SparkPost Overview
What is SparkPost?
SparkPost is a cloud-based email analytics solution designed to help businesses of all sizes optimize email performance, deliverability, engagement, and more. The platform includes predictive intelligence technology, which allows marketers to gain insights into campaign health, engagement rate and spam links to diagnose performance issues.
SparkPost includes real-time analytics, which let managers view and manage email delivery performance based on metrics such as bounce rate, blocks, and read/open status. It offers a host of features including A/B testing, instant alerts, spam trap indicator, recipient validation, optimization recommendations, and more. The PowerMTA module, an on-premise message transfer system, assists organizations with sending bulk emails. Customizable templates help teams create personalized emails for marketing.
SparkPost’s customer engagement insights let users analyze data related to unsubscribe ratio and spam complaint rate to improve ROI. The platform also integrates with various websites and third-party systems such as Boomtrain, Kickbox, Ongage, Zapier, Magento, Cordial, Blueshift, OpenText, and mGage using an API.
SparkPost Overview
Pricing
Pricing options
SparkPost pricing is based on the number of emails sent per month. It offers a free Test plan for users to try out SparkPost's analytics and alerting functionalities. Paid plans start from $20/month for up to 50k emails, and $30/month for up to 100k emails on the Starter plan, with real-time alerts, spam trap monitoring, email health alerts, and predictive analytics. The Premier plan starts from $75/month for up to 100k emails, $170/month for up to 250k emails, $290/month for up to 500k emails, and $525/month for up to 1 million emails, for A/B testing scheduled sending, subaccounts, and more. Enterprise plans are also available on request for customers sending more than 1 million emails per month.
SparkPost Features
Media
SparkPost Reviews
SparkPost Reviews
Bulletproof API mail delivery with OK freemium tier
I use the SMTP integration to send administrative alerts from my web servers. I appreciate the reliability of deliverability for these critical messages. I prefer to offload the responsibility of sending email from my web servers so they can do the job of hosting. The other benefit I get is that my SPF and DKIM settings can be static for all domains I host instead of tying my sending IPs to my hosting IPs, which have the possibility of changing. I can also easily whitelist delivery of my admin alerts to make sure I receive critical information instead of it accidentally being sent to spam.
Not a service you want to rely on
I can only warn anybody who relies on their mail being sent to use sparkpost.
We used sparkpost for more than two years. It seems that several months ago they added some automated abuse detection which flagged our account. We only use sparkpost to send transactional mail to our customers and do not send unsolicited marketing mails or similar.
When our account got suspended we couldn't reach anybody to fix this for hours. After finally getting into contact our account got activated again and we just received a standardised "Sorry" E-Mail and that's it.
We haven't had the resources to switch out our mail provider and now after 6 weeks our account got suspended again. After not being able to reach somebody for hours, the person we got in contact with only told us that some other department was responsible for account suspensions.
This service absolutely terrible and you definitely do not want this as a critical part in your architecture.
Can't beat the price, but usability could be improved
The Sparkpost team is clearly committed to improving their product, and they care about their customers. For anyone who's happy to use the API for configuration, using Sparkpost is a no-brainer.
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Bulletproof API mail delivery with OK freemium tier
Pros
API delivery is super simple and offers SMTP server-based injection
Easy to set up DKIM and SPF
Freemium tier meets my needs for basic services
Admin panel offers great reporting
Lots of technical guidance on effective bulk sending
Cons
There are other services that offer higher send limits with their free tier, but SparkPost purports to have better deliverability. This seems a fine tradeoff for the lower limit at the free level since I don't come close to hitting my cap.
Good service to make sure your emails will arrive where they should
Pros
I never had the problem of an email not arriving or getting into the spam folder after installing Sparkpost. It has an easy to install WordPress plugin that makes sure all emails that are sent by the website get sent via Sparkpost. Before installing Sparkpost we had several clients complaining that filled in contact forms would land in their spam folder but we haven't had the problem after installing Sparkpost.
It is also very cheap to use. For our use-case we haven't even gotten above the free threshold.
Cons
It can be a hassle sometimes to activate a domain for sending, requiring altering the DNS of the website. You can also activate it via an email address associated with the domain but this doesn't always work great either.
After a domain has been added to another account it can't be added or transfered to a different account afterwards without the old account deleting the domain. We had this problem with one client for which we couldn't activate Sparkpost because it had been installed by another party before and we didn't know who this was so we couldn't ask them to remove the domain from Sparkpost.
Not a service you want to rely on
I can only warn anybody who relies on their mail being sent to use sparkpost.
We used sparkpost for more than two years. It seems that several months ago they added some automated abuse detection which flagged our account. We only use sparkpost to send transactional mail to our customers and do not send unsolicited marketing mails or similar.
When our account got suspended we couldn't reach anybody to fix this for hours. After finally getting into contact our account got activated again and we just received a standardised "Sorry" E-Mail and that's it.
We haven't had the resources to switch out our mail provider and now after 6 weeks our account got suspended again. After not being able to reach somebody for hours, the person we got in contact with only told us that some other department was responsible for account suspensions.
This service absolutely terrible and you definitely do not want this as a critical part in your architecture.
Pros
Templating for emails
API functionality
Admin interface
Cons
Service reliability. We got suspended not once but TWICE. And couldn't get into contact with the right customer support person. Our whole business relies on messages/orders being sent, so this is really frustrating.
