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Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Introduction
When considering mobile push notifications, entities often come across Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API and SendGrid as potential solutions. Understanding the key differences between these two platforms is crucial for decision-making.
Message Personalization: Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API allows for highly personalized messages, including custom data and user attributes, enabling targeted and tailored notifications. SendGrid, on the other hand, offers personalization options but may be more limited in terms of granularity and customization.
Delivery Speed: Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API is known for its real-time delivery speed, ensuring that notifications reach users swiftly. While SendGrid also offers timely notifications, Pusher's focus on speed may provide a competitive edge in scenarios requiring rapid communication.
Rich Media Support: Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API supports the delivery of rich media content such as images, videos, and interactive elements within notifications, enhancing user engagement. In contrast, SendGrid primarily focuses on text-based notifications, potentially limiting the multimedia capabilities of messages.
Scalability: Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API offers scalability features that cater to the needs of growing businesses and varying notification volumes, ensuring consistent performance. SendGrid provides scalable solutions as well but may have limitations in terms of handling massive spikes in notification demands.
Developer-Friendly Interface: Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API is designed with developers in mind, offering comprehensive documentation, SDKs for various platforms, and easy integration options. SendGrid also provides developer tools but may not prioritize developer experience to the same extent, potentially affecting ease of implementation and maintenance.
Tracking and Analytics: Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API includes robust tracking and analytics features, allowing businesses to monitor the performance of notifications, user interactions, and engagement metrics in real-time. While SendGrid offers analytic capabilities as well, Pusher's focus on detailed insights and reporting sets it apart in terms of monitoring and optimizing notification campaigns.
In Summary, understanding the subtle yet significant differences between Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API and SendGrid is crucial for businesses seeking to leverage mobile push notifications effectively.
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 Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API
- Free7
- Easy setup2
- Scalable1
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 Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API
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 Pusher Mobile Push Notifications API?
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