SparkPost Reviews

Pros
Obviously its ability to send transactional emails. It gives insight on a user's activity in-relation to the email you will have sent which make studying trends easy. Great email event filtering tool It offer an adequate amount of free monthly e-mails for large services.

Cons
The API for getting events for emails sent doesn't have an option to set different endpoint for different domains. I can't view contents of an email sent, it'd be great if it stored an actual copy of the email being sent It can be slow to send messages at times.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
Works wonderfully as a basic SMTP service for our office's needs with plenty of additional features available for web developers as well. Definitely one of the cheapest SMTP services out there. Good customer support and responses are usually within 24 hours of submitting the ticket should a problem arise. Decent reporting/tracking dashboard via the web app allows us to track bounces from our email campaigns and clean up our database accordingly. Auto-suppression list prevents us from emailing invalid addresses more than once. Overall, great service at a great price.

Cons
Recent update to "Message Events" report dashboard requires more clicks than before and is a bit cumbersome when selecting a date range/filter options, but is still functional. Also there is no way to remove dedicated IP's from your account after purchasing without reaching out to customer support, but this is a minor complaint.

Rating breakdown

Pros
We love the ability to integrate our own software stack at will (e.g. through the maintained sparkpost-python package or Webhooks) and have SparkPost just provide a solid general purpose interface. The reports section in the dashboard gives us everything you expect. Onboarding was great as well as customer service which we contacted on different occasions and always got back to us in a timely manner with a helpful response. This company and employees clearly know their (tricky) business. Hope the A/B testing feature graduates from their "labs" and finds it's way into the stable product API. Received a great merch t-shirt for filling out one of their developer surveys (now everyone on the team wants one...). No matter whether you fall under the generous free plan (100k) or need to scale really hard - a lot of other services will impose strict limits on your budget when you start sending a million or more emails per month. Simple summary: We're happy users and can recommend to everyone. Rock on!

Cons
Would be great have access to more detailed billing stats. The missing piece really is solid "email templating" but then you have to understand that SparkPost is not in the market for that and give you the tools (expose API endpoint for that) to instead integrate your own solution.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I switched to SparkPost from Sendgrid because of their more generous free plan back in 2016, and found it easy to drop in replacement code/API snippets to transition to SparkPost

Cons
All good things must come to an end and the 100k/month tier is no longer offered! Good while it lasts, though one wonders if the now grandfathered plan will one day end.

Rating breakdown

Pros
SparkPost is easy to integrate and easy to use, and used to offer great customer service before this year.

Cons
I signed up for a free account two years ago, to manage the email needs of our small non-profit. The account was advertised as "Free Forever." Later when they changed the pricing tiers, I received an email saying: "When you signed up, we promised that if we ever changed the terms of our 100K free plan, we would continue to honor the original plan for the life of the account. I would like to reaffirm this promise." This week they reneged on their promise, forcing small companies into exponentially more expensive pricing plans, despite explicitly promising never to do that.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

Pros
The service is easy to set up and makes sending email, but the cons, which you'll see below make this service unfit for sending emails from Wordpress.

Cons
I have been using SparkPost for a long time and use it to send comment and form notifications from Wordpress. So maybe a few dozen emails per month. Today when I logged into my account I found it was suspended. I emailed their support team and they emailed back with a suspicious link and asked me to explain why I sent an email with that link in it. This was the only information they gave me. My best guess was that it was from a spam comment on my Wordpress site, which would have been a notification to me personally. I said this and asked for more details to help look into the issue further, but they rejected that response and said they couldn't help any further and would stand by their suspension. So now I'm locked out of my account and need to figure out a way to find out, which domains I need to move away from their service.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
SparkPost is, in theory a very nice and slick email delivery service. They offer a fair amount of free emails each month. When it's working, it's great.

