SendGrid Reviews

Pros

The best thing about using the SendGrid Email API was the performance measured in terms of email deliverability and server uptime.

The dashboard provides good insights with respect to number of emails sent, delivered and opened. Thus helps a great deal in improving marketing campaigns.

From the deployment point of view, the integration of SendGrid with the existing email service was quite easy and can be completed easily without great efforts.

Cons

As far as technical aspects are concerned, there is nothing which I don't like.

On the pricing front, would like to add my views. Currently, the pricing plans are available as Free (100 emails per day), Essentials and Pro. The Essentials plan starts from 14.95$ per month for upto 40,000 emails a month and the Pro starts at 89.95$ per month. These plans are good for small and medium size websites.

Would be good to see if a new Basic plan is introduced for a low starting price of 4.95$ per month and offering upto 10,000 emails a month. Such a plan would be highly suitable for extra small website applications who have a limited customer base.

Alternatives Considered

Brevo

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Going by various product reviews and comparing the various plans offered by different vendors, we decided to select SendGrid as the best choice for our email requirements.

Pros

The code editor and how everything is optimized for coding allows for truly beautiful e-mail marketing campaigns. SendGrid can accommodate beautiful e-mail templates that were created in HTML/CSS, you just have to know how to code for it to be useful for you.

Cons

They do not have a way to graphically edit particularly easily like with MailChimp.

To make a good looking e-mail marketing campaign you must know how to code, there are not a lot of templates provided for you to edit or drag and drop. It was not intended as a tool if you would like to drag and drop.

On the upside this got us to learn how to code better.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing SendGrid

MailChimp actually gets very pricey after you exceed 2,000 users. MailChimp also lacks the sophistication you need when you start doing more advanced activities companies like Uber and Spotify do. If you see sent by MailChimp you know it's a small business.

Switched From

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

SendGrid is professional strength e-mail marketing.

Pros

Very easy to create email templates, and integrate with your website. The tool handles really well bounces & spams. We've never had problems with it.

Cons

In the reporting, the unique open email seems to be based on events happening from devices. So if I open the same email from desktop and then from mobile, it will be 2 unique opens. I think this should be based on the actual email.

Pros

None. Our account was locked with no explanation before we could log in for the first time (please understand, we were banned before we could ever try the actual service) and there is no explanation given, and no way to contact the company.

Cons

Sendgrid automatically banned our account - WITHOUT us ever logging in. I put in an email address, signed up, and then received notification that they "cannot support your account at this time" and "Thank you for your interest in Twilio SendGrid, best of luck with your future endeavors." I want to be clear. There was no communication. There was no explanation. There was no avenue for appeal. There was only an automated response from a system, and then to contact support you have to "log in" - well I was never able to log in, not once. They gather your user count on sign up. We are a small company, of fewer than 10 users. I have to wonder whether my user base had been 10,000 instead whether we would've been able to at least talk to someone... To find out why?

Pros

The media center I run submits three political op-eds per week to about 1,300 newspapers in the US (and sometimes another 1,200 internationally). Sendgrid delivers those emails in a timely manner and keeps track of bounces, etc.

Cons

Setting up to use the API from a custom email address is a bit cumbersome.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Competitive pricing, ability to send directly from our address using an API, and ability to maintain our list on our own server rather than on the service's.

Pros

They present a good value and a dependable product

Cons

Customer service is terrible. It used to be pretty good. They have made getting service more difficult, and when you use the chat they try to redirect you away. So when you chat you get in a queue and they text you when you are next. I get a text go to the chat and it says >1 Minute. I stay on for 3-5 minutes no one is there, I go back to what I am doing and when I go back the chat closed. Do it all over again, and this time within a minute someone gets on. I message 7 times my question and issue, 10 minutes go by before I get an answer. The whole process is terrible and purposefully by design treats their paying customer like trash. You don't matter, your time doesn't matter, and in fact you are an idiot for not figuring out the issue on your own. Even when my question/issue was something ONLY they can do. I do not have the ability to increase subusers, only they do. I wish I could say that this is a SendGrid issue, almost every business has rearranged their CS to serve employees, which usually is at the expense of those who pay to make the whole operation work.

