Mailchimp vs Twilio SendGrid

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

Mailchimp

22.4K
12.3K
+ 1
1.2K
Twilio SendGrid

10.9K
5.4K
+ 1
720
Add tool

MailChimp vs SendGrid: What are the differences?

Introduction

MailChimp and SendGrid are both popular email marketing services that provide functionality to send bulk emails and manage email campaigns. However, there are several key differences between the two platforms that make them unique and suitable for different needs.

  1. Pricing Structure: MailChimp offers a freemium pricing model, allowing users to send up to a certain number of emails for free. It also provides tiered pricing based on the number of subscribers. On the other hand, SendGrid offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are billed based on the number of emails sent. This makes SendGrid more suitable for users with fluctuating email volumes or smaller subscriber lists.

  2. Email Delivery Infrastructure: SendGrid is specifically designed for transactional emails, such as order confirmations and password resets. It has a powerful email infrastructure optimized for high deliverability rates, ensuring that transactional emails reach the recipient's inbox promptly. In contrast, while MailChimp also supports transactional emails, its infrastructure is primarily focused on marketing emails. This makes MailChimp more suitable for users who prioritize email marketing campaigns.

  3. Email Templates and Design: MailChimp offers a wide range of pre-designed email templates and a drag-and-drop editor, making it easy to create visually appealing emails without coding knowledge. It also offers advanced customization options for experienced users. SendGrid, on the other hand, provides basic email templates but focuses more on providing APIs and tools for developers to build custom email templates and designs. This makes SendGrid a better choice for users who require more flexibility and control over their email templates.

  4. Marketing Automation: MailChimp excels in providing robust marketing automation features. It offers advanced automation workflows, such as welcome series, abandoned cart emails, and product recommendations. These features allow users to create highly targeted and personalized email campaigns based on specific triggers and conditions. SendGrid also provides basic automation capabilities but does not offer the same level of sophistication as MailChimp. Therefore, MailChimp is a better option for users who heavily rely on marketing automation.

  5. Integration Ecosystem: MailChimp has a vast integration ecosystem and provides direct integration with various e-commerce platforms, CRM systems, and marketing tools. It seamlessly integrates with popular solutions like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Salesforce, allowing users to sync their customer data and leverage it for email marketing campaigns. SendGrid also offers integrations but has a more focused integration ecosystem geared towards transactional email use cases. If integration with specific software or platforms is crucial for your email marketing strategy, MailChimp may be the better choice.

  6. Support and Resources: MailChimp provides extensive support resources, including a knowledge base, video tutorials, live chat, and email support. They also offer phone support for users on higher-tier plans. SendGrid offers similar support resources but lacks phone support, providing support primarily through email and chat. If you prefer phone support or anticipate the need for more direct assistance, MailChimp's support offerings may be more suitable.

In summary, MailChimp and SendGrid differ in their pricing structure, focus on email delivery infrastructure, availability of pre-designed email templates, marketing automation capabilities, integration ecosystem, and support options. The choice between them depends on your specific needs and priorities.

Advice on Mailchimp 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?

See more
Replies (4)
Justini Powell
Lead Developer at Watermark Community Church · | 4 upvotes · 85.7K views
Recommends
on
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.

See more
Mika Henriksson
Coder at mhenrixon Consulting · | 4 upvotes · 85.7K 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!

See more
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.

See more
Aric Fedida
Founder, CTO at ASK Technologies Inc · | 1 upvotes · 85.1K views
Recommends
on
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.

See more
Decisions about Mailchimp and Twilio SendGrid
Andres Paredes
Lead Senior Software Engineer at InTouch Technology · | 6 upvotes · 6.7K views

Both Sendgrid and MailChimp have good API with many common features, but if you want to use only transactional email plans using Sendgrid are more affordable than MailChimp since Mandrill is an add-on and you need to pay for marketing as well. They also have good webhooks supporting use cases for real analytics over events

See more
Get Advice from developers at your company using StackShare Enterprise. Sign up for StackShare Enterprise.
Learn More
Pros of Mailchimp
Pros of Twilio SendGrid
  • 259
    Smooth setup & ui
  • 248
    Mailing list
  • 148
    Robust e-mail creation
  • 120
    Integrates with a lot of external services
  • 109
    Custom templates
  • 59
    Free tier
  • 49
    Great api
  • 42
    Great UI
  • 33
    A/B Testing Subject Lines
  • 30
    Broad feature set
  • 11
    Subscriber Analytics
  • 9
    Great interface. The standard for email marketing
  • 8
    Great documentation
  • 8
    Mandrill integration
  • 7
    Segmentation
  • 6
    Best deliverability; helps you be the good guy
  • 5
    Facebook Integration
  • 5
    Autoresponders
  • 3
    Customization
  • 3
    RSS-to-email
  • 3
    Co-branding
  • 3
    Embedded signup forms
  • 2
    Automation
  • 1
    Great logo
  • 1
    Groups
  • 0
    Landing pages
  • 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

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Mailchimp
Cons of Twilio SendGrid
  • 2
    Super expensive
  • 1
    Poor API
  • 1
    Charged based on subscribers as opposed to emails sent
  • 3
    Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific
  • 1
    Shared IP blacklist removal takes months
  • 0
    Shares IP blacklist removal

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

What is 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.

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 Mailchimp?
What companies use Twilio SendGrid?
See which teams inside your own company are using Mailchimp or Twilio SendGrid.
Sign up for StackShare EnterpriseLearn More

Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Mailchimp?
What tools integrate with Twilio SendGrid?

Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

What are some alternatives to Mailchimp and Twilio SendGrid?
ActiveCampaign
Recognized as the leader in the marketing and sales automation for small businesses, ActiveCampaign helps over 70k growing businesses meaningfully connect and engage with their customers with personalized, intelligence-driven messages.
Drip
It is the first ECRM–an Ecommerce CRM designed for building personal and profitable relationships with your customers at scale. It uses customer insight, data, and smarter email marketing automation at scale. With the best customer experience, your brand will never blend in.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor makes it easy to attract new subscribers, send them beautiful email newsletters and see stunning reports on the results.
Mandrill
Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.
SendinBlue
It is a digital marketing toolbox that's built to scale and adapt with you as you grow. You can save time and boost performance by automating your segmentation and marketing messages.
See all alternatives