Cons
SparkPost will prompt you to add a credit card to cover any overages outside of your free amount. This seems fair, and I decided I didn't want emails not being sent should I ever exceed the free allotment, so I tried to add a card. It failed. I tried another one. It failed. I tried a third. It failed. Baffled I gave up and tried again a few days later. Same problem. I began to worry that my account wouldn't be secured and that emails might go unsent. I emailed their customer support to ask if they could help. They asked me to double check that I'd entered my address correctly. Fine. I confirmed I had. They replied and asked me to make ABSOLUTELY SURE I was entering it correctly. I reiterated that I was absolutely, 100% sure, and sent a screenshot of my address from my online bank account to prove it. They wrote back and told me that I needed to be sure my address ABSOLUTELY correct. Frustrated, I phoned my bank to see what I could do. My bank checked my transactions and discovered that they'd *approved* every one, but SparkPost had then *reversed the authorisation*. I informed SparkPost of this, that there was a problem with *their* system. Their response: "I'm sorry to hear you are still unable to pass the system's address verification. We have the address verification in place to prevent fraudulent charges." A bureaucratic nightmare! If this is how they are if you're trying to GIVE them money, imagine how they must be with other problems!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

Pros
Super easy to get started. We just use this as a secondary SMTP relay. The one time use API keys for the relay seems more secure then other offerings.

Cons
Reporting and user interface isn't as good compared to SendGrid. It's just lacking the ability to search for specific messages. It's also hard at times to figure out where you need to go to find the information you need. We had several issues consistently delivering mail to specific customers, but perhaps that's because we were on the free tier.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 4/10

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).

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
I adore that I can design a post for one social media platform, then seamlessly resize my design to accommodate different sized media posts. For example, I can make a promotion for an upcoming event for Facebook, then toggle to the Instagram size (square), and my design, colors & fonts are transferred to the new format. I still have to tweak the results a little bit, but I don’t have to re-design posts for each media outlet!

Cons
I love this software, but wish I could import my own fonts.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Has a nice Look and feel. Deliverability rates i seems to be good. but i can't tried with my complete list of contacts because SparkPost limit account to send only 1000 emails by day, even after pay for a professional plan.

Cons
Very complicated to configure sending domains. Sub-accounts management is not user friendly When you open a nwe account you have a limit of 1000 emails to send daily. Its ridiculous whe you manage list of 50M emails.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

Pros
I can send tons of emails that are delivering direct to inbox from CF7.

Cons
I can only send from integration and not from the Spark Post dashboard, which is understandable.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
None anymore, better services are available.

Cons
They'll happily terminate your service with no notice after 5 years of custom.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

Pros
Pretty easy to set up, but had to use subdomain name for outgoing mail, not a fan.

Cons
Got flagged due to spam for having a link for acuity scheduling in a follow up sequence without even sending more than 4 test emails to myself. Then got kicked off completely and when asking for explanation the reponse was: “We are sorry that we cannot divulge any information. Good day.”

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

Pros
I love that they have great documentation, low prices and high quality services! (good email reputation)

Cons
They do not offer the possibility to send many emails from their website, only via code.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Easy to use and implement, the tool works good.

Cons
They can suspend your account without previous notification or warning, clear information about suspension is not offer until you take a ticket and ask them. The account might be suspended even you have followed their own recommendations. And if that was not enough you can't cancel your account while this is suspended.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 0/10

Pros
I create advwrtisments, announcements, and memes on SparkPost. I love all of the features and ideas that come preset.

Cons
It can be a little bit tricky to maneuver on my phone for some of the features.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
The ease of use is best part of this software. We can create post through mobile using their app under 10 minutes. I have experience using softwares like Canva, Designr and may more . They are all on computer but on mobile. The templates available enable the user to get more Ideas and adapt the same for their use. Multiple font options available make the creativity to next level.

Cons
they should include the undo option in the mobile app.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
They have a free plan for you to try and the interface is user-friendly.

Cons
Worst customer service that will lie to your face.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 1/10

Pros
Easy to use, very intuitive. I use it a lot to make instagram post, I found that the app version is pretty easy to use but the pc version I feel like an old lady using it, I just don’t understand how it works

Cons
The pc version (webpage). It is pretty uncomfortable to use

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

Pros
With simple configuration you can send automatic mail from your app.

Cons
Free account has changed to a few emails

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
The free plan was extremely generous, more than other competitions. Setup is also quick, and good documentation to get you up and running.

Cons
Sometimes, there was a very long lag to Microsoft emails (i.e. Outlook, hotmail) - where emails were delivered more than 2 days later. Emails to Gmail however was unaffected. Inspite of exchanging several emails with the customer support, the problem was not fixed.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 5/10