SMTP service allows you to send emails securely and successfully. As email is one of the most popular ways to communicate, it’s important to send emails back and forth without having to worry about security, messages being lost, or ending up in a spam or junk folder. And SMTP service makes that possible.
With so many options available, it is hard to choose the right SMTP provider for your needs. I have selected the four best SMTP providers that offer some free plan as well as paid options.
Best Cheap SMTP Service Providers
SMTP service providers allow you to send WordPress emails, transactional emails, bulk emails, etc., right from your website. They differ in their pricing plans, simplicity, the number of emails you can send, available features, and how successful they are at delivering emails. Let’s take a look at some of the most budget-friendly SMTP options available.
1. SendGrid
SendGrid is an impressive cloud-based SMTP email provider that allows you to send emails in bulk without managing SMTP server. They offer a lot of features and flexibility.
SendGrid’s SMTP relay works well with any WordPress website and is simple to configure. It provides an email editor with email templates, email analytics, delivery optimization tools, and integration with other third-party services and applications.
Domain name authentication tools and dedicated IP addresses to enhance email delivery rates are also provided.
Pricing: There is a free plan that allows you to send the first 40,000 emails for free. After that, you can send up to 100 emails daily for free. The paid plans start from $14.95 monthly and more, depending on your needs.
Features:
- Delivery optimization resources;
- Helpful analytic tools;
- Dynamic template editor;
- Subuser management;
- Dedicated IP;
- Email validation;
- SMTP Relay, Webhooks, and APIs.
2. SendinBlue
SendinBlue marketing platform provides access to email marketing, live chat, SMS marketing, and transactional email capabilities. It integrates with third-party tools, including WordPress. Their marketing automation and personalization options can help enhance your current or future marketing campaigns to new and existing customers.
SendinBlue SMTP relay service and incredibly extensible API decrease the chances of emails not arriving in user email inboxes. Their intuitive dashboard makes it easy to set up and manage emails.
Pricing: SendinBlue forever free plan allows you to send up to 300 emails daily for free. Paid plans begin at $25 monthly for sending up to 100,000 emails per month without daily sending limits.
Features:
- A/B testing;
- Pre-designed email templates;
- Reports dashboard with detailed analytic information;
- Make multiple lists based on segmentation;
- APIs for integration with Magento, Shopify, Salesforce, WordPress, and other popular platforms;
- SendinBlue allows you to create Facebook ads and set parameters for them. You can also monitor ads to measure their effectiveness.
3. Amazon SES
Amazon SES is a great option for sending transactional, notification, and marketing emails through its cloud-based SMTP service. You get plenty of helpful features, many of which are geared toward developers and advanced users. Amazon SES is one of the least expensive SMTP options available.
Because of its affordability, Amazon SES may initially seem like the best option. However, it’s a minimal service as it offers a bare-bones solution. All that you can do using Amazon SMTP or API is to send emails. Amazon SES doesn’t provide templates, detailed reports, analytics, or any other features besides the ability to send emails.
Pricing: Sites that use AWS web hosting can use their free tier to send up to 62,000 emails monthly for free. For other websites, pricing starts at $0.10 for every 1,000 emails you send.
Features:
- Amazon SES is part of the Amazon set of tools, which means it can be connected to Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon WorkMail, AWS IAM, etc.
- You can get an affordable dedicated IP address.
- They are one of the most trusted email delivery services because of their email authentication policies such as DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records.
- Amazon SES is very flexible in sending promotional and transactional emails. It’s the preferred option for sending mass emails.
4. Mailgun
Many businesses and developers already use this popular SMTP service provider as Mailgun offers powerful APIs to simplify sending emails.
Mailgun can be integrated into eCommerce store sites, small companies, membership sites, or WordPress websites. Their SMTP services for sending transactional and marketing emails can be scaled to fit your needs.
Pricing: Mailgun has a “pay as you go” pricing plan. You get 5,000 free emails per month for 3 months, then only pay for what you send. The paid plans start from $35/month if you’re looking for dedicated IP and other features.
Features:
- Suppression management;
- Send time optimization;
- Recipient variables setting;
- Email validations;
- Webhooks, SMTP relays, and Email APIs;
- Analytic data in real-time, and you also receive detailed logs should you experience any email delivery failures.
5. Pabbly
Pabbly Email Marketing is a free SMTP server which helps you send marketing, educational, informative and promotional emails.
This SMTP server is really affordable and provides tons of useful features which is required by any email marketing service. These features can be anything like email scheduling, autoresponders, list management, list cleaning, etc.
Also, this software includes 500+ email templates which allow you to create bulk emails via its drag & drop email editor.
Pabbly email service offers a reasonable package for starters meaning you have a 500 emails per day sending limit. This quota can gradually increase depending on your reputation as you start sending regular emails.
Which Is The Best SMTP Service Provider?
When choosing the best SMTP service provider for your needs, you don’t have to choose one from the options listed above. Pepipost, Mailjet, Moosend, Pabbly and Mandrill are just some of the many other SMTP service providers available. Having so many choices can make it difficult to select the one that best meets your business needs.
Take the three following items into consideration when evaluating SMTP services – Email deliverability, Scaling, and Pricing. Most of the platforms already discussed in this article have high email deliverability, and they can be scaled to send millions of emails daily.
Smaller sites and companies can go with SendGrid or SendinBlue. Pricing becomes a more important factor if your sending needs are larger. The SMTP provider you work with should have trusted technical support and scalability with pricing that’s very competitive.
Amazon SES is the obvious choice if you have the technical knowledge, as paying $0.10 for every 1,000 emails is a very cost-effective solution.
Please take into consideration the features that you need from the SMTP provider and their pricing options. Most of them offer detailed pricing plan summaries with features that each plan offers, so you can easily choose one that fits your needs.
