Cloud Transactional Email Service Provider Comparison

Transactional Email Service Providers Help to Receive Email From Web App. Here is Our Cloud Transactional Email Service Provider Comparison. For example, we have shown in a previous guide that, using Mandrill we can receive emails on WordPress without any server side configuration. Mandrill is not alone, there are many such Cloud Based Transactional Email Service Providers. First we will explain a bit about these transactional Email service providers technological part.

What is Transactional Email Service?

Transactional email are been received after it has been triggered after a transaction or a specific action like sending an email to us using the contact us form. Other examples of usage of transactional email are account opening message, order confirmation, tracking and purchase order status, payment confirmation and so on. So, for one client, one e-commerce website can sent 5-10 emails. Official reason of usage definition is to facilitate, complete, or confirm a commercial transactions that the recipient has previously agreed to enter into with the sender.

The web application can usually use SMTP protocol using their SMTP Relay at web application level; server side configuration is not required, it is their API based function.

It is quite obvious – if one client receives 5 emails for one action within few minutes; the need of infrastructure and networking should be quite higher. That is exactly avoided with these emails.

Traditional emails do not have the features offered by this segment’s need.

Cloud Transactional Email Service Provider Comparison

So far, the known names are – Mailjet, SendinBlue, Elastic Email, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Mailgun, SMTP.com, Mandrill, AuthMailer, SocketLabs, Leadersend, turboSMTP, SparkPost, Postmark and some more.

What features are supported by all of these services :

1. SMTP support
2. realtime relay
3. sending bulk emails
4. support for sender policy framework
5. DKIM signing and personalized DKIM
6. Click details
7. Conditional logics

Yes, only 8 features are commonly available. What significant common features are not supported by all of these services are – Incoming Email Supported by Amazon SES, SMTP.com,  Leadersend and TurboSMTP. Amazon SES has least number of features.

We are frankly selecting MailJet, SendGrid, MailGun, PostMark and ManDrill almost at same level. Mandrill is relatively new.

We think the options of thought should be within Mandrill, SendGrid, Postmark, Mailgun and Amazon SES. Last two has lesser features but from Rackspace and Amazon; both of them has good number of users. Only Mandrill and SendGrid worths the money. Most of us send less than 50K emails per month and SendGrid, Mandrill  and AmazonSES (for comparison) cost approximately – $6, $10 and $5 per month for that usage. Filtering more for Free option for the developers, SendGrid gives 400 emails per day and 12,000 emails/month free respectively, same in short in total number per month. Frankly there is not much reason to think about the others unless their quality is going to fail in future. SendGrid was best when was alone. But Mandrill means the company behind Mailchimp.

Probably you will only looking whether you can use as a free substitute for hosted email services like Google Apps for Domains, Rackspace Mail etc. With transactional emails, we typically can not send emails to a group or list. Mandrill versus Google Apps for Domain (older name) comparison actually does not exist. Otherwise we will write that guide on using Mandrill to receive emails from WordPress while using Google Apps?. Except Zoho’s one email per domain service all are paid now. Zoho plus Mandrill or SendGrid for small new web business. 100% free.