For the last month or so, I spent my days testing popular transactional email services.
I played around with dozens of tools on the market and picked out 8 best-performing providers. I reviewed all of them based on pre-selected criteria. Moreover, I scraped through the reviews on software catalogs to find out what other users think about these tools.Â
So, letâs dive into the list of 8 best transactional email services.Â
8 Best transactional email service providers
- Mailtrap for businesses and individuals looking for a reliable infrastructure to send transactional, bulk, or marketing emails and achieve high deliverability rates.Â
- Mailgun for businesses looking for a two-in-one solution for transactional and marketing services;.Â
- SendGrid for businesses of all sizes looking for a scalable solution.
- Amazon SES for businesses with strong dev teams looking for an affordable solution and already using AWS infrastructure.Â
- Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) for businesses already using Mailchimp as their marketing platform.
- Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) for individuals and small to medium businesses looking for versatile integration options, not just API or SMTP.
- Postmark for businesses looking for a volume-based pricing structure, not a feature-based one.Â
- SendPulse for businesses requiring a comprehensive approach to their transactional and marketing communications.Â
Best transactional email services: selection criteriaÂ
The best-performing transactional email service providers must satisfy specific criteria:Â
- High email deliverability rates. For example, transactional emails, such as password reset or confirmation emails, should always land in inboxes.Â
- Stable infrastructure with close to zero downtime. This includes backup servers, network monitoring, and high deliverability speed.Â
- Email analytics and reports. This will help you track the performance of your emails with popular metrics such as open and click rates, bounce rates, spam complaints, and delivery rates.Â
- Smooth integration with your app or project. Integration options should include SMTP and API, as well as SDKs for popular programming languages. All of that should be paired with extensive and helpful documentation. Optional but useful integration options include plugins, browser extensions, etc.Â
- Scalability. The chosen platform should offer easy scaling options, such as purchasing additional emails or upgrading the plan. And, of course, deliverability should remain the same even with increased sending volumes.Â
- Transactional email templates. This isnât a must-have feature, but itâs pretty useful, especially for maintaining consistency in all your emails.Â
Best transactional email services
Disclaimer: The prices and product ratings are up-to-date at the time of writing and could be different when youâre reading this blog post. Also, all the included prices are for monthly subscriptions and can differ for annual plans.Â
Mailtrap
Mailtrap is an email delivery platform that has both Email Sending and Email Testing solutions. For this blog post, Iâll focus on Email Sending.Â
Email Sending is an email product with high deliverability rates by design. It has Email API and SMTP Service and ready-made SDKs for Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Python, and Elixir.Â
Creating the account is quite straightforward. You just go to the signup page, choose the registration method, and fill out the empty fields.Â