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Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Introduction Transactional HTML email templates are used by Mailgun and SendGrid to send personalized and dynamic emails to recipients. While both platforms serve the purpose of sending transactional emails, there are key differences between Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates and SendGrid.
Email Template Design: Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates offer a user-friendly and intuitive drag-and-drop editor, allowing users to easily create visually appealing email templates without any coding knowledge. On the other hand, SendGrid provides a flexible and customizable email template design, allowing users to have full control over the HTML and CSS codes to create their own unique email templates.
Template Personalization: Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates provide advanced personalization options, including built-in variables that can dynamically insert recipient-specific information into the email content. This allows for highly personalized emails with dynamic content. SendGrid also supports template personalization, but it requires users to make use of substitution tags in the HTML code.
Template Versioning and Drafts: Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates enables users to create multiple versions of a template and save drafts, allowing for easy testing and iteration before finalizing the template. SendGrid, on the other hand, does not offer template versioning or draft saving capabilities, making it less convenient for template management and testing.
Template Testing and Previewing: Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates provide a preview mode that allows users to see how the email template will appear when sent to different recipients. This feature enables users to catch any design flaws or formatting issues before actually sending the email. SendGrid also offers email testing, but it requires users to send test emails to specific addresses.
Template Variables: Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates allow users to create and manage a set of template variables that can be used across multiple templates. This provides consistency and efficiency when updating common information across different templates. SendGrid, on the other hand, does not have a dedicated feature for managing template variables.
Template Library: Mailgun provides a template library that contains a collection of pre-built email templates that users can choose from and customize according to their needs. This can significantly reduce the time and effort required to create a template from scratch. In contrast, template libraries are not available in SendGrid, requiring users to create templates entirely from scratch or import external templates.
In summary, the key differences between Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates and SendGrid lie in the email template design options, template personalization capabilities, template versioning and drafts, testing and previewing features, template variable management, and the availability of a template library.
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 Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates
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 Mailgun Transactional HTML Email Templates
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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