Asynchronous nature of API. When you send a message you always receive an "200 OK" Status Code. To get to know if a message got successfully sent you need to query another API.
Response from SparkPost
Hi Bernhardt, thank you for taking the to leave this review. In order to protect all of our senders against potentially bad actors or bad sending practices that would affect sending pools, we have a strong Messaging Policy that we enforce posted on our website (https://www.sparkpost.com/policies/messaging/). If you feel this does not apply to you, you can always write in to [email protected] to try and remedy the situation. Thanks again and have a wonderful rest of your week!
Can't beat the price, but usability could be improved
The Sparkpost team is clearly committed to improving their product, and they care about their customers. For anyone who's happy to use the API for configuration, using Sparkpost is a no-brainer.
Pros
Sparkpost is very reliable for transactional email sendings, and the free plan provides unbelievable value.
Cons
Some Sparkpost features cannot be altered via the dashboard, and therefore require some API/programming knowledge to change - however this is improving.
Sparkpost - solves key email challenges
Pros
This software has a focused feature set and executes it flawlessly and consistently. We utilize this feature to notify key stakeholders about real-time marketing effectiveness and new SQLs. The volume we send is high, and this program has met every challenge, without needing us to constantly babysit it.
Cons
I haven't found a thing to dislike, and I'm pretty picky about the software our agency uses (see my other reviews).
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SparkPost Pricing
SparkPost Pricing
SparkPost pricing is based on the number of emails sent per month. It offers a free Test plan for users to try out SparkPost's analytics and alerting functionalities. Paid plans start from $20/month for up to 50k emails, and $30/month for up to 100k emails on the Starter plan, with real-time alerts, spam trap monitoring, email health alerts, and predictive analytics. The Premier plan starts from $75/month for up to 100k emails, $170/month for up to 250k emails, $290/month for up to 500k emails, and $525/month for up to 1 million emails, for A/B testing scheduled sending, subaccounts, and more. Enterprise plans are also available on request for customers sending more than 1 million emails per month.
SparkPost pricing is based on the number of emails sent per month. It offers a free Test plan for users to try out SparkPost's analytics and alerting functionalities. Paid plans start from $20/month for up to 50k emails, and $30/month for up to 100k emails on the Starter plan, with real-time alerts, spam trap monitoring, email health alerts, and predictive analytics. The Premier plan starts from $75/month for up to 100k emails, $170/month for up to 250k emails, $290/month for up to 500k emails, and $525/month for up to 1 million emails, for A/B testing scheduled sending, subaccounts, and more. Enterprise plans are also available on request for customers sending more than 1 million emails per month.
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SparkPost Features
SparkPost Features
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Categories
Categories
Additional information for SparkPost
Additional information for SparkPost
Key features of SparkPost
- A/B Testing
- Bounce Tracking
- Email Monitoring
- Event Triggered Email
- Queue Manager
- Routing
- Signature Management
- Spam Check
- Subscriber Management
- Template Management
- Unsubscribe Database
SparkPost FAQs
SparkPost FAQs
Below are some frequently asked questions for SparkPost.
Q. What type of pricing plans does SparkPost offer?
SparkPost offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: $20.00/month
Pricing model: Free, Subscription
Free Trial: Available
SparkPost pricing is based on the number of emails sent per month. It offers a free Test plan for users to try out SparkPost's analytics and alerting functionalities. Paid plans start from $20/month for up to 50k emails, and $30/month for up to 100k emails on the Starter plan, with real-time alerts, spam trap monitoring, email health alerts, and predictive analytics. The Premier plan starts from $75/month for up to 100k emails, $170/month for up to 250k emails, $290/month for up to 500k emails, and $525/month for up to 1 million emails, for A/B testing scheduled sending, subaccounts, and more. Enterprise plans are also available on request for customers sending more than 1 million emails per month.
Q. What are the main features of SparkPost?
SparkPost offers the following features:
- A/B Testing
- Bounce Tracking
- Email Monitoring
- Event Triggered Email
- Queue Manager
- Routing
- Signature Management
- Spam Check
- Subscriber Management
- Template Management
- Unsubscribe Database
Q. Who are the typical users of SparkPost?
SparkPost has the following typical customers:
Small Business, Large Enterprises, Mid Size Business
Q. What languages does SparkPost support?
SparkPost supports the following languages:
English
Q. Does SparkPost support mobile devices?
We do not have any information about what devices SparkPost supports
Q. What other apps does SparkPost integrate with?
SparkPost integrates with the following applications:
Blueshift, Bold BI, Boomtrain, Iterable, KudosHub Email Validation, Magento Commerce, Movable Ink, Moxtra, Sycamore Campus, Zapier
Q. What level of support does SparkPost offer?
SparkPost offers the following support options:
Phone Support, Online Support, FAQs, Forum, Knowledge Base
I use the SMTP integration to send administrative alerts from my web servers. I appreciate the reliability of deliverability for these critical messages. I prefer to offload the responsibility of sending email from my web servers so they can do the job of hosting. The other benefit I get is that my SPF and DKIM settings can be static for all domains I host instead of tying my sending IPs to my hosting IPs, which have the possibility of changing. I can also easily whitelist delivery of my admin alerts to make sure I receive critical information instead of it accidentally being sent to spam.