Comparison of top SMTP Relay Services, with their popular features and website links. The comparison contains both open source(free) and commercial(paid) software.
This detailed comparison chart will help you to choose your cloud based SMTP Relay email solution for bulk email or transactional email. Most of them have a free plan, it will help you to test several email sender before deciding which one is the best for your needs.
Link | Mail250 | Amazon SES | Mailjet | Mailgun | SendGrid | Postmark | SparkPost | Mailtrap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Like | Likes 9 | Likes 3 | Likes 52 | Likes 16 | Likes 44 | Likes 6 | Likes 2 | Likes 3 |
| Image |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
| Website | mail250.com | amazon.com/... | mailjet.com | mailgun.com | sendgrid.com | postmarkapp.com | sparkpost.com | mailtrap.io |
| Pricing | ||||||||
| Price | $ 20 (Send 24k/ Day) $50 (Send 60k/ Day) $150 (Send 120k /Day) | $ 0.1 per thousand, plus traffic charges. $0.12 per GB of attachments sent. | $ 0.18 to $0.50 per thousand | $ 0.1 to $0.50 per thousand | $ 0.57 to $0.80 USD per thousand | $ 0.5 to1.50 USD per thousand | $ 0.2 to $0.15 per thousand, depending on volume | $ 10 (10,000 emails/mo), $85 (100,000 emails/mo), $750 (1,500,000 emails/mo) |
| Free plan | Yes, 10K emails free | 62,000 emails per month for EC2 users | 6,000 emails per month, max 200 per day | 10,000 free per month | 45 day free trial, 12,000 per month, 400 emails per day | 25,000 emails, no time limit | 15,000 emails per month | 1,000 emails/mo |
| Startups plan | Yes | Yes | ||||||
| Cancellation policy | Cancel any time, no contract | Pay for what you send; no required contract or commitments. | Cancel any time, no contract | Cancel any time, no contract | Cancel at any time, no contract | Cancellation must be issued via the Service. Any cancellation issued must be done three (3) days prior to the end of the contract term. | Cancel any time, no contract, month-to-month | Cancel any time on the Mailtrap website or via email |
| Unlimited Free Emails | You can upload unlimited contacts. | |||||||
| Features | ||||||||
| SMTP support | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes Globally redundant SMTP and API infrastructure | Yes | Yes |
| Personalized DKIM for free (no more "on behalf of") | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes Upgrade to a Silver plan or higher to get personalized DKIM | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Clicks Details (per Link, etc.) | Yes | Yes | Yes Reporting available both through Control Panel and API | Yes Via real-time Event API webhook | Yes Through webhooks real-time event reporting. | Yes | ||
| Conditional Personalization (if/else) | Yes | - Yes but, not through web newsletter editor, only by using the API | Yes | Yes | ||||
| WYSIWYG Newsletter Editor | Yes | No | Yes Available for free, with any plan (Free plan included) | No | Yes +$0,25 per thousand, in addition to monthly package | No | - only with "Elite for Marketers" plan | |
| Dedicated IP available | Yes | No $25 per month for EC2 users | Yes With our Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond Plans, you can ask for a Dedicated IP address. | Yes $59 per month | Yes | No Shared IPs. They believe shared IPs are preferable to dedicated. | Yes | Yes |
| REST API | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes Yes, for our Bronze plan and higher (and Free plan too) | Yes | Yes | |
| Event API | Yes | Yes you can set up Amazon SES to publish email sending events to Amazon CloudWatch or Amazon Kinesis | Yes For every plan, you can get every event (open, click, bounce...) in real time | Yes | Yes Yes, for our Silver plan and higher (and Free plan too) | Yes | Yes Via Webhooks | |
| Send email through API | Yes | Yes | Yes Only by one HTTP call http://dev.mailjet.com/guides/send-api-guide/ | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Incoming Email Support | No | Yes | Yes Using the Parse API you can get the content of an incomming email POSTed by HTTP on a server : dev.mailjet.com/guides/parse-api-guide/ | Yes Parse emails, including attachements and quoted text. Easily forward using different expression matches, including regex, and POST to HTTP. Supported by Griddler: https://github.com/thoughtbot/griddler | Yes Parse inbound email, including attachments and content. See docs.sendgrid.com for webhook examples. Supported by Griddler: https://github.com/thoughtbot/griddler | Yes Handles inbound, can be parsed by griddler: https://github.com/thoughtbot/griddler | Yes | |
| Stores Outgoing Emails for Later Viewing | Yes | No | Yes Stores for 45 Days | Yes 60-days email logs | ||||
| Explicit/sexual content policy ? | No | |||||||
