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Postfix vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Postfix and SendGrid are both email delivery services, but they have some key differences that set them apart from each other.
Reliability and Deliverability: Postfix is a widely used open-source mail server software that is known for its reliability and stability. It is highly configurable and can handle a large volume of emails. On the other hand, SendGrid is a cloud-based service that focuses on high deliverability rates by optimizing email sending through advanced algorithms and email infrastructure.
Email Automation and Marketing: SendGrid offers an extensive set of features for email automation and marketing campaigns. It provides easy integration with various customer relationship management (CRM) tools, allowing businesses to automate their email workflows and track email performance. Postfix, being primarily a mail transfer agent (MTA), does not have built-in features for email marketing or automation.
Email Parsing and Tracking: SendGrid offers robust email parsing and tracking capabilities that allow businesses to track email opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and other engagement metrics. It enables businesses to monitor the effectiveness of their email campaigns and make data-driven decisions. Postfix does not provide these tracking features natively, as it mainly focuses on reliable email delivery.
SMTP and API Integration: Postfix is generally used as an SMTP server, which means it accepts incoming emails and delivers them to the recipient's mailbox. It can also be integrated with various APIs to enhance its functionality. On the other hand, SendGrid provides a full-fledged API that allows developers to integrate email sending and tracking capabilities into their applications more seamlessly.
Email Deliverability Tools: SendGrid offers a range of tools and services to improve email deliverability, such as email authentication, domain reputation management, and IP warm-up guides. These tools help businesses ensure that their emails reach the recipients' inbox and avoid being marked as spam. Postfix does not provide these deliverability tools as comprehensively.
Pricing and Scalability: Postfix is an open-source software and can be freely installed and used on any server. It is highly scalable and can handle large email volumes efficiently. SendGrid, on the other hand, offers flexible pricing plans based on the number of emails sent, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes. It also provides scalable infrastructure to handle high email traffic during peak times.
In Summary, Postfix excels in reliability and being highly configurable, while SendGrid focuses on email automation, parsing, and tracking with advanced deliverability tools and scalable pricing options.
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 Postfix
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 Postfix
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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