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Twilio SendGrid vs sendwithus: What are the differences?
Introduction:
In today's digital era, communication plays a vital role in the success of any business or organization. Email is one of the most commonly used communication channels, and companies often rely on third-party email service providers to ensure reliable and efficient delivery. Two popular options for email service providers are Twilio SendGrid and sendwithus. While both platforms offer email delivery services, there are significant differences between them in terms of features, pricing, and integrations. The key differences between Twilio SendGrid and sendwithus are as follows:
Pricing Models: Twilio SendGrid offers a tiered pricing model based on the volume of emails sent per month. They provide multiple pricing plans with different features and additional add-ons. On the other hand, sendwithus follows a different pricing structure, charging customers based on the email credits they purchase. This means sendwithus offers more flexibility for organizations with fluctuating email sending volumes.
Email Editing and Templating: Twilio SendGrid provides a drag-and-drop email editor that allows users to create visually appealing email templates efficiently. Additionally, they offer a robust template engine with advanced customization options. In contrast, sendwithus focuses more on the developer experience by offering powerful APIs and tools for dynamic email template creation through code. This makes sendwithus a better choice for developers who prefer to have control over the email templates through code.
Integration Capabilities: Twilio SendGrid offers a wide range of integrations with popular CRM systems, marketing platforms, and customer support tools. They have native integrations with platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Magento, making it easier for businesses to seamlessly connect their email marketing campaigns with existing systems. On the other hand, sendwithus provides a RESTful API that allows developers to integrate their email infrastructure with any platform or application. This flexibility in integration makes sendwithus a preferred choice for organizations with complex tech stacks or specific integration requirements.
Email Testing and Deliverability Monitoring: Twilio SendGrid offers comprehensive tools for testing and optimizing email deliverability. Their platform includes features like inbox preview, testing different email clients, and detailed email statistics, helping businesses improve their email open rates and deliverability. Sendwithus, while also providing email testing capabilities, focuses more on the design and content aspect of the emails rather than deliverability monitoring. This makes Twilio SendGrid a better choice for companies that prioritize deliverability management.
Transactional Email vs. Marketing Automation: Twilio SendGrid is well-known for its transactional email capabilities, allowing businesses to send personalized, real-time emails triggered by specific events or user actions. They provide robust APIs, SMTP relay, and webhooks for seamless transactional email delivery. In contrast, sendwithus places more emphasis on marketing automation, offering features like A/B testing, email sequencing, and analytics for targeted marketing campaigns. This difference in focus makes Twilio SendGrid a better choice for companies primarily looking to enhance their transactional email workflows.
Support and Documentation: Both Twilio SendGrid and sendwithus provide documentation, guides, and developer resources to assist users in integrating and troubleshooting their services. However, Twilio SendGrid has a dedicated support team available 24/7 via chat, phone, or email, providing users with immediate assistance and faster response times. Sendwithus, while also offering support options, focuses more on providing in-depth documentation and resources to empower developers to troubleshoot and resolve issues independently.
In summary, Twilio SendGrid and sendwithus differ in their pricing models, email editing capabilities, integration options, email testing and deliverability monitoring features, focus on transactional email vs. marketing automation, and support offerings. The choice between the two platforms depends on the specific needs and priorities of the business or organization.
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.
Pros of sendwithus
- Easy setup10
- Replacement tokens/templated emails8
- Great analytics7
- Html template editor7
- Works with sendgrid/mandrill/mailgun7
- Free tier6
- Very responsive and friendly support team4
- Easy A/B testing3
- Excellent api documentation2
- Live database integration1
- Reliable1
- Conversion tracking1
- Redshift integration1
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 sendwithus
- Conversions don't quite seem to work1
Cons of Twilio SendGrid
- Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific3
- Shared IP blacklist removal takes months1
- Shares IP blacklist removal0