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An order confirmation email, a password reset, and a dispatch update email don’t sound exciting. But for marketers, transactional emails are often an overlooked opportunity. They’re one of the first emails a customer receives from you and have way higher open rates than marketing emails. When done right, transactional emails can be a great opportunity to strengthen customer relationships.
If a customer has ordered from you, maybe they’re interested in another one of your products. If they’re resetting their password, perhaps they’re logging in after a long time and need a product tour refresher. All transactional emails are an occasion to deepen customer trust and share personalized offers.
And even if you don’t plan on using transactional emails beyond their obvious use case, there’s no denying that they’re one of the most important forms of customer communication. If you don’t inform your buyers (or inform them too late) of an order dispatch, a password reset, or a new device login, it can have significant costs for your business and customer experience. You want to land in their primary inbox and you want to do that fast.
I’ve been researching, testing, and writing about email marketing software for the last five years. And I know the decision to choose an email tool can be time-consuming. To update this list for this year, I spent several weeks researching and testing nearly two dozen transactional email apps. Based on that experience, here are the seven best.
The best transactional email services
What makes the best transactional email service?
How we evaluate and test apps
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Picking a tool to send transactional emails is tricky—there are tons of options offering similar services and competitive pricing. I started by figuring out what the essential features were for apps in this category. Here’s what I looked for during my evaluation of transactional email providers:
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Value for money. Transactional email tools are a heavy investment. It’s essential to get a feel of the app before purchasing, so the best transactional email apps aren’t just competitively priced but also include a free trial or a cheaper plan with fewer features to test out the tool without an annual financial commitment.
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Ease of setting up. There’s nothing more frustrating than signing up for a transactional email app, making an account, and then being unable to figure out how to configure your domain. Your team—developers or not—should be able to easily log in to the app and set it up for action.
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Customer support. Even the experts need help sometimes. Success with a transactional email app means getting quick and reliable support—whether that’s in the form of live chat, email, or phone. The best tools also have an extensive and updated knowledge base so you can help yourself when possible.
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Customizing the emails. The days of boring and bland transactional emails are long gone. Customers now expect branded transactional emails with your logo, aesthetic designs, and overall an amazing experience. The best transactional emails make it easy for you to design and brand your emails. I haven’t included tools that require coding to customize all emails. You need to be able to create them easily using drag-and-drop features, just like marketing emails.
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Deliverability. There’s nothing worse than a customer receiving their dispatch status email in spam, or worse, not receiving any update at all. The ideal transactional email app has excellent deliverability—ensuring you land in your customers’ inboxes on time.
To find the best options, I signed up for free trials of all the apps that met my criteria and tested them. I added contacts, drafted an email, and sent two or three test emails for each app—unless their domain verification process made it impossible to move ahead with testing. Along the way, I took notes on everything I encountered—what I liked and what I didn’t like.
I also read user reviews to better understand how the various features held up over a period of several months or years, versus just a few weeks. For example, I checked to see if there was overwhelmingly negative feedback about deliverability or bounced emails when the volume of emails increases as a business scales. Once I’d narrowed down the list, I tested the shortlist again, even more in-depth, to be sure each service lived up to its unique selling point. And that’s how I landed on these seven apps.
The best transactional email services at a glance
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Best for |
Standout features |
Pricing |
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|---|---|---|---|
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Transactional emails and email marketing in one |
Easy setup and drag-and-drop email design |
Free for up to 100 emails/day for 60 days; paid plans from $19.95/month for up to 100,000 emails |
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Quick and reliable email delivery |
Integration with ActiveCampaign allows you to run combined email sequences |
Free for up to 100 emails/month; paid plans from $15/month for 10,000 emails |
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Enterprise businesses |
Email validation to clean your list; inbox placement to understand which folder your emails land in |
Free for up to 100 emails/day; paid plans from $15/month for 10,000 emails |
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Cost-effective plans |
Intuitive drag-and-drop email builder and customization options |
Free for up to 3,000 emails/month; paid plans from $35/month for 50,000 emails |
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Interactive emails |
Create interactive emails easily from various templates; fetches your brand logo, font, colors automatically |
Free trial for 21 days; plans from $49/month for 2,500 contacts and 20,000 emails |
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SaaS businesses |
Can add unlimited teammates; built on AWS SES infrastructure |
Free for test emails only; plans from $20/month for 10,000 emails |
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A pay-as-you-go option |
24/7 email and phone assistance |
Free for up to 10,000 emails; £2 per credit (1 credit = 10,000 emails), valid for 6 months |
Best transactional email service for transactional emails and email marketing in one
SendGrid
SendGrid pros:
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Setting up is easy and fast
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Excellent deliverability and deliverability insights
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Drag-and-drop feature to create and design emails easily
SendGrid cons:
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It might be expensive to scale after you cross the 300K email mark—price jumps from $89.95/month to $249/month
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The drag-and-drop email editor can feel a little outdated
If you want to manage your transactional emails and marketing emails under one roof, SendGrid is the way to go. Transactional emails are at the core of SendGrid’s business, so it’s no surprise it’s a killer in this domain. And it stacks up really nicely against some other big names.