Alternatives Considered

SparkPost

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

I also use Twilio, seemed like a reasonable thing to use both services.

Pros

Easy to connect up and set up delivery of email, handles any bounces, spam reports, link tracking and continually trying to deliver. Allows set up of email authentication including SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Cons

Sometimes things fail and can take a while to get to the bottom of, some of the reporting feels lack lustre and limited given the volume of emails we send. Support has at times been slow to get back to us, although they always do come back with answers.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon SES

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Had used it previously for a large scale operation.

Pros

The API is so easy to use and implement. The dashboards and statistics is a great addition which makes our jobs easier and cuts down costs.

Cons

I wish there was a plan between FREE and BASIC. I pretty much need to send around 200-300 emails a day. Free is 100 Emails per day, and the basic plan is 1000 email per day. If there was something @ half the cost to send 300 emails a day that would be perfect!

Pros

I like the vetting process, making sure users don't spam.

Cons

The customer is weird, they didn't approve my account for whatever reason, no explanation, I sent mail and still no explanation, they only reffered me to some policies none of which I violated.

Alternatives Considered

MailerSend and Postmark

Pros

Complete and stable solution, ready for live apps

Cons

Some advanced features require some time to take full advantage of

Pros

Our help desk/support team skews more to the "client's industry specialist" side and less to the tech savant end. That being said, SendGrid continues to be simple to use tool for those that interact with it daily. Setup and further customizations have been simple, and over the course of 10 years, it has continued to prove its value with minimum service inturruptions.

Cons

Our team's only major complaint during our ensure using SendGrid was mostly when it was a less mature product. There were some shortcomings early on with the email marketing and contact management, but there has been considerable progress and improvements in almost all corners of their service and UI.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub and Mailchimp Transactional Email

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Our company was VERY small and short staffed when we realized we needed a transactional/API email service. After reading reviews and comparing pricing and features, SendGrid fit our needs the best, especially the pricing packages.

Pros

I don't think the email API service has ever had a technical downtime where it doesn't work in the many years we have used it. The API itself is very easy to use and use the least privileges. Integrating the API into your SEIM or reporting platform (Power Bi for example) is also really easy to do and gives verbose information.

Cons

Email reputation can be a concern in ensuring your emails are delivered externally unless you want to pay extra, otherwise, the lower tiers are fine and still have decent deliverability %'s, typically above 95%'s.

Pros

Basic SMTP - no really a lot to like in fact it's awful

Cons

We have reviewed your account and have determined that Twilio’s services cannot support the content and/or nature of your business.

SLOW support

Alternatives Considered

Brevo

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

because I thought Twilio would be reputable, I spend 3,000 a year at twilio, and they just cut my email off like that

Pros

The site is pretty straight forward and easy to navigate.

Cons

There are a lot of technical kinks that need to be worked out. Simple things like copy and paste, moving items around, etc. often do not work and will kick me out of the program. This often does not save my work even though it 'automatically' saves. Also, minor changes to specs often messes up the entire layout, causing me to have to start over.
It would also be nice if you had the option to view emails from a browser, as we use this site for a newsletter and having the option to download this/upload a link to a website would be helpful.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

I did not choose. But would choose switching to mailchimp if I could.

Pros

Easy to use API, advanced features, relatively friendly and very secure with 2FA foreced on you and every user in the system

Cons

Customer support can improve significantly (didn’t reply to my ticket for more than 2 months, I had to approach the sales department for making sure my ticket is reviewed)

Pros

I absolutely love using Sendgrid for our email marketing needs. Its intuitive and user-friendly interface makes creating and sending professional-looking emails a breeze. The email list segmentation feature, which allows us to trigger email engagement based on user behavior within our app, has had a significant impact on our overall sales conversion workflow. Additionally, Sendgrid's reporting and analytics tools have been invaluable in measuring and identifying the strengths and weaknesses of our email campaigns through real-time data metrics. Overall, Sendgrid has been a game-changer for our email marketing efforts.

