the emails using the API

Minpunten

- Mandrill doesn't store past emails for backup, even as a paid option
- the UI seems 10 years old, and not user friendly

Pluspunten

I run a busy social network. Around 6,000 users total, and 300-400 online at any given time. Due to this, I needed a transactional email service that had great deliver-ability for invitations, verifications, password changes, etc. Mandrill was recommended to me, and we were completely happy with the service. Unfortunately, when they bundled Mandrill into Mailchimp, we couldn't afford it anymore.

Minpunten

Unfortunately, bundling services did no favors. What previously was affordable for us no longer was. While the service is great, the way the change was implemented was sudden, leaving companies little time or recourse to find other options quickly. That solidified my decision to leave- most companies would grandfather in existing members, offer a lower rate, something. They simply provided us with addresses for other services, losing customers in the process.

Pluspunten

Easy to use dashboard for administration
Easy to integrate with any existing code
Straight forward implementation

Minpunten

Logs are only kept for a few weeks
The dashboard looks outdated
Hard to perform advance searches over logs

Pluspunten

- Very user-friendly interface
- Analytics is great to track customers activities on emails.
- Good Dashboards

Minpunten

- it can be confusing to manage emails from different domains. This could be clearer in the application UI/UX.

Pluspunten

Almost all of the functionality can be controlled through the dashboard, as opposed to some of Mandrill's competitors which require use of the API for configuration.

Minpunten

The price - Mandrill used to be free, but has since moved to a model which requires a pro subscription to Mailchimp (even if it's not going to be used) plus a cost based on the amount of emails needed each month.

Pluspunten

I love the software because it's sooooo straight forward to use. I can basically send the link to anyone on my team and I need very minimal time to train them and they can jump right into to troubleshoot what they need. My customer happiness team loves it.

Minpunten

No complaints about this software at this time. With that being said, I'm not on the team who manages it financially so unsure of investment.

Pluspunten

I have chosen Mandrill over other solutions because it does very good what it does with great reports.

Minpunten

Old user interface, but you can find any information you need.

Pluspunten

I love how easy it is to use Mandrill. I get great insight into whether emails were received and opened. It's awesome for support!

Minpunten

Sometimes it's a little tricky to unblock emails that have accidentally bounced after changes have been made on the end user's side.

Pluspunten

I like that it's easy to use and to learn more about what is holding up communications with customers. It gives IP and delivery information that is easy to understand.

Minpunten

I wish that I could have more history for rejected and failed messages. It doesn't keep them for very long. I also wish that I could view emails that hard-bouced/were rejected in Mandrill so I could see what the customer missed out on.

Pluspunten

Mandrill used to be the go-to transactional email service. It had free plans, great and easy to use hooks and templating system. The report is just amazing to use, you can filter by api key, making it possible for you to know which of your websites is sending more email.

Minpunten

It is only available at a much higher cost than it used to be for MailChimp users. There is no more free plan and support has that "moody" mailchimp attitude of "we know best".
I ditched it for sendgrid.