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  1. Stackups
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  3. Email Services
  4. Transactional Email
  5. Customer.io vs SendGrid

Customer.io vs SendGrid

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Stacks11.1K
Followers5.7K
Votes720
Customer.io
Customer.io
Stacks348
Followers138
Votes33

Customer.io vs SendGrid: What are the differences?

Key Differences Between Customer.io and SendGrid

Customer.io and SendGrid are both popular email delivery platforms, but they have key differences that set them apart:

  1. Target Audience: Customer.io is primarily targeted towards businesses and organizations that want to send highly targeted and personalized emails to their customers. It allows for advanced segmentation and automation based on user behavior, enabling businesses to create personalized customer experiences. In contrast, SendGrid is designed for developers and is commonly used as an email delivery service to send transactional emails, such as password resets and order confirmations.

  2. Email Types: Customer.io focuses on behavioral emails, which are triggered based on user actions, such as abandoned cart emails or event reminders. This allows businesses to send timely and relevant emails to their customers based on their specific interactions. SendGrid, on the other hand, is more focused on transactional emails, which are typically triggered by system events or user-specified actions. These emails are commonly used for sending notifications, alerts, or updates to customers.

  3. User Interface: Customer.io offers a user-friendly and intuitive interface that is geared towards marketers and non-technical users. It provides an easy-to-use drag-and-drop email editor and customizable templates, making it simple to create and send targeted emails. SendGrid, on the other hand, provides a developer-friendly interface and robust API that allows developers to integrate email functionality directly into their applications. It offers flexibility and customization options for developers to design and send emails programmatically.

  4. Pricing Structure: Customer.io offers tiered pricing based on the number of active profiles (individuals with tracked behavior) and monthly email sends. This allows businesses to choose a plan that aligns with their specific needs and scale as their customer base grows. SendGrid, on the other hand, offers a flexible pricing structure that is primarily based on the number of emails sent per month. It provides different pricing tiers that offer various features and support levels, allowing businesses to choose a plan that suits their email volume requirements.

  5. Integration Capabilities: Customer.io offers seamless integrations with popular customer data platforms, CRMs, and other marketing automation tools, allowing businesses to leverage their existing customer data and workflows. It provides a wide range of API integrations and pre-built connectors, making it easy to connect with other tools in the marketing ecosystem. SendGrid also offers integrations with various platforms and frameworks, but its focus is primarily on developer-centric integrations and API-based workflows.

  6. Support and Documentation: Customer.io offers comprehensive customer support through email, chat, and phone. They also provide extensive documentation, knowledge base articles, and video tutorials to help users set up and use the platform effectively. SendGrid offers support through email and chat, along with a dedicated support portal and community forums. Their documentation includes detailed API reference guides, SDKs, and code examples to assist developers in integrating and troubleshooting.

In summary, Customer.io is tailored towards businesses looking to send targeted, behavioral emails, with a user-friendly interface and seamless integrations, while SendGrid is more developer-centric, focused on transactional emails and offers robust API capabilities.

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Advice on Twilio SendGrid, Customer.io

Slawomir
Slawomir

Head of Product at Coresender

Oct 15, 2020

Decided

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.

88.6k views88.6k
Comments
Klaus
Klaus

Jan 22, 2020

Needs advice

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?

101k views101k
Comments
RichardsFood
RichardsFood

Sep 19, 2019

Needs advice

The problem I have is we are using mailchimp and not happy. We want to switch to mailster and are curious the easiest and best way to send emails with mailster.

The most important factors for me are ease of use, tracking.

I have only had experience with mailchimp, constant concact and streamsend. So ease of use is important.

30k views30k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Customer.io
Customer.io

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.

Customer engagement platform for tech savvy marketers sending personalized, data-driven marketing, product, and transactional messages. Ideal for mid-market SaaS, FinTech, EdTech, mobile apps, marketplaces companies, and more.

Open Tracking;Click Tracking;Unsubscribe Tracking;SMTP Relay;SMTP API;Web API;DKIM;SPF;Reputation Monitoring;ISP Monitoring;Domain Level Load Balancing;ISP Deliverability Outreach;Return Path Certified Partner;Support via Phone, Chat, Email, Online Support Portal
Data-driven segment builder updates in real-time;Integrates with your preferred data warehouse;Transactional, newsletters, and customer journeys in one platform;No-code visual workflow builder;Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native mobile SDKs;Multi-channel messaging: Emails, rich push notifications, SMS, in-app messages;A/B and multivariate testing;Ad audience sync;Programmatically or manually export your customer data;Manage leads and customers in one workspace;No-code and HTML/CSS email builder;Multi-language Messages;Webhooks;API;Industry-leading email code editor
Statistics
Stacks
11.1K
Stacks
348
Followers
5.7K
Followers
138
Votes
720
Votes
33
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 190
    Easy setup
  • 137
    Cheap and simple
  • 107
    Easy email integration!
  • 86
    Reliable
  • 58
    Well-documented
Cons
  • 3
    Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific
  • 1
    Shared IP blacklist removal takes months
  • 0
    Shares IP blacklist removal
Pros
  • 16
    Behavior based emails
  • 11
    Transactional emails
  • 6
    Newsletter to user base
Integrations
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Twilio
Twilio
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Heroku
Heroku
Parse
Parse
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
CloudBees
CloudBees
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Keen
Keen
Mixpanel
Mixpanel
PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Slack
Slack
Census
Census
Segment
Segment
Twilio
Twilio
Google Forms
Google Forms
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads
Snowflake
Snowflake

What are some alternatives to Twilio SendGrid, Customer.io?

Mandrill

Mandrill

Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

Mailgun

Mailgun

Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.

Intercom

Intercom

Intercom is a customer communication platform with a suite of integrated products for every team—including sales, marketing, product, and support. Have targeted communication with customers on your website, inside apps, and by email.

Amazon SES

Amazon SES

Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2.

sendwithus

sendwithus

Send email from your app with a simple API call, Sendwithus manages the rest. Templates, testing, data management, segments, and analytics are all accessible through a friendly dashboard.

Postmark

Postmark

Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.

Mailjet

Mailjet

Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: scalable, agile and flexible. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.

SparkPost

SparkPost

SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.

Mailtrap

Mailtrap

We offer one platform that covers all email-related needs in one place: testing, sending, and in-depth tracking to control how email infrastructure works and performs.

Pimcore

Pimcore

It is a software vendor for free and open-source customer experience management, digital asset management, product information management, multi-channel publishing and e-commerce software.

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