https://postmarkapp.com/ vs http://www.mailgun.com/
When mandril effectively shut down I needed a new transactional email system. Hosting my own SMTP for assorted clients is not my idea of a good time.
The features I valued with mandril were:
- Deliverability
- Tracking the send
- Tracking when the user opened the mail & clicked any links
- Tracking subject and content of sent mail. (so i can check if something went wrong)
- ability to add multiple servers to one account
- ability to add multiple users with different permissions to view servers
- sustainable business model
- low prices.
Some of those mean that good old reliable sendgrid.com was off the list. The tracking does not show what was sent. You can’t have multiple domains per account. It’s a shame, because otherwise it’s really nice and the dashboard is pretty.
After some googling around i settled on trialling postmarkapp.com and mailgun.com.
Street Cred
Postmark was the first service i tried. It’s built by wildbit, who made beanstalkapp, which is a totally ace deployment tool. Their support has always been very professional, knowledgeable and friendly and they seem like they are around for the long haul.
MailGun is owned by Rackspace, so that’s some serious pedigree right there. Rackspace are well known for their technical knowhow & support.
Pricing.
Postmark is fairly expensive. No free tier, $1.50/1000 emails after that. Bulk discounts are available and they don’t expire though. So that’s kind of bad, but also it means they are making money from the service, which is good! : )
MailGun is cheaper. 10,000 free emails per month and then $0.50/1000 emails. Does that mean they are going to vanish? hopefully not since they are owned by Rackspace, but you never know.
Tracking
Postmark
Multiple servers
Yep, they both have that.
Permissions
Sometimes, not often, a client will need to be able to login and see their send stats. I don’t want them to be able to view the billing details or the other clients servers or to be able to mess up configuration settings. MailGun doesn’t have a user permissions system, PostmarkApp does, and it’s really good. KO!