In this article, we are going to go through a list of the best SMTP service providers. But, before we do that let’s first learn what is SMTP & how does it work? So, what are we waiting for, let’s roll.
What is SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) & how does it work?
To put it simply, it’s a mail transferring protocol that allows you to send emails (as well as receive them) via the internet.
The industry standard, SMTP comes in action when you start an email campaign where it works with Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) to forward your emails through white-listed servers, making sure that your emails will be successfully delivered to the receivers inbox.
There are both paid and free SMTP service providers. In fact, you can get a free SMTP account with a business email address from Google or Outlook.
However, there is a limit on how many emails you can send using the traditional email services. Usually, these free email providers like Gmail or Outlook don’t want you to use their SMTP servers for automatic emails.
This is why you need to sign up with one of the well-known SMTP services for successful and reliable email marketing. Don’t worry, a lot of the top SMTP companies offer very generous free SMTP plans that are good enough for most websites.
Let’s take a look at the best SMTP service providers with high deliverability.
Best SMTP Service Providers
There are many SMTP service providers that allow you to send mass emails, WordPress emails, transactional emails, and more.
However, they differ from each other based on features, pricing, ease of use, number of emails allowed on a free plan, and most importantly their track record on deliverability.
The following are the best SMTP service providers that offer higher deliverability and best set of features.
SendinBlue
Offering an all-in-one digital marketing toolbox with transactional emails, email & SMS marketing, Facebook ads and live chat at extremely competitive pricing, SendinBlue sits at top of the stack.
The powerful marketing platform can integrate with most major content management systems including WordPress, Wix & Jimdo and other 3rd-party platforms like Salesforce, Zapier, Google Analytics and so forth. You also get strong personalization and marketing automation features to help with your marketing campaigns. Despite being some of the most advanced, its email automation features are yet the easiest to use.
Moreover, it offers one of the highest delivery rates, so be rest assured that your emails will land into your customers’ inbox.
Pricing: It offers a number of plans including a forever free one that allows you to send 300 emails per day. The paid ones start at $25/mo with 40,000 emails per month and no daily sending limits.
Mailgun
Built for developers, Mailgun offers powerful APIs to integrate email. Enabling you to send, receive, track and store emails effortlessly. With its intelligent inbound routing and storage, you’ll exactly know where your emails are ending up.
Whether you have an e-commerce store, a membership website, a small business, or something else entirely, Mailgun offers an easy to scale SMTP service to send your marketing and transactional emails.
It supports all of the most popular languages including PHP, Python, Ruby, C# and Java. Since, it’s designed for developers that’s why it lacks some of the beginner-friendly features of other SMTP providers on the list.
Pricing: Mailgun offers a ‘pay as you go’ plan with the first ten-thousand emails free, which if you ask me will be more than enough for small websites. It charges $10 for sending thirty-thousand emails in a month.
Their paid plans are fairly competitive in the market. However, if you want a dedicated IP and improved deliverability, then it starts at $79/mo with hundred-thousand emails & 1 dedicated IP address.
SendGrid
This powerful cloud-based SMTP email service provider allows users to reliably send and receive mass emails without managing an SMTP server. It is able to manage various types of emails such as friend requests, shipping notifications, email newsletters, and sign-up confirmations.
It offers excellent scalability and has an easy to use interface that makes it very easy to run marketing campaigns and send transactional emails. Also, it includes delivery optimization tools, email analytics, email templates with a simple email editor, and integrations with 3rd-party apps and services.
According to Twilio, those familiar with programming languages (like C#, Java, PHP, Go, Python, and Ruby), can get started in just a few minutes. With these languages, you make client libraries and development frameworks that allow you to tailor your emails anyway you want.
If your main concern is deliverability, then this is the perfect option for you as it has the tools to further improve email delivery including dedicated IP addresses and domain name authentication tools.
Pricing: They offer a free plan with the first forty-thousand emails free for 30 days and then 100 emails/day forever. Their paid plans start at $14.95/mo.
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
Amazon SES is a cost-effective email service built for marketers and developers to easily send marketing, notification, transactional email campaigns, or any other type of high-quality content to their customers.
It offers higher deliverability (by filtering emails to ensure that messages don’t spam, and won’t get blocked by spam filters) and comes with a lot of powerful features, but most of them are suitable for advanced users and developers.
Amazon SES can be easily integrated into your WordPress site with a little help from plug-ins (like WP Mail SMTP). Depending on your usage, this cloud-based service can be the cheapest SMTP service in the market.
Pricing: With Amazon SES, you pay only for what you use. If your website is hosted on AWS, then you can use their free tier to send 62,000 emails each month, and pay $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send after that. For other websites, pricing starts at $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send.