| Needs time to approve account before sending ? | No. Domain approval is not required. | Mailtrap users get asked to verify their domain | ||||||
| Asks to create SPF and DKIM records | Yes Optional | |||||||
| Languages | English | English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish | English, French, German, Spanish | English, French, Russian | English | English | English | English |
| Multi-user Login | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | ||
| Prioritize emails | No | Yes Email Priority Management is handled on Mailjet with X-Mailjet email headers : http://www.mailjet.com/docs/email-priority-management | Yes Add preferred time of delivery which can prioritize or schedule for later. | Yes | ||||
| Plugins | Yes WordPress | Yes Prestashop, Wordpress, Dotclear, SPIP, Joomla, Drupal | Yes Most major languages and frameworks | Yes http://developer.postmarkapp.com/developer-libs.html | Yes Node, PHP, Python & More, see http://developer.sparkpost.com | Yes 20+ code integrations like Ruby, Python, PHP, Node.js, Java, C#, and more | ||
| Support | ||||||||
| 24/7 Support | Yes | Yes Basic: Included, Developer: $49/month, Business & Enterprise prorated. | Yes Across 3 Global Time Zones - Online ticket generation | Yes Online form submission. | Yes Online ticket generation. | Yes Support by email around the clock. Live chat. | Yes | No |
| Dedicated Support Team | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Phone Support | - | - Available with paid support plan | - Available for VIP clients | - For First-class plans | Yes During regular business hours for all plan levels, including "Free." Critical and Escalation Support available 24/7 | No | Yes | No |
| Sample Customers | DLF, Vodafone, etc | SIEMENS, HBO, Vodafone, Allergan | TAG Hauer, MIT, Fotolia, TheFancy, Jolicloud, Readability, Sketchfab, Prestashop, Amnesty International... | Github, Heroku, Uservoice, Stripe, 37 Signals, Parse, Adroll, Pagerduty | Spotify, Foursquare, Pandora, Hootsuite, Uber, Kickstarter, Air BnB, GitHub | IKEA, Minecraft, Livestream, Unicef, Litmus, Salesforce-Desk | Pinterest, Zillow, Financial Times of London, Career Builder | Adobe, ATLASSIAN, Calendly, Yelp, UserTesting |
| Website | mail250.com | amazon.com/... | mailjet.com | mailgun.com | sendgrid.com | postmarkapp.com | sparkpost.com | mailtrap.io |
5 more
User reviews and comments
Solution efficace et support réactif. Je recommande
So far my experience is extremely ignorant, lazy and helpless first line support basically doing nothing. One ticket resolving takes more than 1 week!
AVOID SPARKPOST SparkPost is a new Scammer in the place of Email Marketing. They canceled our account only 48 hours after payment claiming that our complaint rate was too high. Out of 27.000 emails sent, we had 150 bounces = 0.5% which is a very low bounce rate in any given industry. (we have made a screenshot showing these data). The way they communicate with us is like a Police Investigation, or even worst since they assume clearly that you are guilty! On Top of this, You can see on the Home Page of their website that they use very poor Marketing Pratices : Welcome Mandrill Customers! Here’s your migration guide. They want to take over the customers of Mandrill, their main competitor, with agressive Marketing. Don't be fooled by their low prices, there is NO service behind, and they use scammer practices
Actually, screw my previous comment. I take it back. They require business verification, and you have to jump through all these hoops for them to allow you to use their service, then beg them "oh pretty please" let me use your service oh wise Rackspace gods. Sod that, no time for that.
Update: managed to get second email confirmation working after being in touch with them via twitter, and decided to go with them due to mailgun's annoying company verification stuff which put me off.
This is definitely my favourite of the lot. Very good service, as to be expected from Rackspace. But also pretty cheap, which isn't so much to be expected from them!
I tried to add a second email to my account and it went straight into spam. Then the confirmation link inside didn't work (404). Then whitelisting my local domain didn't work, so now I'm stuck. Therefore, I have no interest in going any further as I can't be bothered waiting around for them to fix things.
great but they dont mention your DAILY LIMITS even on a paid plan
I bought sparkpost and they have some problem working with interspire which i got to know later. I asked them to give me time to fix things as i use interspire and you are the only one who need a patch to be added. Neither they refunded and keep billing me for no use. and nor they replied to my request. Handle with care.