February 8, 2022

5 Best SendGrid Alternatives for Transactional Email (2022)

Reading time about 12 min

If you’re looking for a SendGrid alternative, you’re probably in the market for a transactional email service. Although it offers other core email features as well, it’s what it’s best known for.

Transactional emails are very different from marketing ones. Not only can any website or application make use of them, but they also need to be personalized with dynamic contact information to deliver registration info, order details, and password resets. That’s why speed, deliverability, and security are top priorities when choosing an email service provider.

Let’s look at the SendGrid offering and how SendGrid competitors stack up.

What SendGrid Offers

SendGrid is a large-scale email solution, providing email automation, signup forms, and list management. It’s used by big name clients like Uber and Airbnb. However, it’s best known as a leading transactional email platform offering email Rest API and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).

SendGrid is developer-oriented and usually integrated into stand-alone applications, rather than used as a SaaS.

Pros

Email templates with conditional formatting available
Advanced testing options (inbox look, links, spam filter risk)
Email validation API available to check email addresses before emails are sent and bounce.
Good email delivery rates
Monitoring and tools for sender reputation management
Paying customers get chat, ticket, or phone (on higher plans) support
Scalable for large-volume operations

Cons

They sign you up for ISP feedback so you can remove contacts who complain about your emails from your list. Other solutions save time by automatically removing them for you.
Only 3 days of transactional messages history included, 30-day email activity history is a paid add-on.
You need other Twilio add-ons for chat, SMS, and push notifications.
You need a separate email marketing plan to be able to send other kinds of emails apart from transactional. Charges for it are based on contact list size.
You also need this other plan to use a drag-and-drop email editor if you don’t want to code your emails.

SendGrid Pricing

There’s a free forever plan, 100 transactional emails a day. Plans start at $14.95/month. Dedicated IPs are available on Pro plan or higher, starting at $89.95/month. Marketing Campaigns plans also offer a free plan (2,000 contacts, 6,000 emails/month) and start from there at $15/month.

Sendgrid Alternatives Compared

Here’s an overview of the prices and main features SendGrid and its competitors offer as transactional email solutions.

SendGrid/Alternative	Free	Plans start at	Email editor	Transactional sending options	Email marketing campaigns
SendGrid	Up to 100 emails/ day forever	$14.95/ 10,000 emails/ mo	HTML or Drag and drop builder on email marketing plan	API / SMTP	Separate pricing
Sendinblue	Up to 300 emails/ day forever	$25 / 10,000 emails/ mo	Drag and drop, HTML, templates available	API / SMTP / Plugins / marketing automation	Included in plan
Mandrill	500 emails one time	$20 / 10,000 emails/ mo	HTML or import Mailchimp templates	API / SMTP	Separate plan on Mailchimp
Mailgun	5,000 emails/mo for 3 months	$35 / 50,000 emails/ mo & $0.8/ 1,000 emails PAG	HTML or use Mailjet’s drag and drop editor	API/ SMTP	Separate plan on Mailjet
Postmark	Up to 100 emails/ day forever	$10 / 10,000 emails/ mo	Only code	API/ SMTP	No
Amazon SES	First 62,000 emails if hosted in Amazon EC2	$0.10 / 1000 emails pay-as-you-go	Only code	API/ SMTP	No

Sendinblue

Sendinblue is the most cost-effective SendGrid alternative. Let’s explain why.

API, SMTP, and more

As a SendGrid competitor, Sendinblue offers transactional emails via email marketing API, and SMTP relay. But that’s not all.! You can also connect it to all major ecommerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop) via plugins. Or set up automations to trigger transactional emails when certain events occur. (Our SMTP server lets you set up webhooks and track events.)

We understand performance is essential for this type of communication. That’s why Sendinblue offers detailed email analytics on all key metrics. Plus, it offers the advantage over other email delivery services of keeping unlimited logs (i.e. the history of individual emails sent to each recipient).

Test-drive Sendinblue for free >>

Premium deliverability

We have a dedicated team of email deliverability experts who monitor sender reputations on our shared IPs to make sure your emails reach the inbox. We also have a strict vetting process to keep spammers out and protect your sending and open rates. 99.98% of emails are delivered by Sendinblue in less than 20 seconds.

All-in-one email

Sendinblue covers the full range of email marketing services on one marketing platform and plan. No need to use separate tools, or pay different plans on top.

Grow your list first with signup forms and start sending a newsletter. Then, run a promotional campaign. Confirm each individual order that comes in. After that, automate engagement with tailored offers based on the products purchased. And maybe send a mass email to announce a new product range. Send all your transactional, marketing, and automated emails from one place.

Sendinblue also works as a bulk email service. You can use the email API or SMTP to send large volume marketing campaigns faster and with better results.

And if that’s not enough, live chat, landing pages, and SMS marketing are also available. Complete with a CRM, you have all customer data and communications on the same platform.

GDPR

Sendinblue is one SendGrid alternative that takes GDPR very seriously.

It offers signup forms that make collecting consent legal and managing subscribers preferences easy. If someone one accepts transactional but not promotional emails, you won’t be able to email them by mistake and annoy them. This protects your sender reputation as you won’t get marked as spam for unwanted communications.