Cons

Twilio's email builder is restrictive when it comes to available design options and flexibility. One area for improvement is its drag-and-drop editor, which could benefit from more advanced customization options, such as the ability to add custom HTML or CSS for greater design flexibility.

Pros

It's really easy to integrate quickly with just one API key. When I learned that it is also preferred by many large businesses, my confidence increased considerably.

Cons

It's really easy to integrate quickly with just one API key. When I learned that it is also preferred by many large businesses, my confidence increased considerably.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Switched From

Mailchimp

Pros

Originally it gave us full visibility into our emails and helped us get much better tracking on who was receiving what and when. Important to know emails had been delivered as we deal with large numbers of payslips and emails for our clients.

Cons

Recently there's been a change with their new API which has been nothing short of woeful.

We've had multiple clients either having emails not sent (where did they go?) or sending emails twice because they are getting incorrect feedback that the email hasn't been sent. (delivery report being wrong).

This has been for invoices and payslips which are highly sensitive information to be missing or duplicated.

It's made us look like fools repeatedly and our clients are furious. Sendgrid literally has one function which is to send emails and it's failing to do that accurately.

The response for help in these scenarios has been non-existent at best and negligent at worst despite having been a client for over a year. We haven't had a response to urgent requests for over 4 days and our clients are furious.

Pros

I think, that SendGrid might be the best solution for e-mail marketing purposes or sending automated e-mails in some sort of user flow. It really speeds up the development. The desktop/mobile formats make it easy to reliably send pre-specified e-mails.

Cons

Some customizations might not be that straight forward for someone.

Alternatives Considered

Brevo and Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing SendGrid

Too few customization options.

Switched From

Brevo

Pros

A free plan is the most attractive thing they offer. Their free plan is for life long tenure. It is easy to integrate the Send Grid with almost any software. It offers a choice to integrate using their API or connect through SMTP. Their dashboard and reports are very detailed.

Cons

It seeks improvement in multiple areas like customer services, business intelligence and error messages. There user interface also confuses sometime.

Pros

Send massive mail with this service is very simple

Cons

Maybe the price for thousands mail in a month is too expensive.

Pros

It was easy to set up, and worked perfectly until it didn't; then, customer support was non-existent.

Cons

Customer support does not answer emails. Compliance team does not speak with me, I could not determine what I had done wrong. They simply left me in the lurch, and held my email hostage.

Pros

We’ve been using sendgrid for more than 6 months now for our clients and we’ve seen amazing results with it. We’ve seen a conversion lift of somewhere between 10-12% which is great. The thing that I find most useful is it lets you collect signups and feedbacks right into the emails. I know its not some out of the box features but we’ve tried many other tools and we found sendgrid to have the easiest setup. The deliverability rate is also great for a email marketing tools and the metrics that it offers are really insightful. It helps us regularly monitor and reiterate our email sequences to optimise performance.

Cons

I don’t think I’ve noticed any cons yet in my 6 months of usage. Its bug free and easy to set up email marketing tool

Alternatives Considered

ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

ease of use

Pros

An wonderful platform, particularly for novices. It provides free trial packages for life, 100 emails every day, and an SMTP feature that can be linked with a program. Emails can be recorded and Follow Up can be done, as well as accurate analyses through development. There are numerous benefits, and it is easy to create an HTML form to place on a landing page or your website to enroll individuals in a mailing list for a charge.

Cons

Haven't really thought about anything negative with this.

Pros

The uptime and delivery monitoring service is the best in class. No doubt large enterprises like Uber, Spotify, etc. use sendgrid for their email delivery. Additionally, its overall communication tools suite like Twilio SMS, Whatsapp business make it an all in one solution for all the communication related APIs

Cons

Probably needs a little elaborative developer documentation with respective to example code samples for a newbie.

Alternatives Considered

Brevo and Mailchimp