Elastic Email's pricing plans share some similarities but Marketing and Email API are tailored to satisfy different needs - and are different at their cores. Understanding these differences will be crucial in deciding which of our products will best fit you.
Key differences
Marketing
Access to Campaign Creator
Ability to design A/X split campaigns, scheduled campaigns, and event-driven campaigns on the go - perfect for marketing emails
You are charged according to the number of contacts. You can send up to your plan's sending limit to these contacts
Starts at 2,500 contacts and 37,500 emails tier
Free attachments
Private IPs are available for purchase for Marketing Starter/PRO plans
Overall contact management, including custom contact fields
Webforms
Landing pages
Email API
No access to Campaign Creator
Designed for developers and those who want to create their own integration with Elastic Email
Access to our SMTP and HTTP API
Perfect for transactional emails - you are charged only for the number of emails you send as you go. You can hold as many contacts as you need
Starts at 50,000 emails tier
Free attachments
Private IPs are available for purchase for API Starter and API PRO plans
Suppressed contact management
About Marketing
The key feature of the Marketing plan is it's accessibility. All it takes is a brief setup after which you are ready to go. You can find a short description of the initial configuration of an Elastic Email Account below. This applies to Email API plans as well, but with Marketing, you will most likely spend much more time on our dashboard.
With our Marketing plans, your monthly subscription and the subscription price depends on the chosen contacts and email sending tier.
It is best suited to satisfy your Email Marketing needs. It grants access to many tools and features available through our easy-to-use and intuitive dashboard - most importantly, access to the powerful Campaign Creator. This is a tool that lets you design and send out a marketing campaign on the fly. You can read more about it here:
About Email API
Email API plans are best used for transactional emails sent out through a custom built integration with our API or SMTP relay. However, nothing will stop you from using a third-party software and integrating it for marketing purposes too.
You can find details about how to configure SMTP and API in our article:
To start integrating your code with the Elastic Email API, just check out our API Documentations:
There are additional tutorials and hints for integration in some of our resources:
To ensure seamless delivery without interruptions related to your account's credit, we implement an Auto-recharge feature for Email API plans. If you are sending continuously and your email credits are about to run out, we will recharge the account's credits according to the levels that you set up so that you can continue to submit emails without managing this manually.
PRO Plans
You can always upgrade both Marketing and Email API plans to their respective PRO versions. Just go to your account's Billing page. This unlocks Elastic Email's full potential and gives you access to our additional features. These features include:
Unlimited custom fields for your contacts.
Extended email logs - 7 days instead of 3
Setting up custom rDNS (PTR) for any private IPs you purchase
We provide detailed Pricing Plan Comparisons where you can see the differences between the regular and PRO versions. Just go to the Pricing page of your choosing and select the "+See full feature comparison" option at the bottom.
Recommendations
To summarize: we kindly advise you to choose Marketing Plan if your main goal is to send marketing campaigns and grow your customer base.
If you're more interested in transactional communication (password resets, sending invoices, order confirmations, system notifications etc.) which does not require our dashboard tools, the Email API Plan is for you.
If any further clarification is required, we are available to you every day at any time. Please contact our 24/7 Customer Support to get the necessary assistance. We are always happy to help!