7 Best SendGrid Alternatives and Competitors: Free and Paid

If you are looking for the best SendGrid alternative or competitors, your search ends here. 

SendGrid is an email marketing software, and it is needless to say how important email marketing is for businesses. 

Email communication is a strong medium for businesses to speak to their customers, whether for making announcements of their offers or new product launches or responding to clients’ actions taken on their website or application, like sending verification emails, OTP emails, password resetting emails, etc. 

All these email marketing features are difficult with email clients like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. They impose a certain limit on email sending, and the alternative is setting up your SMTP service, which is quite a hassle and not cost-effective.

So what can be done in such situations? Well, here comes email marketing software to the rescue that has our back and saves us in this situation. 

SendGrid is one such email marketing software that helps us in this situation. However, this article outlines SendGrid’s alternatives. Here, we will learn about 7 of the best SendGrid alternatives available to us.

Before discussing SendGrid’s alternatives, let’s understand SendGrid and why we need alternatives. 

SendGrid is an email marketing software that has its own SMTP service. It is an efficient email marketing platform that can be helpful for you if you are a marketer, an eCommerce business, a high-volume email sender, a startup, an enterprise, or a developer.

If you need to blast bulk email campaigns, send personalized emails, or trigger-based transactional emails and want to ensure high deliverability of the emails and want them to always reach the recipient’s inbox, look no further. 

SendGrid is a capable email marketing software trusted by 80,000 customers, including some of the big brands like Uber, Spotify, Airbnb, Yelp, etc. It can fulfill all the email marketing needs of your organization.

SendGrid offers an Email API that comes with detailed documentation so that your developers can easily set it up with your application. Its library comes with languages like Ruby, Java, Python, Node, Curl, PHP, etc. 

Some of its best features are its high deliverability, sender reputation, email templates, and a drag-and-drop email builder. It lets you see the software’s uptime and the past incidents on the network status page.

Before I jump into what has made its existing users or prospects look for an alternative, let me first mention that SendGrid was acquired by the cloud communication tool Twilio in 2018. Therefore, it is now known as Twilio SendGrid.

One key reason to look for SendGrid alternatives is its pricing. SendGrid has two pricing plans, one for its Email API service and campaign marketing. 

Even if you intend to replace SendGrid, you should be aware of your choices.

7 Best SendGrid Alternatives

The followings are the 7 best SendGrid alternatives:

1. Moosend
2. SendinBlue
3. Hubspot Email Marketing
4. Constant Contact
5. GetResponse
6. Mailjet
7. Postmark

#1. Moosend

Founded in 2011, Moosend is an SMTP email marketing software that supports campaign marketing and transactional email like SendGrid but at a lower price than SendGrid.

Key Features of Moosend

• Moosend’s email marketing supports many useful email marketing features and marketing automation. Its marketing automation supports website user tracking, and it comes with over 30 email automation templates with a drag-and-drop workflow builder. You can see reports of workflow steps, put up personal notes on the steps, etc.
• Email sending comes with features like list segmentation, A/B testing, etc. It offers more than 70 email templates for quick use. You can see detailed reports of your email performances, such as open rates, click rates, unsubscribing information, etc. 
• Moosend will help you build landing pages and signup forms. Both come with pre-designed templates, and it has a drag-and-drop builder to play around with and create beautiful landing pages and forms.

Ratings

On Capterra, a software review application, Moosend has been given 4.8 stars out of 5 by 156 users. 

Businesses like Dominos, Tedx, Gucci, Vogue, and many others have trusted Moosend for its email marketing services.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Great ratings and user trust.
• 100+ third-party integrations, even in the free plan.
• Dedicated IP in enterprise plan.
• It comes with a free plan with no credit card requirement.
• You can reuse email credits in the next month, and they do not expire.

Cons

• In the free plan, you do not get support for transactional emails or landing pages.
• No network status page.

Pricing

Moosend offers three pricing plans: Free, Pro, and Enterprise. The Pro plan starts at as low as 8 USD per month for 1,000 contacts (for a yearly subscription, 10 USD for a monthly subscription). As the number of contacts increases, the rate will increase too.

Keep in mind that you can send unlimited emails in all the plans, unlike SendGrid.

Let’s move to the second SendGrid alternative.

#2. SendinBlue

Sendinblue, founded in 2012, is a popular email marketing software and offers unlimited contact storage at affordable rates.

Key Features of SendInblue

• Sendinblue is an email marketing software that supports unlimited contact storage, unlike SendGrid.
• It offers email marketing, marketing automation, transactional emails, etc.
• Just like Moosend, Sendinblue helps you design landing pages and subscription forms using a drag-and-drop builder.
• It supports Facebook Ads, SMS marketing, list segmentation and provides CRM.
• You can add a chat option to your website for real-time communication with your website visitors.
• It provides detailed reports and analytics. But what is notable here is its STO feature. The abbreviation stands for Send Time Optimization, a machine learning algorithm that lets you know the best time to send an email to recipients by analyzing their previous engagement. SendGrid does not offer this feature.

