SparkPost Reviews

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

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.

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.

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.

Templating for emails API functionality Admin interface

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.

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 compliance@sparkpost.com to try and remedy the situation. Thanks again and have a wonderful rest of your week!

Sparkpost is very reliable for transactional email sendings, and the free plan provides unbelievable value.

Some Sparkpost features cannot be altered via the dashboard, and therefore require some API/programming knowledge to change - however this is improving.

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.

I haven't found a thing to dislike, and I'm pretty picky about the software our agency uses (see my other reviews).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hi Julen, Thanks for your review. However, we do not restrict daily sending limits to 1000 per day on paid accounts. If we did, we'd be out of business. Some of our largest customers send 1B+ emails per day. I would suggest logging a ticket with support inside the app to help you with configuration.

Integration Step I Liked the Most. Just Add Your Domain Verify Records & You are Ready to Go With SMTP, Easy to Setup & Now Cheaper Plans.

They Reduced the Free Emails Limit Now Also Sometime I see .in Domains are not Getting integrated it says TLD not allowed. I don't Know Why they Say so as it's a Global tld. I had to use the .net domain then. Also there is No Direct email process from dashboard

Thanks for the kind review, Sonu! Happy Sending!

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

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.

I love that they offer so much to you beyond the emails. They contact you with webinars, and offer help in any capacity.

Still learning the program and features, they are so helpful that I don't think I will find any issues

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.

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.

Thanks for your review and your feedback! We have passed along your suggestion to our product team. Would you be willing to chat with them for further feedback?

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...

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

Glad you're enjoying the service! We do not plan on un-grandfathering anyone who took advantage of the 100K free plan back in 2016. But we do want you to be successful, so hopefully your business will grow and you'll be sending a lot more than 100K emails/month eventually. Best of luck and Happy Sending!

SparkPost is a great email delivery platform with an easy-to-navigate web UI and straightforward setup. Support is quick to respond (within 24 hours) and always willing to help. Service is reliable and far more affordable than a lot of competitors.

Automatic reputation monitoring is always a plus, as well as integrated deliverability testing to see if emails are being delivered to recipient inboxes. Would love to see these features added in the future!

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.

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...

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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.

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...

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We are terribly sorry we couldn¿t get this resolved, it is an edge case limitation within our current payment infrastructure in the UK and we are actively looking to get this addressed so everyone can take advantage of the SparkPost service. We appreciate the feedback.

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

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

None anymore, better services are available.

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

Hi Adam, I'm sorry to hear about your experience. 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 which prohibits affiliate marketing, and which is why you were suspended. (https://www.sparkpost.com/policies/messaging/). If you feel this does not apply to you, you can always write in to compliance@sparkpost.com to try and remedy the situation.

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

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.”

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

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

Easy to use and implement, the tool works good.

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.

Hi Luis, thank you for taking the time to let us know about your experience! 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 compliance@sparkpost.com to try and remedy the situation.

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

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

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.

they should include the undo option in the mobile app.

I do like that the product ties into our CRM and that we can build our emails and style them through our CRM. It's nice having everything in one spot.

We do tend to go to spam a lot and when looking at Sparkpost, the lingo is very confusing unless you have someone who understands code.