Constant Contact vs Twilio SendGrid

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Constant Contact

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Twilio SendGrid

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Constant Contact vs SendGrid: What are the differences?

  1. Pricing: Constant Contact offers tiered pricing based on the number of contacts, starting from $20 per month. SendGrid, on the other hand, has a flexible pricing structure that depends on the volume of emails sent, starting from $14.95 per month. So, Constant Contact's pricing is based on the number of contacts, while SendGrid's pricing is based on the number of emails sent.

  2. Features: Constant Contact provides a range of features including email marketing, event management, surveys, and social media integration. In contrast, SendGrid primarily focuses on email delivery and provides features like email templates, email analytics, and email API. Therefore, Constant Contact offers a broader range of features beyond just email delivery compared to SendGrid.

  3. Automation: Constant Contact offers an easy-to-use automation feature that allows users to set up automated email campaigns based on triggers like sign-ups, purchases, or birthdays. SendGrid also provides automation capabilities, but it requires integration with external tools for setting up complex sequencing and workflows. So, Constant Contact offers a more seamless and built-in automation feature compared to SendGrid.

  4. Customer Support: Constant Contact offers phone, chat, and email support for all customers, including their basic plan. In contrast, SendGrid's customer support varies based on the plan level, with phone support available only for higher-tier plans. Therefore, Constant Contact provides more accessible customer support options for all users compared to SendGrid.

  5. Email Deliverability: SendGrid is a well-known and reputed email delivery service that specializes in providing high deliverability rates and reliable email infrastructure. Constant Contact, although also reliable, focuses more on holistic marketing solutions and may not have the same level of expertise and specialization in email deliverability as SendGrid. Thus, SendGrid has a stronger emphasis on ensuring deliverability compared to Constant Contact.

  6. Integration Options: Constant Contact integrates with a wide range of third-party tools and platforms, including popular CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, and event management tools. SendGrid also offers integrations but primarily focuses on email-related integrations with platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and Twilio. So, Constant Contact provides more diverse integration options beyond just email-related integrations compared to SendGrid.

In Summary, Constant Contact offers tiered pricing based on the number of contacts, provides a broader range of features beyond email delivery, offers an easy-to-use built-in automation feature, provides accessible customer support for all plans, focuses more on holistic marketing solutions rather than email deliverability specialization, and offers diverse integration options. On the other hand, SendGrid has flexible pricing based on email volume, specializes in high email deliverability rates, offers email-related integrations, and provides automation capabilities through external tool integration.

Advice on Constant Contact and Twilio SendGrid

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?

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Replies (4)
Justini Powell
Lead Developer at Watermark Community Church · | 4 upvotes · 85.5K views
Recommends
on
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

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.

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Mika Henriksson
Coder at mhenrixon Consulting · | 4 upvotes · 85.5K views
Recommends
on
PostmarkPostmark

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!

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Vit Ulicny
Recommends
on
MandrillMandrill

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.

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Aric Fedida
Founder, CTO at ASK Technologies Inc · | 1 upvotes · 84.9K views
Recommends
on
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

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:

  1. 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).
  2. Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
  3. 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.

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Pros of Constant Contact
Pros of Twilio SendGrid
    Be the first to leave a pro
    • 190
      Easy setup
    • 137
      Cheap and simple
    • 107
      Easy email integration!
    • 86
      Reliable
    • 58
      Well-documented
    • 28
      Generous free allowance to get you started
    • 25
      Trackable
    • 21
      Heroku add-on
    • 15
      Azure add-on
    • 13
      Better support for third party integrations
    • 6
      Simple installation
    • 6
      Free plan
    • 4
      Helpful evangelist staff
    • 4
      Great client libraries
    • 3
      Great support
    • 3
      Better customer support than the competition
    • 3
      Great add-ons
    • 2
      Nice dashboard
    • 2
      Scalable
    • 1
      Web editor for templates
    • 1
      Cool setup
    • 1
      Within integration
    • 1
      Easy set up
    • 1
      Free
    • 1
      Great customer support
    • 1
      Google cloud messaging

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Constant Contact
    Cons of Twilio SendGrid
      Be the first to leave a con
      • 3
        Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific
      • 1
        Shared IP blacklist removal takes months
      • 0
        Shares IP blacklist removal

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      What is Constant Contact?

      As an industry leader in permission based online marketing, Constant Contact partners with the leading providers of online marketing and social media marketing solutions.

      What is Twilio SendGrid?

      Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

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      What tools integrate with Constant Contact?
      What tools integrate with Twilio SendGrid?

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      What are some alternatives to Constant Contact and Twilio SendGrid?
      Mailchimp
      MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It's like your own personal publishing platform.
      Campaign Monitor
      Campaign Monitor makes it easy to attract new subscribers, send them beautiful email newsletters and see stunning reports on the results.
      Benchmark Email
      It is an Email Marketing Service to engage subscribers, nurture leads, send beautiful, responsive emails and track results.
      Pardot
      It is a software as a service (SaaS) marketing automation platform offering email automation, targeted email campaigns and lead management for B2B sales and marketing organizations. It provides a full solution that helps marketers create meaningful connections, generate more pipeline, and empower sales to close more deals.
      HubSpot
      Attract, convert, close and delight customers with HubSpot’s complete set of marketing tools. HubSpot all-in-one marketing software helps more than 12,000 companies in 56 countries attract leads and convert them into customers.
      See all alternatives