Ratings

As I said, it is a pretty popular email marketing software, and ratings show it. Sendinblue received 4.5 out of 5 based on 915 users.

Sendinblue has a user base of 175,000 in 160 countries. Some notable customers are Frontline, Louis Vuitton, Marcel, Codeinwp, etc.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• High ratings.
• Free plan.
• Integrations.
• Dedicated IP.
• Provides network status.

Cons

• Many good features are available in the highest plan, like dedicated IP, dedicated account manager, multi-support user, etc.

Pricing

Sendinblue offers a free plan, and it has a limitation on daily email send. You can send 300 emails per day to your contacts.

The paid plans are Lite, Premium, and Enterprise. There is no daily email sending limit imposed on any of the paid plans, and Lite and Premium plans start at 25 and 65 USD for 10K and 20K emails sent.

Let’s move to the next SendGrid competitor.

#3. HubSpot Email Marketing

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software that perfectly fits your marketing, sales, services, operational, and CMS needs. It provides different hubs for each of these requirements. In this article, we will discuss the marketing hub.

Key Features of HubSpot

• In email marketing, they offer A/B testing, list management, personalized email content for different recipients, dozens of email templates that can be customized easily with the help of drag-and-drop builders, and many more features.
• Marketing automation comes with dozens of triggers and conditions to fully automate the journey. You can automate webhooks, lead scores and update properties in bulk. You can also automate triggers for your team when a lead takes any action. You can automate notifications and task creation in Hubspot free CRM and a lot more.
• HubSpot supports a landing page builder, and they have a handful of landing page templates. You can even personalize landing page content by adding smart rules based on location, source, device type, and the contact’s lifecycle stage. You can analyze the performance of your landing page.
• Their form builder is also a drag-and-drop interface. You receive 1,000 form fields and a handful of form types. You can insert forms on your website and capture lead details in Hubspot CRM automatically. From there, they can create a new connection with your lead. You can automate follow-up emails as soon as someone submits a form.
• You can use the HubSpot marketing hub for free without providing your credit card details. In the free plan, you get email marketing, landing pages, Facebook, Instagram, Google and LinkedIn ads, traffic and conversion analysis, etc., as free tools, which is commendable.

Ratings

HubSpot has been helping businesses since 2006 and has a rating of 4.5 stars out of 5 given by 4501 users. Some of the brand names that are part of Hubspot’s user base are Surveymonkey, Loom, monday.com, Frontify, etc.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Highlighted features.
• Free plan with a pool of tools.
• Good ratings.

Cons

• Expensive software.
• Steep learning curve.

Pricing

Hubspot marketing has three plans: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise. The starting rates are 45 USD/month, 800 USD/month, and 3,200 USD/month, respectively. 

You can create bundles on Hubspot. This means if you wish to use two or more hubs, you can add any of the paid plans to your bundle. 

#4. Constant Contact

Constant Contact has been available since 1996. It helps us with website creation, eCommerce store set up, email marketing services, etc.

Key Features of Constant Contact

• Like most email marketing software, Constant Contact email marketing gives us beautiful email templates, and the email builder is easily editable with no hassle. Constant Contact comes with 100+ email templates. It lets us send unlimited emails.
• Regarding marketing automation, the features offered are quite similar to other marketing automation tools: A/B testing, welcome email, triggered email series, and contact segmentation. It automatically resends emails that remain unopened.
• Constant Contact provides eCommerce tools that are ideal for your eCommerce store.
• You can create Facebook and Instagram ads, track their performances, engage with your audience, and have a detailed performance report.
• Like most email marketing tools, here you get detailed metrics of your email performance. Based on the reports, you can create more segmented lists for your customers.
• Constant Contact lets you connect with your contacts using methods other than email, through surveys and polls, donation pages, sign-up forms, events, etc.

Ratings

Constant Contact’s ratings are pretty appealing. 1,849 users have given it 4.3 stars out of 5.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Good ratings.
• 1-month free plan.
• Third-party integrations.
• Free downloadable marketing guide

Cons

• No network status page.

Pricing

Constant Contact has two pricing plans: Email, which starts at 20 USD per month, and Email Plus, which starts at 45 USD per month. Constant Contact’s pricing depends on the number of contacts. The price increases as the number of contacts increases.

No matter which plans you choose, you get the first month free. It does not matter how many contacts you have. This is a great opportunity to test the tool and evaluate your options.

