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SparkPost

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SparkPost vs Twilio SendGrid: What are the differences?

SparkPost: Email Delivery and Analytics for Developers and Enterprises. SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue; Twilio SendGrid: Email Delivery. Simplified. Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.

SparkPost and Twilio SendGrid belong to "Transactional Email" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by SparkPost are:

  • Quick and easy SMTP or REST API integration
  • Free trial
  • Real-time & predictive analytics

On the other hand, Twilio SendGrid provides the following key features:

  • Open Tracking
  • Click Tracking
  • Unsubscribe Tracking

"I could start sending real emails in less than 5 mins" is the primary reason why developers consider SparkPost over the competitors, whereas "Easy setup" was stated as the key factor in picking Twilio SendGrid.

According to the StackShare community, Twilio SendGrid has a broader approval, being mentioned in 3101 company stacks & 1904 developers stacks; compared to SparkPost, which is listed in 59 company stacks and 50 developer stacks.

Advice on SparkPost and Twilio SendGrid

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?

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Replies (4)
Mika Henriksson
Coder at mhenrixon Consulting · | 4 upvotes · 94.6K views
Recommends
on
PostmarkPostmark

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!

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Justini Powell
Lead Developer at Watermark Community Church · | 4 upvotes · 94.7K views
Recommends
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Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

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.

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Vit Ulicny
Recommends
on
MandrillMandrill

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.

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Aric Fedida
Founder, CTO at ASK Technologies Inc · | 1 upvotes · 94K views
Recommends
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Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

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:

  1. 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).
  2. Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
  3. 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.

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Pros of SparkPost
Pros of Twilio SendGrid
  • 10
    I could start sending real emails in less than 5 mins
  • 2
    Email don't end up in spam after DNS verification
  • 1
    Flexible, robust API
  • 1
    Very easy to integrate with Laravel
  • 190
    Easy setup
  • 137
    Cheap and simple
  • 107
    Easy email integration!
  • 86
    Reliable
  • 58
    Well-documented
  • 28
    Generous free allowance to get you started
  • 25
    Trackable
  • 21
    Heroku add-on
  • 15
    Azure add-on
  • 13
    Better support for third party integrations
  • 6
    Simple installation
  • 6
    Free plan
  • 4
    Helpful evangelist staff
  • 4
    Great client libraries
  • 3
    Great support
  • 3
    Better customer support than the competition
  • 3
    Great add-ons
  • 2
    Nice dashboard
  • 2
    Scalable
  • 1
    Web editor for templates
  • 1
    Cool setup
  • 1
    Within integration
  • 1
    Easy set up
  • 1
    Free
  • 1
    Great customer support
  • 1
    Google cloud messaging

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Cons of SparkPost
Cons of Twilio SendGrid
  • 1
    Suspended paid acount without warning or reason
  • 1
    Spam trap reports are suspicious b/c all users opted in
  • 1
    Support won't answer mail (9h so far)
  • 1
    Only free for 100 emails/day
  • 1
    New dedicated ip blacklisted by some clients
  • 3
    Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific
  • 1
    Shared IP blacklist removal takes months
  • 0
    Shares IP blacklist removal

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What is SparkPost?

SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.

What is Twilio SendGrid?

Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use SparkPost?
What companies use Twilio SendGrid?
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What tools integrate with SparkPost?
What tools integrate with Twilio SendGrid?

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What are some alternatives to SparkPost and Twilio SendGrid?
Postmark
Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.
Mandrill
Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.
Mailgun
Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.
Amazon SES
Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2.
Mailchimp
MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It's like your own personal publishing platform.
See all alternatives