Whether it be it a small or large one, every business needs a reliable email marketing solution to communicate with its customer base and market itself to a wide audience.
There are various solutions available for businesses of all sizes, startups, and established ones.
Mailchimp is a widely used option, and if you want a Mailchimp alternative, you can also consider SendGrid. In this SendGrid vs. Mailchimp comparison, you can learn more about how the two options compare as far as pricing, features, and more.
As a business, it is important to choose the right email marketing software. It should be able to handle your business growth and must-have features that cater to all your marketing needs and allow you to deliver superior customer service seamlessly. All this has to be within your budget as well.
Mailchimp is a marketing software company that was founded in 2001. It has headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, and three other additional offices in North America. For small businesses, it is an all-in-one marketing platform. To help companies to get online, Mailchimp offers websites and custom domains.
On the marketing side, the products include:
- Landing pages
- Digital ads
- Social media
- Postcards
SendGrid by Twilio is primarily an email platform for businesses to communicate with their clients. The company sends over 70 billion emails every month for their 80,000 plus paying customers.
These include many top companies such as Uber, Spotify, Glassdoor, Airbnb, Yelp, eBay, and Meetup. The main products that SendGrid offers are email marketing, email API, and expert service. Under each of these categories are a range of features.
It’s now time to look at how the two companies compare as far as affordable pricing, variety of platforms, features, and integrations.
Pricing and Free Plan
In general, Mailchimp pricing is cheaper and more affordable for smaller businesses compared with SendGrid. There are four pricing plans available, and pricing is calculated based on the number of email messages that are sent and contacts are required.
There is a free plan, which offers businesses just getting started with a range of multi-channel tools to grow.
Next up, the Essentials plan starts at $9.99 per month and is ideal for email-only senders. The next offer is the Standard plan, which starts at $14.99 per month. With this, subscribers can enjoy optimization tools and data-driven automation to accelerate their business growth.
Finally, there is the Premium plan starting at $299 per month. This plan provides numerous advanced features and gives businesses a more customizable offering.
SendGrid pricing is available for the email API product and the marketing campaign product. There are four plans available under the Email API plan to help you integrate email into your app or website.
There is a free one, which allows users to send 100 emails a day. Next, the Essentials plan starts at $14.95 and allows businesses to send 100,000 emails a month.
The most popular plan is the Pro plan, which starts at $89.95 a month. Businesses can send up to 1.5 million marketing emails per month.
The Premium plan is available for businesses looking for an even more customized plan and additional team support. If you 40,000 emails per month, for example, you can start with the Essentials plan. These plans can be tried out for free first.
SendGrid’s Marketing Campaign plan has three pricing levels to help businesses design and send email marketing campaigns and marketing automation.
The free plan can store up to 2,000 contacts and send up to 6,000 emails per month. The Basic plan starts at $15 per month, can store up to 100,000 contacts, and can send 300,000 emails per month.
The most popular option is the Advanced plan. Here, you can store 200,000 contacts and send 1 million emails at a price starting at $60 per month. If you 12,000 emails per month, for example, you can start with the Basic plan.
Available Platforms
Mailchimp offers a wider platform that covers more than emails but also includes ad channels and social media. This provides a more unified dashboard and an all-in-one marketing solution.
SendGrid is a powerhouse when it comes to email marketing communications. It makes it easy to send emails from any application.
Features
Mailchimp has a wide range of features, and these are divided into different categories:
- Audience management – Here, you can expect marketing CRM, signup forms, segmentation, behavioral targeting, predicted demographics, as well as tags and contact profiles.
- Creative tools – Featured in this category, you can expect content studio, creative assistant, dynamic content, subject line helper, and campaign templates.
- Marketing automation – The features here include customer journeys, integration, and transactional email.
- Insights and analytics – Finally, in this category, you can expect features such as reports, smart recommendations, A/B testing, and surveys.
SendGrid features include the following for the three product categories:
- Email marketing – These services include email template creation, automation, testing, design, statistics, and signup forms.
- Email API – In this category, you can find SMTP service, email validation, deliverability, dynamic templates, email testing, and 5-minute integration.
- Expert services – These are not limited to set-up assistance, delivery help, and ongoing consulting.
Integrations
Mailchimp can be integrated with many apps and tools to allow you to do more with the platform. Some common eCommerce apps you can integrate with Mailchimp are Stripe, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and PrestaShop. You can also connect your SMS and do live chat for improved customer service.
LiveChat, SimpleTexting, and Textiful are some options here. Mailchimp can also be integrated with design platforms such as Canva, Adobe Photoshop, and Unsplash.
Integration with eCommerce payment tools like Square, meeting, and event tools like Eventbrite, workflow automation tools, and data sync apps is also possible.
SendGrid has partnered with over 120 companies to enable a wide selection of integrations. Some of these include GitHub, Insider, Oracle, WordPress, Zapier, and Microsoft Azure.
Both Mailgrid and SendGrid offer a wide range of great services for businesses to scale their marketing and grow. SendGrid is ideal for businesses wanting a reliable means to send an email, but as far as covering all the aspects of a marketing campaign, Mailgrid is more comprehensive.
