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OneSignal vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between OneSignal and SendGrid, two popular platforms for sending notifications and emails.
Pricing Model: OneSignal offers both a free and paid version, with different pricing plans based on the number of subscribers. On the other hand, SendGrid follows a more traditional pricing model, where you pay based on the number of emails sent or the volume of data transferred.
Notification Delivery: OneSignal specializes in push notifications and excels in delivering them to mobile devices across various platforms. It supports web push, iOS push, Android push, and email notifications. SendGrid, on the other hand, is primarily focused on email delivery and provides advanced features for ensuring high inbox placement rates.
Email Features: SendGrid offers a wide range of email-specific features, such as advanced email templates, email validation, email analytics, and dedicated IP addresses. OneSignal, on the other hand, provides basic email functionality, allowing you to send text-based emails but with limited customization options.
Integration and APIs: Both OneSignal and SendGrid offer robust APIs for integrating their services with your applications. However, the integration capabilities of SendGrid are more extensive, with support for various programming languages and frameworks. OneSignal, on the other hand, focuses more on providing easy-to-use SDKs for mobile and web platforms.
User Interface: OneSignal provides a simple and intuitive user interface for managing push notifications and basic email campaigns. SendGrid, on the other hand, offers a more comprehensive user interface that allows you to manage email templates, set up automated email workflows, and conduct A/B testing.
Customer Support: OneSignal provides customer support through email and a community forum. While they offer a robust knowledge base, their support options are limited compared to SendGrid. SendGrid offers dedicated customer support via email, phone, and chat, ensuring timely assistance for any issues or queries.
In summary, OneSignal is primarily focused on push notifications with limited email functionality, while SendGrid specializes in email delivery with advanced features and comprehensive customer support. The pricing models, notification delivery capabilities, email features, integration options, user interface, and customer support differ between the two 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?
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 OneSignal
- Free of cost28
- More parametrable22
- Simple and Easy To Use. Well Documented :)17
- Device to device13
- Simple12
- Many Platforms9
- Great support9
- Free8
- Flexibility in working with web, android and iOS4
- Phonegap / Cordova / Ionic starters4
- Good1
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 OneSignal
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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