For example: SendGrid has an intuitive email editor and useful deliverability insights. (SendGrid even offers deliverability consulting if you need additional support.) You can see which mailbox providers most of your customers use, track deliverability trends, and view these insights alongside your email marketing dashboard. SendGrid outshines other apps with its API integrations and support for multiple frameworks like Java, PHP, Go, Python, and C#.
SendGrid’s email templates are great for customizing and branding emails. There are a lot of options to add your brand logo, alter the design, and even add your own code.
I was also impressed by their email testing—you can do inbox rendering and test your emails for how they look and deliver on different devices. But this ease of use comes with a trade-off: SendGrid probably wouldn’t be your ideal choice of email marketing app if you’re looking for complex automation and workflows.
The email testing capabilities, combined with SendGrid’s comprehensive analytics, make it super easy to continually improve your emails based on feedback. So if you want to do your email marketing and transactional emails in one place—without sacrificing the quality of the transactional side of things—SendGrid is my pick. (You can also purchase marketing and transactional email services separately if you don’t want to commit to both services off the bat.)
You can also automate SendGrid with SendGrid’s Zapier integrations to do things like automatically sending transactional emails based on new form submissions or spreadsheet updates. Learn more about how to automate SendGrid, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
SendGrid pricing: Free for up to 100 emails/day for 60 days. The Essential plan begins at $19.95/month and includes up to 100,000 emails, guaranteed response time on ticket and chat support, and more.
MoEngage is a good alternative to SendGrid, if you want all your customer engagement tasks within a single tool. It can help you practice cross-channel marketing, analyze customer behavior, deliver personalized experiences, and send transactional emails. It does a host of things, but it doesn’t particularly excel at transactional email.
Best transactional email service for quick and reliable email delivery
Postmark
Postmark pros:
Postmark cons:
Postmark specializes in only one service—transactional email—and does it well. It goes back to basics, focusing on core email sending.
Where Postmark stands out is its speedy email delivery: it aims to deliver all your emails within 10 seconds after you press send (they have a separate message stream for transactional emails to ensure timely delivery in the primary inbox). I was able to verify this while testing—the email I sent was delivered within 7 or 8 seconds of sending. Having a separate email infrastructure for your transactional emails also preserves your email reputation better.
The setup instructions are pretty straightforward, and you can speed up the process with some help from your engineering team. You simply choose the language or framework you want to use and get instructions for setting up. The knowledge base felt much more approachable than the other apps on this list, too, and reviews rave about the company’s useful, clear, and quick support.
Since ActiveCampaign has acquired Postmark, you can integrate the two and design your transactional emails in a drag-and-drop editor. (Postmark also has several useful email templates available for specific use cases like welcome emails and password reset emails, although they aren’t as useful as SendGrid’s.) This makes the process simpler and also provides fancier options to edit your transactional emails. You can even use the integration to set up a combined automated email sequence. For example, if you want to send a relevant marketing email to someone after they purchase a product from you, you can do that easily by connecting your ActiveCampaign and Postmark account.
And you can do even more with your transactional email by using Postmark’s Zapier integrations to do things like getting notified via Slack whenever an email bounces and even resend it. Here are a few examples to show you how it works.
Postmark pricing: Free for up to 100 emails per month. Paid plans begin at $15/month for 10,000 emails. (Unused emails don’t roll over to the next month.) If you’re a bootstrapped company, Postmark also offers a $75 account credit to help you reduce your email costs.
Best transactional email service for enterprise businesses
Mailgun
Mailgun pros:
Mailgun cons:
Mailgun is one of the top names that comes up when talking about transactional email, and for good reason: it’s easy to use, has a drag-and-drop editor (and a code-based editor, too, if you need it), and excellent deliverability.
There’s a five-step onboarding process to set up your account, send a test email in a sandbox environment, and add the API/SMTP details. Like with most tools, the help of a developer can make things much quicker.
