Recently acquired by Mailgun, Mailjet is an email solution based in Europe. Founded in France back in 2010, they now have offices all over Europe and boast more than 130,000 active accounts.
Their goal is quite simple: to make email more collaborative for development and marketing teams, and to be more accessible for international companies. Put simply, Mailjet is used by businesses that rely on email marketing campaigns.
By marketing, we mean newsletters, automated emails, transactional emails, etc. that integrate with a multitude of platforms, including WordPress, Google Cloud, Zapier, Megento, and MS Azure.
So, what about the detail, and what are the alternatives to Mailjet? Let's take a look…
Mailjet Pricing
There are four affordable Mailjet packages: Free, Basic, Premium, and Enterprise.
1. The Free Plan
Yes, this really is free — forever, and with no credit card required
You can send up to 6,000 emails a month, with a maximum of 200 emails per day. It’s a good option for small operations. You can store unlimited contacts, APIs, SMTP Relay, Webhooks, and use Mailjet's ‘Advanced Email Editor' and' Statistics.'
2. The Basic Plan
For $8.69 a month, you can send 30,000 emails a month, with no limit on daily sending or Mailjet's logo. You also get access to online customer support.
3. The Premium Plan
At $18.86, you'll get everything we've just listed, PLUS:
- A/B testing
- Segmentation
- Marketing automation
- Multi-user collaboration
4. The Enterprise Plan
The cost of this package is customized to meet the services you require. You get all the Premium package items plus a dedicated account manager, a service level agreement, custom onboarding and migration, an inbox preview, a custom number of users, and advanced permissions. There's also a lot of assurance on their website about their “robust infrastructure and rock-solid deliverability.” — which is never a bad thing!
Mailjet Review: The Pros
Setting up contact lists, emails (including subject fields), newsletters, and automation workflows is very simple. One big plus point is that teams can collaborate on the same email in real-time, a great bonus! It’s a bit like Google Docs only on email.
You can set the permission of individual team members when editing a document. That way, you can retain as much (or as little) editorial control and oversight as you want. For example, locking in a newsletter’s header and footer copy.
Pricing is competitive, including its cheaper options. It's a lot less than some of the other solutions on the market, such as Sendinblue, Hubspot, and Sharpspring.
Mailjet supports more than 80 integrations, including several ecommerce platforms, Facebook, and CRMs.
Mailjet's dashboard is incredibly intuitive and has a drag and drop editor option, which allows users to create loads of different email and/or newsletter styles. Once you’ve completed your campaign, Mailjet provides reports that highlight all the usual data, including bounces, clicks, and so on.
Lastly, apart from English, Mailjet's also available in German, French, Italian, and Spanish.
Mailjet Review: The Cons
Unsubscribing inactive users from your email list is cumbersome. You have to download and remove them through Mailjet's removal interface. Also, once you’ve unsubscribed someone, that’s it. They're unsubscribed from all your lists, not just one for a particular campaign.
Mailjet‘s segmentation options are limited. For example, if you’re running campaigns and want to set up certain conditions, you can’t do so based on whether the recipient has opened/unopened/bought a product. It makes targeting your audience all the harder.
You can’t edit the workflow once it’s activated, and you can’t reactivate an inactive workflow. Also, some reviews on Mailjet’s deliverability say their emails often end up in Junk or Spam boxes, or Gmail’s Promotional box.
There's a selection of templates available; however, the choice is relatively limited in terms of their design, and you can’t store images.
Mailjet Alternatives
So, now we’ve covered the basic pros and cons. What are the main alternatives to Mailjet? There are plenty out there, including MailChimp, GetResponse, and Drip, but here we’re going to briefly cast our eyes over Sendinblue, Hubspot Email Marketing, and SharpSpring.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue‘s tagline is “prepare for take-off,” promising their users the ability to “make your business take flight with the complete sales and marketing toolbox. Grow. Sell, Engage.”
There are five pricing options:
- Free: allows you to send 300 emails a day to unlimited contacts
- Basic at $25 / month: There isn't a daily sending limit, but you can only send 40,000 emails a month.