Also, the API syncs contact activity with the CRM in real time. So hard bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complainers from transactional emails are automatically blacklisted in your CRM so promotional emails are not sent to those addresses either. And unsubscribe links are automatically inserted in all email templates to take one more thing off your plate to remember.

For developers AND marketers alike

Sendinblue as a SendGrid alternative makes transactional email (and not only) accessible to users who are not as tech savvy as a developer. Here are our developer resources but if you’re not one, you can still make full use of the marketing platform.

First, you don’t have to code your transactional emails. The user-friendly drag and drop email builder lets you create any type of email you want from scratch or customizing one of the ready templates available. This way, your transactional emails can be branded and look just as good as the marketing ones.

With Sendinblue, customizing your transactional emails with individual information like order status is also easy. Ready-made elements for dynamic content personalization are available in the email editor.

There’s no need to code your marketing automations either. Just add the steps you want in the visual workflow builder. You can even add transactional SMS or rules to manage the contact based on their behavior, too.

Sendinblue vs SendGrid

All email marketing needs taken care of in one place: bulk email, newsletters, marketing emails, automated campaigns, and every other email marketing use case
Not just 2, but 4 options for sending transactional emails
Ready-to-use ecommerce plugins for quick and easy integration
Unlimited send logs
No charge for contact list size
User-friendly email design tool and templates for marketers who don’t have coding skills
Easy use of dynamic content for personalization
Preview on different email clients and devices
Customer support in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese

Overall, Sendinblue is a SendGrid alternative for small businesses when you don’t know how to write code for transactional emails and want to send everything from one platform.

Pricing

You can activate API or SMTP service even on Sendinblue’s free account (300 emails/day). Paid plans begin at $25/10,000 emails/month with automation, signup forms, templates, A/B testing, SMS, CRM, and no daily sending limit.

Get started for free >>

Mandrill

Mandrill is another SendGrid alternative for transactional email. It offers a full range of features: dynamic content (merge tags), conditional rules and webhooks to react to specific behaviors, click tracking, A/B testing.

However, it’s owned by Mailchimp and unfortunately you have to pay for both to be able to use Mandrill’s API or SMTP.

No contact storage available on Mandrill is another downside. You need Mailchimp for list management or the API/ SMTP will make a call to your external database every time it’s sending an email.

Pricing

You get 500 emails to test Mandrill for free. After that, you need a Mailchimp Standard or Premium plan (from $17 for 500 contacts) and add blocks of 25,000 emails starting at $20/month. Price per block goes down as volume goes up but unused email quota doesn’t roll over to the next month. Dedicated IP add-on is $29.95/month.

Mailgun

Mailgun is a close SendGrid competitor. It’s an API-first solution for developers or B2B and is often white labeled by other applications. It offers additional email deliverability services, inbox placement, email verification, and transactional SMS as well.

If you’re a marketer, though, Mailgun can be intimidating.

You’ll probably need developer’s help for sending any email because it’s not done directly from the platform as with email marketing software. At least you have an alternative to creating the emails in HTML. Mailgun acquired Mailjet for email marketing (promotional emails, newsletters, drip campaigns). Now, you can use Mailjet’s drag and drop email builder to create transactional emails as well.

Pricing

Mailgun offers a trial period of 3 months with 5,000 emails/month. Then, it’s $0.80/1,000 emails. Marketing campaigns are paid on separate plans starting at $35/mo

Dedicated IPs are available on the Foundation 100k plan and up. Validations are an add-on, from $1.20 / 100.

Postmark

Postmark is another SendGrid competitor on the transactional side. It’s built as a transactional email service provider for applications so it’s perfect for SaaS, apps, etc. It’s a robust solution for the tech savvy with detailed reporting and 45 days log retention, boasting superior customer support.

But it lacks campaign building capabilities such as list management, contact segmentation, or a user-friendly design tool needed for ecommerce marketing, for example. Only pre-built transactional email templates are available or alternatively you can use their open-source toolset MailMaison with CSS.

Pricing

Postmark’s pricing starts at $10 per 10,000 emails a month, and you can top up with additional blocks of 1,000 for $1.25 each. Dedicated IP addresses cost $50/month.

Amazon SES

Amazon SES can be counted as a SendGrid alternative as it’s the most basic solution for service emails. The name literally stands for Simple Email Service. It offers APIs and SMTP, core metrics, and a focus on the tech side as it’s a part of the AWS suite for enterprise. Prominent users are Reddit, Netflix, and Duolingo.

It’s a developer tool, usually integrated into stand-alone applications. And so you can’t log in and simply send your emails from its platform. It doesn’t offer a user-friendly interface or email marketing functionality. It works best if you’re hosted on Amazon too.

Pricing

Amazon SES is often cited as the cheapest SendGrid alternative. This can be true, but keep in mind that price depends on your location, your setup, and hosting. There are no set fees, it’s $0.10 / 1000 emails charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. Dedicated IPs are $24.95/ month.

Choosing a SendGrid Alternative

All of the listed SendGrid competitors offer the basic functionality for sending transactional emails. From there, your decision depends on what additional features you need in one email service provider. It’s a good idea for small businesses to try a few SendGrid alternatives for free and see which one’s easiest to use.