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

The analytics tools was the best aspect of our use of SendGrid.

Cons

It is constantly buggy. Contact lists don't always load in. Email drafts don't always save, resulting in loss time and effort.

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

An excellent platform, especially for beginners. It gives free trial packages for life, 100 emails per day, and it has an SMTP feature that can be linked with a programEmails can be tracked and Follow Up can be doneAnd accurate analyzes through development. There are many advantages, and it is possible to make an html form to put it on a landing page or your site to put people in a mailing list for a fee.

Cons

Yet countries in the world are banned in this company.

Pros

Integration is dead easy and the free tiers are fantastic for small businesses and to try out the software.The Marketing Campain feature is great.Documentation is comprehensive as well. The real time analytics and reporting is fantastic.

Cons

Payment issues and customer service response times are a bit of an issue.

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing SendGrid

Better pricing and more features

Switched From

MailerLite, Mailchimp Transactional Email, Zoho Mail and Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Better pricing, more features and more in-depth documentation.

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

Quite easy to setup, integration with firebase was easy enough

Cons

User experience, account closed due to inactivity and without any email or notification.

Customer support didn't even read what I wrote and just copy&pasted a response.

New account flagged by "the system" and misleading information provided by their twitter support.

Pros

A straightforward and convenient tool for email marketing. In the preview phase, you can see how the email looks on different devices. That is very useful.

Cons

The platform's email editing tools are too simple. If you want finer and more elegant features, you should code them, depending on which feature you want.

Pros

Functional, practical and inexpensive email newsletter system in relation to the volumes it allows to send. The statistics are detailed and precise, the website is well designed and pleasant to look at. It allows you to send emails built in HTML or with a drag&drop editor.

Cons

I've tried it for a month so far and I can't say anything bad. Everything works as it should.

Pros

ok this is not a free software but you can get all you want: just smtp or stats and more.. what I really enjoyed was the stats service.. If you run an e-commerce you'll be familiar with the question: "did my customer got the email?" well with sendgrid you can actually answer that question. You'll have a full report and you can easily tell if your customer got the email or something went wrong. This is something just invaluable.

Cons

This is not a pricy software but you need to understand its value. if your business is not big enough maybe it will be hard to sustain. nevertheless i just can say this is the place to look even if you have a small business. unless you want to take the burden of handling smtp this software is just awesome.

Alternatives Considered

MailUp, Zoho Mail and Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing SendGrid

This is the best software if you need an affordable secure smtp with stats and cherries on top.

Switched From

Zoho Mail and Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

SendGrid is my recommended choice. I'll keep suggesting it to all my customers.

Pros

The most impactful feature of SendGrid for our business is data analysis of using both numbers and graphs to paint a very clear picture of the project performance. It is a very powerful tool we use for sending and managing emails campaigns, especially for cold email for marketing.

Cons

The most challenging part of using Sendgrid for us was the integration and setup process but the customer support and YouTube videos were very helpful.

Alternatives Considered

Mailshake

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

It was a better all-around package for what we were looking for with a tool like this.

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

We use sendgrid for our enterprise application for all purpose ranging from notification, verification and transactional information. We switched from a competitor that was burning our pockets and had a lot of issues. the pricing was a balance between our budger and our requirements and send grid just fit into the grid for us

Cons

No complaints. However the suggestion to the manufacturers would be to improvise the documentation for this product to provide more use case specific guidance to help users

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

Switched From

Mailchimp

Pros

Our business application uses Sendgrid for various purposes, including notification, authentication, and transactional data. We migrated from a competitor that was draining our bank accounts and causing a slew of problems. The cost was a good match for our budget and objectives, and the send grid was a perfect fit for us. They provide some handy online manuals to get you started, as well as a variety of configurable options to make sure the device is suitable for you.

Cons

It requires greater adaptability and customization tools to be successful in the long run. I couldn't discover a method to adjust automatic track in UTMs; it can only be activated or deactivated, which isn't convenient. The integrating and installation procedure were the most challenging aspects of implementing Sendgrid for us. However, customer assistance and YouTube tutorials were beneficial.

Pros

1. On the bottom left side of the dashboard is a small reputation percentage bar, that measures your reputation. The bar is updated daily based on your email sends, your reputation goes down if your email bounces or is marked as spam.
2. Stats: SendGrid provides A LOT of data on the performance of your email campaigns, these stats are: Requests, Delivered, Opens, Unique Opens, Clicks, Unique Clicks, Unsubscribes, Spam Reports, Bounces, Blocks, Bounce Drops, Spam Report Drops, Unsubscribe Drops and Invalid Emails. SendGrid also provides stats such as: Global Stats, Category Stats, Category Comparison, Subuser Stats, Subuser Comparison, Geographical, Email Clients & Devices, Mailbox Provider Stats, Mailbox Provider Comparison, Browser Stats, and Browser Comparison
3. A/B Testing
4. Unsubscribe Groups: This is without doubt my favorite feature from SendGrid. When you click on "Marketing" on the left side of your dashboard, and select tour from the drop down, it sort of lists steps to set up for sending marketing emails. Step 3 on the list of things to do is to create unsubscribe groups. Here you can Create groups that represent types of email that you regularly send to your recipients. If a recipient chooses to unsubscribe, they will have the option of selecting which of these groups they want to unsubscribe from.