Mailgun is perfect for enterprise businesses because many of its best services come at additional cost. The email validation service that helps you clean up your list and stop sending emails to wrong invalid addresses, for example, is excellent for improving your email reputation and reducing bounce rates. But it comes at an additional $49/month. And if you have more than 2,500 emails, the cost jumps to $99/month. The best support (phone and chat) is also limited to the highest paying customers. All the other customers get ticket support—which would’ve been fine if I didn’t see mixed reviews about their customer service online.
On top of all that, Mailgun comes with all the features you need to keep on top of high volumes of transactional emails. I particularly liked the inbox placement feature, which allows you to test which folder your email is likely to land in before you hit send.
To make Mailgun more powerful, connect it to Zapier, so you can do things like trigger a Slack message for failed email deliveries or bounce events. Here are a few other examples to get you started, or you can learn more about how to automate Mailgun with Zapier.
Mailgun pricing: Free for up to 100 emails/day. Paid plans begin at $15/month for 10,000 emails.
Best transactional email service for cost-effective plans
MailerSend
MailerSend pros:
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Generous free plan and relatively cost-effective pricing for high volume sending, too
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Lots of options to customize and brand your emails
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Email verification feature to remove fake, misspelled, or inactive emails
MailerSend cons:
MailerSend is a dream come true for non-tech teams and developers. Its drag-and-drop email builder is smooth and super intuitive, but there’s also a rich text editor and HTML for developers who need it. I also found some of the best transactional email templates in this tool, so you never have to start from scratch.. I opted for the drag-and-drop email builder and found 50 templates—ranging from simple shipping notifications to complex ones like order-on-hold.
I tested the order confirmation email template, and it was really quick to customize: adding and deleting various content blocks (social links, image, etc.), changing the background, modifying sections—it all took less than 15 minutes (given I had every detail and attachment available on my desktop). It has a lot of features, but it’s really easy to use. The dashboard is simple to navigate, and you can find everything you need without wasting a minute.
The whole setup process was similarly easy: there are even domain authentication instructions that pop up as a chatbox as you finish setting up. I found that particularly helpful because there was a guide available for various domain providers, including GoDaddy, Wix, Namecheap, and more—meaning a user doesn’t have to hunt for other resources outside the app. I also noticed a pattern in reviews where multiple customers appreciated how quick it was to get their account approved (which is a major friction point with competitors). If something doesn’t work, there’s email support in the free plan and chat support in the paid plans. There’s no phone support in any plan, although the higher-tier plans do get onboarding assistance.
They also have an email verification feature that allows you to run a fine-toothed comb through your email list and remove any emails that are misspelled, fake, spam, or simply inactive. This could be immensely helpful in validating your email list—and by extension, boosting your sender reputation and deliverability rate.
What I love is MailerSend pricing doesn’t get out of hand as your sending volume increases. In SendGrid, this was a major con: if you wanted to jump from sending 100K transactional emails to 300K, the price increased to a whopping $249/month. In MailerSend, sending 250K transactional email costs $162.50/month. Even in its free plan, MailerSend doesn’t restrict you to sending 100 emails/day (like many other services on this list). You can send 3,000 emails per month with no cap on per day volume.
If you also send transactional SMS to your customers, you can combine the two using MailerSend. You can’t send text messages in the free plan, but there’s and SMS API available in all the paid plans across North America. The company’s planning on expanding the SMS service to more regions in the future.
To do even more with MailerSend, you can use MailerSend’s Zapier integrations to automate your transactional emails. Get Slack notifications for hard bounced emails, send an email for refunded PayPal sales, or anything else you can think of to connect all your apps.
MailerSend pricing: Free for up to 3,000 emails per month. The premium plan begins at $35/month for 50,000 emails; $0.95 for an additional thousand emails.
Best transactional email service for interactive emails
Mailmodo
Mailmodo pros:
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Interactive email editor to level up your transactional emails
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Automatically fetches your brand logo, fonts, etc.
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Embedded AI
Mailmodo cons:
Mailmodo is unlike any other app on this list because it helps you create AMP emails—a technology that allows you to add interactive elements within your email content.
For example, if you want to give a first-time customer a unique discount code, you can set up a “spin the wheel” element inside the email itself to offer various choices and gamify the experience. Similarly, you can embed NPS forms in post-purchase emails. Or you can offer product recommendations from your Shopify store. Mailmodo has over 300 such interactive email templates and various widgets to improve your transactional emails (as long as your customers use email apps that support it). I found it quite cool that it also automatically fetches your brand logo, fonts, and colors into the emails.
Because of its unique features, Mailmodo definitely has a bigger learning curve than most of the other tools on this list. But its knowledge base is quite good, and support is also responsive.
