Mailjet vs Mandrill

Mailjet has a template designer included, along with the option to upload your own custom templates. This gives you a lot of flexibility in personalizing emails.

The interface is very nice. Clean and easy to understand, especially when it comes to analytics. The graphs are clear and well-organized and you can choose what kind of data to display through checkboxes on the top of the graphs.

Simply set your SMTP server to smtp://user:API_KEY@smtp.mandrillapp.com:465 and you're good to go. There are libraries for using the API in a variety of languages, including Node.js.

The UI is very clean and good-looking overall. While the Analytics may seem basic and not very detailed, the dashboard interface is very clean which also helps with the set up.

The left side of the page has the navigation to different parts of the dashboard. The main view displays all the most important data and analytics that you may need (emails sent, deliverability, reputation etc...). While the navigation itself is pretty straightforward and self-explanatory.

Instead of sending real e-mails out, can use test keys which allows to test without actually sending out real e-mails. These test keys can also safely be shared inside the team since they cannot be used to send real e-mails on your behalf.

The API documentation is very clear and makes it pretty easy to set up you application with Mandrill's API quickly and painlessly.

Mandrill has companion apps for iOS and Android that allow monitoring the service using a smartphone.

Mandrill has made templates a core part of the product as they simplify the payload when compared to sending the full HTML each time and allow non-developers to design the template.

Mandrill uses the flexible content formatting of MailChimp templates. This paired with the API access to template management, gives the user a great deal of flexibility.

Mandrill provides and Event API also or "webhooks" through which it registers events when they occur. So when an activity occurs, the application server is called along with the activity that occurred. Events include opens, clicks, bounces, deliveries and spam complaints.

Mandrill allows setting up rules in a non-technical way.

Mandrill is made by the same company that made MailChimp. As such, both products work very well with each other.

You can see the contents of all messages that Mandrill has sent out, for free for the last 24 hours, or for some cents per thousand messages if you need a longer retention period.