Picking a single provider really depends on your needs, wants, and app type.
I’m going to speak very general here but many times you want a separate provider for app transactional sending vs marketing.
My personal favorite stack is postmark (transactional in app) & active campaign (marketing). Sometimes I go Mailgun over postmark depending on client needs.
The reason for the split is both for email health & delivery as well as ease of setup.
You can cut out the monthly cost of Mailchimp if you wanted to build all the campaign, list, & batch sending features in your via postmark and save a decent chunk of money, even more if you do Mailgun.
My personal favorite email managers.
(Marketing) all of these tend to be about as equally as strict with content sent and following emailing rules.
- Active campaign: one of the best for list/campaign management, can install 3rd party tracking pixels on emails, a bit more complicated to use than mailchimp.
- Mailchimp: easy to use, builder is good, can’t install 3rd party tracking pixel.
- Really all 3rd party CRMs will accomplish the same thing but far more expensive (ex hubspot, Zoho, pipedrive, Monday)
My personal favorite email server/senders
(Transactional)
- Postmark: World class deliverability when starting, very strict, great batch sending if not using a marketing email provider, scaleable.
- Mailgun: Not as strict, far more flexible, cheap, scaleable, far superior over sendgrid.
- Amazon SES: this is my favorite ONLY when I know the client will be sending millions of emails per month, hard to setup, super scaleable, not forced to follow many rules but your domain reputation and email sender score can take a big hit if you’re not knowledgeable with email best practices.
Here’s my email builder & sender if you want something easy to use out the box.