It offers you an advance payment option where you can get a 15% discount.

#5. GetResponse

GetResponse is an email marketing software founded in 1998. Along with email marketing features, it has many unique features that SendGrid and its alternative do not have.

Key Features of GetResponse

• Firstly, GetResponse has email marketing features that support both campaign and transactional emails. It comes with beautiful email templates and an email editor that has a drag-and-drop interface. You get dynamic content, 99% email deliverability, autoresponders, list management and email reports, and many more features.
• Marketing automation comes with various triggers and conditioning options. You get many marketing automation templates. Create unlimited tags and segments, customize contacts, and then send them personalized, relevant emails.
• GetResponse provides a no-code website builder with website templates to make it easy for you to design beautiful websites. Along with the website builder, it supports the landing page builder and sign-up form builder. It provides in-depth marketing campaign performance reports.
• Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and web push notifications are also available.
• GetResponse provides webinar builder and sales funnel features. You can host unlimited webinars, store up to 20 hours of webinar recordings, and have 1000 live attendees. 

Ratings

Trusted by 350,000 customers worldwide, GetResponse is given a decent 4.1 score out of 5 stars by 274 users.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Good ratings.
• Free trial.
• Third-party integrations.

Cons

• No network status page.

Pricing

GetResponse does not have a free plan, but it offers a 30-day free trial period with no credit card required.

It has four paid plans: Basic, Plus, Professional, and Max. GetResponse’s rates depend on the size of your contact list.

#6. Mailjet

We are almost at the end of our list. At number 6 we have Mailjet, a cloud-based email delivery software founded in 2010.

Key Features of Mailjet

• It is an email marketing tool that supports marketing automation, sending campaign emails, and transactional emails. More or less, the features are quite similar to any email marketing platform.
• You get free email templates for your email sending needs. You also get an intuitive drag-and-drop email builder in case you want to create something of your own. You can see this functionality in all the email marketing software I have mentioned above. But what makes Mailjet unique is that it lets you do live collaboration with your team while you are working on it. 
• When we build a design, we finish the design and then have it checked by our team. However, with live collaboration,  your team will view your email builder when you are working on it and provide their live comments.
• Another highlightable feature of Mailjet is its A/B testing. Mailjet lets you test 10 email variants. By analyzing the detailed analytics, you can decide which one to go with.
• The email builder named Passport is compatible with all devices.

Ratings

Mailjet is given 4.3 stars out of 5 by 335 users. 130,000 companies trust Mailjet as their email service provider, and Microsoft, KIA, and American Express are some of Mailjet’s clients.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Highlighted features.
• Free plan.
• Good ratings.
• Network status.

Cons

• Automation and segmentation options could be improved.

Pricing

Mailjet offers a free plan that lets you send 200 emails per day. You get unlimited contact storage even in the free plan.

The paid plans are Essential, Premium and Custom. To send 15,000 emails per month, the Essential and Premium plans start at 15 and 25 USD per month. Paid plans are exempted from the daily email sending limitation. The higher plan has more features than the lower-paid plan. 

Now, let’s move to the last SendGrid alternative.

#7. Postmark

The last SendGrid alternative is Postmark. Postmark was founded in 2010. I love this platform for its transparency. They share the time Postmark takes to reach different email clients like Apple, Gmail, AOL, etc. Postmark is mainly focused on only transactional emails, but they support bulk and marketing emails as well.

Key Features of Postmark

• Their determination to email deliverability. They believe email should reach inboxes immediately, not eventually, and have built their software to follow that belief.
• Detailed email metrics that consist of bounced and delivery emails with their open and click rates.
• You get 45 days of searchable previous email sending data.
• Other email marketing will suggest you go for a dedicated IP for a better sender reputation. But Postmark does not suggest this until you need a dedicated IP. They provide you with a well-established sender reputation in the shared IP itself.
• Postmark comes with beautiful developer-friendly transactional email templates.

Ratings

Postmark has 4.9 out of 5 stars from 23 users. Salesforce Desk, Code Climate, and Livechat are some of its notable clients.

Pros and Cons

Pros

• Highlighted features.
• Network status page.
• Free plan.

Cons

• No A/B testing feature.
• More developer-friendly than marketer-friendly.

Pricing

Postmark has a free plan that lets you send 100 emails per month. In the above image, you can see the cost of different email sending amounts per month. With the cost calculator, you can calculate the price.

Conclusion

SendGrid is a powerful email delivery software, but so are the 7 email marketing software options discussed in this article. These 7 email services are not the only email marketing services available on the market, and there are many available: Amazon SES, Active Campaign, SparkPost, to name a few.

That is all for today’s topic. What best SendGrid alternative have you selected for your business? Please let me know through the comments section.