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Postal vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Key differences between Postal and SendGrid
1. Scalability: Postal is highly scalable and designed to handle large volumes of email delivery. It can handle millions of messages per hour, making it suitable for businesses with high email volumes. On the other hand, SendGrid also offers scalability, but it may not be as efficient in handling extremely high email volumes as Postal.
2. Email Templates: Postal provides a powerful, flexible, and customizable email template system that allows users to design and create visually appealing email templates with ease. It offers various template customization options like drag and drop, HTML editing, and dynamic content insertion. In contrast, SendGrid also provides email template functionality but with slightly less flexibility and customization options compared to Postal.
3. Advanced Reporting and Analytics: Postal offers detailed reporting and analytics features that provide insights into email delivery performance, engagement, bounce rates, opens, clicks, and more. Its analytics dashboards provide actionable data to improve email campaigns. While SendGrid also provides reporting and analytics features, Postal offers more advanced and comprehensive analytics capabilities.
4. Email Deliverability: Postal prioritizes email deliverability and provides extensive tools and settings to improve email delivery rates. It allows users to set up custom tracking domains and provides options to manage sender reputation and deliverability best practices. SendGrid also focuses on deliverability but may not offer the same level of customization and control as Postal.
5. Pricing Model: Postal offers a simple pricing model based on the number of sent emails, providing transparency and flexibility for businesses to scale their email marketing efforts. SendGrid, on the other hand, offers tiered pricing models based on different usage levels, which may be suitable for certain businesses but can make cost management slightly more complex.
6. In-house vs. Third-party: Postal is a self-hosted email delivery solution, meaning businesses can host and manage their own email infrastructure using Postal. This offers more control and security for organizations that prefer to have complete ownership of their email systems. In contrast, SendGrid is a third-party cloud-based service, where the email infrastructure is managed by SendGrid. This reduces the burden of managing email infrastructure but may have limitations in terms of customization and control.
In summary, Postal offers superior scalability, advanced reporting, customizable templates, and a self-hosted infrastructure, while SendGrid may have limitations in handling extremely high volumes, offers slightly less flexibility in templates, and is a cloud-based third-party service.
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 Postal
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 Postal
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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What is Postal?
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