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Sailthru vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Introduction:
Sailthru and SendGrid are two popular email marketing platforms used by businesses to manage their email campaigns effectively. While both platforms offer similar services, there are key differences that set them apart.
Customization and personalization features: Sailthru is known for its robust customization and personalization capabilities, allowing businesses to tailor their email content based on individual user preferences and behaviors. On the other hand, SendGrid offers basic customization options but lacks the advanced personalization features that Sailthru provides.
Automation and scalability: Sailthru excels in automated email campaigns and can handle large-scale operations with ease, making it a preferred choice for enterprises with complex email marketing needs. SendGrid, on the other hand, may offer automation features but is better suited for smaller businesses and startups due to its scalability limitations.
Reporting and analytics: Sailthru offers detailed reporting and analytics tools that provide insights into campaign performance, user engagement, and ROI. SendGrid, while also offering reporting capabilities, may not provide the same depth of analysis and reporting features as Sailthru, making it more suitable for basic tracking and monitoring purposes.
API integration and compatibility: Sailthru is known for its seamless API integration with various third-party applications and services, making it easy for businesses to connect their email marketing efforts with other tools and platforms. SendGrid also offers API integration options but may not be as extensive or flexible as Sailthru's integration capabilities.
Support and customer service: Sailthru is recognized for its dedicated customer support team that provides timely assistance and guidance to users facing technical issues or challenges. In comparison, SendGrid's customer service may not be as responsive or comprehensive, which can impact the overall user experience and troubleshooting process.
In Summary, Sailthru stands out for its advanced customization, personalization, and automation features, making it a preferred choice for large enterprises with complex email marketing needs, while SendGrid is more suitable for smaller businesses with basic email campaign requirements.
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 Sailthru
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 Sailthru
Cons of Twilio SendGrid
- Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific3
- Shared IP blacklist removal takes months1
- Shares IP blacklist removal0