- Essential $39 / month: You get all the ‘Basic' features, 60,000 emails a month, no Sendinblue logo on your campaigns, and advanced statistics.
- Premium $66 / month: As above, plus 120,000 emails a month, Facebook ads, landing pages, marketing automation, multi-user access, and live chat support.
- Enterprise (customized pricing): features as per Premium. Plus, a managed setup and priority support, 10+ seats, priority sending, SSo (SAML), and a dedicated account manager.
The main advantage is that it offers 200+ templates, a landing page builder, and a CRM platform. Sendinblue users get to see where in the world their users are opening and clicking through to their marketing campaigns. It’s available in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian.
The main disadvantage is that there’s no A/B testing, and its main packages only offer email. If you want to send SMS messages, you have to pay extra.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
They say: “some things belong together,” meaning they offer “Free Email + Free CRM.” Their big sell is that they provide users with the option of creating emails that are ‘conversion-ready' and powered by the Hubspot CRM tool.
Let's take a look at their pricing options:
- Free: There’s a free trial option as well as a free plan
- Starter: at $50 / month
- Basic: at $200 / month
- Professional: $800 / mo
- Enterprise: $3,200 / month
HubSpot costs more because it’s an all-in-one sales and marketing software package, unlike the others. We couldn’t get a breakdown of what you get per package, that’s only available once you sign up with your details.
The advantages are that you get everything you need in one neat package. There are unlimited templates users get access to, that's in addition to tools for lead generation, social media management, and SEO. You'll enjoy an integrated blog, a CMS, marketing automation and workflows, and a landing page and form builder. There’s also A/B testing, analytics, reporting, and call to action buttons — just to name a few!
Less attractive is the extra onboarding fee. This rate varies depending on which pricing package you go for. The alternative is that you don’t pay for it and work with one of Hubspot’s agency partners, but you still have to pay them.
SharpSpring
SharpSpring‘s big selling point is that more than 10,000 businesses use and trust them. Their landing page offers a free demo, lists five significant sites that have reviewed them (well!), minus links, and says it will “help you drive more leads, convert leads to sales and prove ROI.”
What's not to love about that?!
You can’t immediately see their pricing structure on their website. Instead, you have to download a free report that compares it to other similar sites. Potential businesses may want a glance at the fees first, rather than wading through a ton of pages.
Six pricing options are available to you and are based on the number of emails you want to send:
- There's a free demo, but no overall ‘free forever' option
- For up to 1,500 contacts: $450 a month
- For up to 10,000 contacts: $650 a month
- For 20,000 contacts: $875 a month
- Agency plan (customized quote): Unsurprisingly, this is best for marketing agencies.
- The Enterprise plan (customized quote): This is for larger companies who frequently send vast quantities of emails.
Billing is month to month, and there are no long term contracts. SharpSpring boasts a dedicated customer support line. This is open from 8 am to 8 pm, five days a week. Plus, this solution is easy to use, and there are user guides on their website for you to download, as well as FAQs and video tutorials.
There’s also in-depth reporting on all your campaigns. Like the others, it has a drag and drop editing functionality. There’s an open API that integrates with hundreds of apps, and you can register an unlimited number of users.
Less attractive is that it's pretty expensive. There’s also limited functionality compared to dedicated CRM tools.
Overall Winners and Losers
Sendinblue is easy to use, relatively competitively priced, but not as cheap as Mailjet.
HubSpot makes a big deal out of being free, but their website lacks clarity. Yes, the CRM is free, but there’s still a pricing plan, which isn’t immediately evident on their website like it is with the other options we’ve covered. A bit more transparency would be helpful. Ditto for SharpSpring when it comes to pricing.
Offering customers just a quick glance at a table like Mailjet would be a wise improvement. Overall, it’s your choice, SharpSpring says it’s the number one fastest growing platform for digital agencies, so if you’re an agency, it may be the best solution for you.
If, however, you’re a start-up or an SME, you may want a cheaper price package or even something free that you can then upgrade as your business grows. Over to you.
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