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Amazon Pinpoint vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will compare the key differences between Amazon Pinpoint and SendGrid. Both Amazon Pinpoint and SendGrid are popular communication platforms, but they have some distinct features and capabilities. Let's explore the differences between them.
Service Integration: Amazon Pinpoint is tightly integrated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing seamless integration with other AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon S3, and Amazon DynamoDB. On the other hand, SendGrid is a standalone service that can integrate with various platforms through its APIs, but it does not have native integration with AWS services.
Email Deliverability: Amazon Pinpoint is specifically designed for high email deliverability, leveraging the reputation of the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). It utilizes the extensive infrastructure of AWS to ensure that emails reach the recipient's inbox without being marked as spam. SendGrid also has good deliverability rates, but it does not have the same level of infrastructure and reputation as AWS.
In-Depth Analytics: Amazon Pinpoint offers comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities for both email and mobile campaigns. It provides insights into email open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and other engagement metrics. SendGrid also provides analytics, but it does not offer the same level of in-depth reporting as Amazon Pinpoint.
Mobile Push Notifications: Amazon Pinpoint is not only an email service but also a powerful mobile engagement platform. It allows you to send targeted push notifications to mobile app users, personalize messages, and track user interactions. SendGrid, on the other hand, primarily focuses on email delivery and does not have native support for mobile push notifications.
Scalability and Performance: As part of the AWS ecosystem, Amazon Pinpoint leverages the scalability and performance capabilities of AWS. It can handle large volumes of email and mobile notifications without compromising speed and reliability. SendGrid also provides good scalability and performance, but it may not offer the same level of scalability as Amazon Pinpoint in terms of the underlying infrastructure.
Pricing Structure: Amazon Pinpoint has a flexible pricing structure based on the number of messages sent, providing cost-effective options for different usage levels. SendGrid also offers pricing based on the number of messages sent but may have different pricing models. The specific pricing details may vary, and it's always recommended to review the pricing documentation of both services for accurate cost comparisons.
In summary, Amazon Pinpoint is tightly integrated with AWS, offers high email deliverability, in-depth analytics, mobile push notifications, scalability, and performance. On the other hand, SendGrid is a standalone service that can integrate with various platforms, provides good deliverability, offers basic analytics, and focuses primarily on email delivery.
For transactional emails, notifications, reminders, etc, I want to make it so writers/designers can set up the emails and maintain them, and then dynamically insert fields, that I then replace when actually sending the mail from code.
I think the ability to use a basic layout template across individual email templates would make things a lot easier (think header, footer, standard typography, etc).
What is best for this? Why would you prefer Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill or something else?
The only transactional email service that I've been able to stomach is Postmark! It is by far the easiest (and quickest to get feedback from) service that I have come across. While drowning in attempts to debug Mandril, Mailgun and others I get quick feedback from Postmark in what I need to do.
Postmark for the win!
If you need your emails to be sent in a time-sensitive manner, I'd recommend SendGrid. We were using Mailgun and the lag because they aren't "transactional" in nature caused issues for us. SendGrid also has the ability to do dynamic templates and bulk send from their API. I don't know that they have the shared layout ability you mentioned, though.
We are using more extensively Mandrill.
It is a ok tool, which gives you the power for emailing with nice set of features.
The templates editing and management is a bit tricky, but this is mostly related to email templates in general, which are hard to create and maintain.
I do not think you can share the parts of the templates. You can have your predefined templates with possibility to insert dynamic content.
They provide a limited possibility to preview and test your templates.
The template editor is text only. For the better editors checkout http://topol.io or https://mosaico.io
Unfortunately, I do not have experience with the other tools and possibilities to manage templates.
At this stage, all of the tools you mentioned do email delivery pretty well. They all support email templates as well. Here are some considerations:
- Twilio owns SendGrid. If you're an existing Twilio customer, in my opinion that's a good reason to use SendGrid over the other solutions. The APIs are solid, and Twilio has excellent developer tools that allow you to create interesting automations (which is important for scaling).
- Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
- Mailgun is a tool on its own. Like the other two, it supports mail templates and is built to be controlled almost exclusively via APIs.
SendGrid and Mandrill have pretty nice WYSIWIG template editors as part of their platform. Not so sure about Mailgun.
So for me the considerations would be: 1. How easy is it for you to integrate with their API? How complete is their API in terms of your own specific needs? 2. Prices: Which one works best for my budget? 3. Am I OK with editing the templates elsewhere (or even by hand), and then pasting the code into Mailgun? Or do I want the comfort of Mandrill or Sendgrid with their WYSIWYG editors?
Personally I'd go with Twilio, simply because it's such a massive ecosystem they are less likely to go bankrupt, and their APIs are rock solid.
Of course we chose Coresender to send our own transactional emails :) So I thought I'll let you know how we use it.
We set up separate sending accounts for all company needs, eg. transactional emails, monitoring alerts, time to inbox. We even configured our office printers to send emails through Coresender.
We have a real-time and extremely usable view into what emails go through each account, so each time anybody reports an email not arriving we're able to assist them in a few seconds
We utilize our message timeline feature, so we can learn eg. if people are clicking on password reset links
We always know how many of our onboarding emails are being opened which helps us improve them
Finally, we have full controll over our suppressions lists, so we can add (and remove!) from them whenever necessary.
To sum up, at Coresender we're eating our own dogfood and it helps us stay connected to the product and understand our customers better.
Pros of Amazon Pinpoint
- Transactional Messages13
Pros of Twilio SendGrid
- Easy setup190
- Cheap and simple137
- Easy email integration!107
- Reliable86
- Well-documented58
- Generous free allowance to get you started28
- Trackable25
- Heroku add-on21
- Azure add-on15
- Better support for third party integrations13
- Simple installation6
- Free plan6
- Helpful evangelist staff4
- Great client libraries4
- Great support3
- Better customer support than the competition3
- Great add-ons3
- Nice dashboard2
- Scalable2
- Web editor for templates1
- Cool setup1
- Within integration1
- Easy set up1
- Free1
- Great customer support1
- Google cloud messaging1
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Cons of Amazon Pinpoint
Cons of Twilio SendGrid
- Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific3
- Shared IP blacklist removal takes months1
- Shares IP blacklist removal0
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