The deliverability infrastructure is good, but it’s worth noting that interactive emails require you to maintain a strong email reputation. You need to keep an eye on your domain reputation score within Mailmodo to ensure your emails are getting delivered in primary on time.
Mailmodo is priced based on the number of contacts and emails—so it definitely doesn’t come cheap. But if you’re looking to elevate your transactional emails, I’d definitely recommend giving Mailmodo a shot. To get even more out of Mailmodo, connect it to Zapier, so you can do things like trigger new journeys for new or updated Google Sheets rows. Here are a few other examples to get you started.
Mailmodo pricing: Free trial for 21 days. Paid plans begin at $49/month for 2,500 contacts and 20,000 emails. Mailmodo offers discounted plans for NGOs.
Best transactional email service for SaaS businesses
Waypoint
Waypoint pros:
Waypoint cons:
Waypoint is a transactional email app built on AWS infrastructure. So, if you want the reliability of AWS SES with a visual editor, Waypoint is the perfect choice. You can easily set it up using the knowledge base, but a developer helping you would definitely make the process more efficient.
Once you’re set up, you don’t need to write a single line of code. Waypoint has various templates—from “Download ready” to “Here’s your OTP”— that you can easily edit using the drag-and-drop editor. The email builder itself is simple to use and straightforward, but it doesn’t have a lot of fancy features like adding social links.
Another thing I liked is you can add unlimited team members on all plans. This is a major plus for SaaS companies where you’d like the input of product, marketing, and dev in transactional emails.
Waypoint is still a young app—it was founded in 2023. That means you might end up communicating with the founders in support conversations, which is neat. But it also means you’re taking a gamble on an app that hasn’t been around quite as long. If you’re ok with that, I’d say it’s definitely worth a try.
Waypoint pricing: Free for test emails only. You can purchase a paid plan for $20/month for 10,000 emails.
Sidemail is a good alternative to Waypoint if you’re looking for an all-in-one email platform for your SaaS business. Like Waypoint, Sidemail’s transactional email service has a visual drag-and-drop editor and it’s also built on AWS infrastructure. But you can also use it to send product emails, newsletters, and onboarding sequences.
Best transactional email service for a pay-as-you-go option
Zoho ZeptoMail
ZeptoMail pros:
ZeptoMail cons:
ZeptoMail combines the best of SendGrid and MailerSend. It has 24/7 email and phone call assistance in all its plans (even the free one!)—which is an absolute standout in the transactional email service market. And it’s part of the Zoho suite of apps, which is known for its affordability.
I loved ZeptoMail’s email templates. There are a ton of options to choose from, and they’re super easy to customize. There’s a drag-and-drop builder like MailerSend (although not as thorough). I’d say my experience within the app was even slightly better than SendGrid because the UI and UX was better and the email editor was more modern. But if I had to pick, MailerSend has the most features while ZeptoMail stays simple with no bells and whistles.
Setting up is easy, but not as smooth as Postmark. You might need some tech assistance (which is great with their 24/7 phone support!) initially to set up your SMTP or API. But after this friction, the app is easy and intuitive to use. You can select multiple mail agents to send your transactional emails.
The deliverability is ok—it wasn’t very quick, but the email landed in my primary inbox, so that’s a win. Like Postmark, ZeptoMail also uses separate email infrastructure for delivering transactional emails, which helps preserve your email reputation.
I also love that ZeptoMail has a pay-as-you-go option. It’s beneficial if you have seasonally high requirements (like during the holidays). The credits you purchase are valid for six months, so there’s enough time to utilize them all and not pay for more emails than you’re using.
Another great feature was the email segmentation options. You can categorize your emails by purpose (like login-related emails vs. order-related emails), domain, or even application. The various mail agents you create will have their own analytics and credentials.
To do more with ZeptoMail, connect it to Zapier, so you can do things like send Slack messages for new email activities or email bounces. Here are some other examples to get you started.
ZeptoMail pricing: Free for up to 10,000 emails. You can purchase one credit for £2 (1 credit = 10,000 emails). Each credit is valid for six months.
Which transactional email app should you use?
If you’re already using an email marketing tool that offers a transactional email service, it’s worth starting there. If it doesn’t offer deliverability or the features that you need, give the apps on this list a try. It’s worth investing in a dedicated transactional email app—especially if you send a high volume of emails.
No matter which app you choose, you want your emails to be as effective as possible. Here are a few ideas to level up your transactional email app with automation. Then take a look at how to nurture customer relationships with email automation.
Related reading:
This article was originally published in January 2015 by Matthew Guay. The most recent update was in July 2025.