Cons

1. The Email templates in SendGrids gallery are a bit basic which initially wasn't a problem as I liked creating my own template, but I did not like how I couldn't modify the "columns" module to my taste.

I wanted to create a template with three columns with the center column bigger than the two on the side. The idea was to have my client's images linking to their projects (On their websites) on the side columns, with the write up in the center column.
However, that couldn't be done (At least so far it seems so as I can't find any option to tweak the size/width of each column) as each column has an equal width.

2. No automation function: I'd like to create a sort of If/Then sequence where I can resend an email to a group of people after x days, for example, I'd like to resend an email (With a different heading of course) to people who have not opened the first email after four days.

Pros

We use SendGrid for transactional emails, such as welcome messages & notifications. Generally, SendGrid offers great tools to integrate emails into a variety of different application platforms and programming languages. We really like its level of detail when checking on the status of emails. Sendgrid is also free for basic transactional emails, which makes it easy to try and ensure it will work with your application. We use a third-party library called Nodemailer with Sendgrid, so switching from a different service to Sendgrid was trivial.

Cons

While the service is easy to use and offers comprehensive email activity metrics, there are a few things about it we didn't like. First, because the free tier uses shared IPs, we consistently had emails that wouldn't get delivered because of IP blocks. There were a handful of IPs that we had that experience with, and it persisted for weeks -- without any support intervention. Sendgrid must have deliverability metrics on their side as well, so I am surprised they didn't drop these IPs from their IP pool proactively. We had to upgrade to the PRO plan, which was the least expensive plan that had a dedicated IP. We also had to pay extra for 30 days of email history, you get 3 days by default. I'd love to see all these options be a-la-carte, but I get that you need to make revenue somehow, and few companies send enough emails to justify jumping to the next paid plan -- unless you NEED that deliverability guarantee that you get w/ dedicated IPs, which we did.

Pros

The pricing is great. Easy to use API with lots of documentations. Their user interface is straightforward. The customer service has always been pretty quick to get back to me. It's a popular service with a lot of integrations available.

Cons

I was a happy user of Sendgrid for a long time, but emails sent with the service always went to the spam folder for Microsoft email services (Outlook, Hotmail, MSN). This could never seem to get resolved, even with a dedicated IP that they offered. Then recently, Microsoft started blocking the emails. I found out this was because a spammer had used their service and got the shared IP blacklisted. They were unable to help me resolve it swiftly, so I had to leave the service, because we have a lot of people who use Microsoft email services.

Alternatives Considered

Mailgun

Pros

The easy integration with their API and out of box integration with dozens of third parties. Easy to use SMTP gateway service and amazing free to start plan.

Cons

Office365 now blocks most of Sendgrids IP ranges which makes delivery difficult in some cases. You can how ever upgrade to a dedicated IP and this isn't an issue with their software. Other than that, have more than 1 api user on the entry plan would be great but what can I complain about..

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp Transactional Email

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Pricing.

Pros

Two things actually. The transactional email software was what we started with and it was exceptional. The emails were fast and delivered promptly. That made us try the email Marketing feature and we eventually dumped Mailchimp for it. You can have as much as 1000 free subscribers and send 6000 emails per month, not as much as Mailchimp is offering but it gets the job done and we love the simplicity, are there cons? Yes, and I'll get to that shortly. Sendgrid also takes security seriously and never lets you rest until you've turned on two factor authentication even when I'm sure my account is not in that much of a threat, simply not bad.

Cons

Mostly on the email marketing part cause that's what we use more often. The pricing isn't small business friendly and you'd have to pay more to access essential features like automation, not great, you'd have to pay more for that. Dedicated IP, that I get, but automation not available on the basic paid package is kind of a kicker but with email marketing ROI, its probably a great investment but then again, we do make do without it. The software doesn't work well on all browsers and devices sometimes, it happened to us at some point but I reckon its been fixed.

Alternatives Considered

Benchmark Email and Mailchimp

Pros

Easy of getting startedGenerous Free TierSMTP

Cons

Pricing is on the higher side as compared to the competition

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp

Reasons for Choosing SendGrid

Better UI

Switched From

Alibaba Cloud

Reasons for Switching to SendGrid

Pricing at that point of time

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

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

Pros

We used Sendgrid for our Email Marketing. I loved the technology, the cost was okay and easy to implement.
It also optimized to reach user inbox instead of spam.
It could also be integrated to CRM of your choice which team liked.

Cons

The support, I mean, if you are paying $100,000 an year, we expect a dedicated person, which was not available. Even the sales team felt like more to make sales than worry about use case or team.

Pros

We needed an email server provider for our web application and my friend recommended me Sendgrid 3 years ago. We are still using it without any problem. Our Pro 300K plan gives us a clean, dedicated IP address so our automatic emails don't end up in Spam folders.

You can observe the email's journey and get various analytics on how many emails are delivered, how many people have opened, how many clicks etc.

Our marketing team also started to use Sendgrid to send newsletters. It is very easy to manage contact lists and subscriptions.

Customer support is great. They helped a lot whenever we have a question or problem.

API documentation is clean and thorough.

Cons

Website menu structure is a bit complicated and left menu fonts are faded. It is hard to read the menu elements. It's color should be darker.