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Nodemailer vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Introduction:
Nodemailer and SendGrid are two popular email delivery services that provide developers with the ability to send emails programmatically. While both services offer similar functionalities, there are several key differences between Nodemailer and SendGrid that distinguish them from each other.
Pricing Models: Nodemailer is an open-source library that is available for free, meaning developers can use it without any cost. On the other hand, SendGrid offers both free and paid plans, with varying features and limits. The pricing model of SendGrid makes it more suitable for businesses and developers with high-volume email sending needs.
Email Templates: Nodemailer allows developers to create custom email templates by directly manipulating the HTML, CSS, and other components of the email. SendGrid provides a more user-friendly approach by offering a drag-and-drop email builder that simplifies the creation of visually appealing email templates.
Email Deliverability: SendGrid has built-in advanced deliverability features such as dedicated IP addresses, domain authentication, and ISP monitoring, which improve the chances of emails reaching the recipients' inbox. While Nodemailer does not have these features out of the box, it can still achieve high deliverability rates by configuring the email server properly.
SMTP Support: Nodemailer relies on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for sending emails. This gives developers more control over the email sending process and allows integration with various email servers. SendGrid also supports SMTP but provides its own API for sending emails, which offers additional features like tracking, analytics, and email statistics.
Integration Options: Nodemailer can be easily integrated into any Node.js application as it is a dedicated library for Node.js. Besides Node.js, Nodemailer can also be used in other JavaScript environments. SendGrid offers official libraries and SDKs for multiple programming languages and platforms, making it more versatile and easily integrable with different frameworks and languages.
Scalability and Infrastructure: SendGrid operates on a cloud-based infrastructure and offers high scalability, allowing it to handle large volumes of email traffic efficiently. Nodemailer's scalability and performance depend on the email server and infrastructure it is configured to use, as it is a library rather than a service itself.
In Summary, Nodemailer is an open-source library suitable for small to medium-scale email sending needs, while SendGrid is a feature-rich email delivery service with advanced deliverability features, templates, and support for multiple platforms.
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?
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.
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!
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.
Pros of Nodemailer
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 Nodemailer
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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