G Suite
Developed by Google Cloud, G Suite is a suite of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products for businesses. It allows you to use a calendar, Google Drive, Docs… everything you need, with your own domain.
This allows you to get a professional business email address while still hanging onto the familiarity of the Google interface. G Suite allows you to use Google SMTP servers to send out emails which means you can set up an email account for your WordPress site and then use it to send WordPress emails.
It’s a great solution but only for small business websites and blogs with low email volume because it can only send 2,000 messages a day.
Pricing: You can try it for free for 14 days. Paid plans start as low as $6 per user per month for basic, $12 per user per month for business, and $25 per user per month for the enterprise.
Postmark
Postmark helps to say goodbye to expensive and clunky SMTP tools. It is easy to use and provides lightning-fast email delivery making it perfect for websites, marketers, and businesses.
Sending transactional emails is their expertise, which means they are focused on deliverability and speed. They offer excellent analytics and security, as well as mobile-friendly responsive email templates, message events that can be triggered with simple webhooks, and more.
Pricing: Starting from $10/mo for ten-thousand emails then $1.25 per one thousand emails.
Office365
Office365 is a popular email and productivity suite offered by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Office product line.
Like G Suite, it too allows you to create a professional email address for your business. You can also use Microsoft’s SMTP servers to send out emails from your WordPress site as long as you’re a small business or company.
The business version of Office365 allows you to send up to ten-thousand emails per day, but this is combined with your regular emails. The only reason why you should go to this service is if you want reliable emails for your small business website.
For larger membership sites or e-commerce stores, it’s better that you go for the other options in the list.
Moosend
Another easy to use an SMTP service provider, Moosend offers lightning-fast email delivery with simpler pricing and easy integration.
It enables you to easily manage multiple email campaigns and mailing lists, as well as design and send striking, responsive newsletters created on the built-in drag and drop email builder. You also get meaningful campaign reports and get to watch your statistics feed in real-time.
Pricing: Moosend offers various affordable pricing plans based on the number of subscribers. The plans offer:
- The free plan allows you to send unlimited emails to 1,000 subscribers.
- Paid plans start at $10/month; you get unlimited emails to up to 10,000 subscribers for $55/month.
- By using its 6 month and yearly plans you can save up to fifteen-percent and twenty-percent respectively.
- They also have a “pay-as-you-go” plan, ideal for occasional senders you only pay when you send.
Mandrill
Mandrill is a simple, powerful SMTP service created by Mailchimp. It’s a secure and efficient way to send automated transactional emails such as password resets, order confirmations, and welcome messages if you’re a Mailchimp user.
It can also be used to send your email marketing and one-to-one e-commerce emails. Mandrill can be easily integrated with the Mailchimp platform (on the downside it only works with the Mailchimp platform) and offers a dashboard showing detailed statistics, a thirty-day, searchable activity log for info about the emails you’ve sent. Other analytics features include split-testing, comparative reports, and custom metadata thus providing you with a comprehensive review of the email campaigns.
Pricing: Mandrill is a monthly paid add-on for Standard (starting at $14.99) and higher-paid Mailchimp monthly plans. Users on Free, Essentials, and Pay As You Go Mailchimp plans will need to switch to an eligible monthly plan to use Mandrill.
With Mandrill, you’ll buy blocks of email credits at a recurring monthly rate. For a single block of 25,000 emails, it’s $20.
Pepipost
The final item on the list is the Pepipost, which is both an email API and SMTP service, with the help of which you can easily send emails through secured and white-listed servers. The reason why it’s on this list is because it focuses on what matters: deliverability, pricing, and good analytics.
The highly scalable platform is capable of delivering emails in bulk with the best inbox rates. Easy integration (you don’t have to worry about the coding part as the ready-to-use plug-ins serve the purpose) and disruptive pricing model makes Pepipost the ideal email delivery partner for both burgeoning startups and industry bigwigs.
Moreover, it keeps track of your email delivery rates; open rates, and bounce rates, as well as notifying you of unsubscribers and other actions taken by your users.
Pricing: The Pepipost SMTP server offers free trial in which users can send 30,000 emails for the first 30 days for free after that 100 emails per day forever. The service has multiple paid plans starting at $15 per month.
Final verdict…
So, that’s it, I hope this blog will help you to find the best SMTP service provider to help increase your business productivity. All these are one of the best available, although, they all differ from each other on the basis of features, pricing, ease of use, number of emails allowed on a free plan and so forth, one thing that’s common among them all is that they are all reliable. So, choose one among them and start sending mass emails in few seconds.