Email marketing remains an extremely effective channel for engaging customers and driving conversions. As a business owner, choosing the right email marketing platform is critical to running successful campaigns. Two of the leading solutions on the market are Mailchimp and SendGrid. But deciphering whether Mailchimp or SendGrid is better suited for your business can be challenging.
This comprehensive guide will compare the key capabilities of Mailchimp and SendGrid to help you determine the best fit for your email marketing needs.
A Brief Background on Mailchimp and SendGrid
Let‘s start with a quick overview of both platforms.
Mailchimp – The Popular Email Marketing Platform
Founded in 2001 in Atlanta, Mailchimp markets itself as an "all-in-one marketing platform" suited for small businesses. The tool rose to popularity thanks to its easy-to-use drag-and-drop email builder and pre-designed email templates.
Today, Mailchimp serves over 200,000 businesses and 13 million users worldwide. It continues to expand its capabilities beyond email into areas like landing pages, postcards, and Facebook ads.
Some of Mailchimp‘s key features include:
- Email builder with drag-and-drop editor
- Automated email workflows and campaigns
- Pre-designed templates
- Audience management and segmentation tools
- Automations based on customer behavior
- Reports and analytics on email performance
- Integrations with ecommerce platforms and other apps
Overall, Mailchimp positions itself as an reasonably priced, user-friendly marketing platform tailored for growing small to mid-sized businesses.
SendGrid – The Trusted Transactional Email Service
Established in 2009 and based in Denver, SendGrid specializes in transactional and engagement email delivery. The company transmits over 40 billion emails every month for internet giants like Airbnb, Spotify, Uber, and Pinterest.
In 2018, SendGrid was acquired by Twilio but continues to operate as a standalone email API platform.
Some key capabilities offered by SendGrid include:
- Reliable infrastructure for high-volume email
- Scalable cloud-based email delivery
- Tools to improve email deliverability
- Email activity tracking and analytics
- Real-time alerts and monitoring
- Flexible APIs for integrating with websites and apps
- Add-ons for sender authentication, email validation, and more
In summary, SendGrid positions itself as the go-to transactional email delivery engine for developers and large enterprises.
Feature Comparison of Mailchimp and SendGrid
Now let‘s do a deep dive into the key features of Mailchimp and SendGrid to see how they stack up:
Email Templates
Both Mailchimp and SendGrid provide professionally designed templates to help you create on-brand, visually appealing emails quickly.
Mailchimp offers hundreds of free and paid templates suited for different use cases like welcome emails, product announcements, events, and more. Users can customize the content blocks using an intuitive drag-and-drop editor. There are also lots of design choices for images, layouts, fonts, and color schemes to choose from.
SendGrid provides over 200 responsive pre-built templates focused primarily around transactional communication for sign-up confirmations, receipts, alerts, and notifications. Users can leverage a basic editor to update header images, logos, and default text. Additional customization requires using SendGrid‘s dynamic transaction templates feature to insert custom fields.
For most use cases, Mailchimp provides simpler, more flexible options for customizing the look and feel of emails to align with your brand. SendGrid‘s templates work great for high-volume transactional emails but have limited editing capabilities.
Email Editor
Mailchimp comes with an user-friendly drag-and-drop email editor that makes building and customizing emails intuitive. Users can leverage a WYSIWYG interface to add and style content blocks, insert images and videos, choose from different layouts, and preview how the email will appear across devices. Advanced users can tweak the underlying HTML code as well.
SendGrid lacks a drag-and-drop editor. Users need to leverage the template editor or dynamic transaction templates feature along with HTML/CSS knowledge to customize emails. This gives developers more control but isn‘t suited for less technical users.
Overall, Mailchimp‘s drag-and-drop email builder allows both novice and advanced marketers to create stylish, branded emails with ease.
Segmentation and Targeting
Both Mailchimp and SendGrid provide the ability to segment your subscriber lists into groups to target content appropriately.
Mailchimp offers powerful filtering tools to split audiences based on categories like demographics, interests, purchase history, geography, engagement metrics, and more. You can then target specific groups with tailored content. Rules can also be set up to automate adding/removing users from segments.
SendGrid provides basic segmentation capabilities based on user attributes like email activity, location, device preference etc. JSON metadata can also be attached to contacts and leveraged for targeting campaigns. Complex segmentation based on user behavior or many criteria requires more customization.
For typical email nurturing workflows, Mailchimp‘s segmentation features are far more sophisticated out of the box. This allows sending precisely targeted content.
Automation
Mailchimp and SendGrid both provide workflow automation capabilities to send emails based on triggers or events. This eliminates tedious manual tasks.
Mailchimp offers an intuitive visual automations builder to set up "customer journeys" across key scenarios like welcome/onboarding flows, re-engaging inactive users, abandoned cart sequences, and more. Users can string together a variety of email, segmentation, tagging, and integration actions based on time delays or customer activity.
SendGrid‘s automation tool called Marketing Campaigns allows setting up a few standard nurture workflows for user signup, engagement after signup, and inactive user winback. Custom automations require leveraging SendGrid‘s event webhooks and writing code to tie into internal systems.
For users that don‘t want to tackle coding, Mailchimp provides far more flexibility to build sophisticated multi-track automations for common marketing workflows.
Analytics and Reporting
Understanding email campaign performance is crucial to optimize and improve. Both Mailchimp and SendGrid emphasize detailed email analytics and reporting.
Mailchimp presents easy-to-digest reports on opens, clicks, unsubscribes, spam complaints, and more to track audience engagement over time. Users can also monitor metrics like browse site activity tied back to email campaigns. Granular segmentation allows isolating how specific groups respond. Over 70+ different reports are offered on all aspects of your audience and email program.
SendGrid offers an Insights dashboard that focuses heavily on email deliverability metrics like spam test rate, open and click activity, bounces, unsubscribes etc. Reports have lots of technical data fields that may overcomplicate analysis for less experienced users. API access also allows pulling statistics.
For marketers managing complex email nurture programs, Mailchimp‘s large suite of interactive reports offer added visibility. SendGrid excels at email delivery KPIs for advanced power users.
Deliverability
Getting your email reliably delivered to the intended recipient‘s inbox is non-negotiable. Both platforms provide strong deliverability capabilities but SendGrid is industry-leading.
As a large-scale email delivery provider transmitting billions of emails monthly, SendGrid has established trusted relationships with major ISPs by adhering to strict sending standards. Leveraging proprietary algorithms and feedback loops, the company optimized placement in spam filters. Advanced users can further improve deliverability via dedicated IPs, domain authentication, and customized routing.
Comparatively, Mailchimp has faced some deliverability challenges in the past that resulted in below-average sender reputation scores. However, the company has invested heavily to course correct by expanding infrastructure and forming new partnerships with mailbox providers. Shared and dedicated IPs are offered along with deliverability monitoring tools.
Ultimately, SendGrid sets the deliverability benchmark that even Mailchimp works to match. But differences for most average users won‘t be noticeably huge.
Pricing
Mailchimp offers free and paid plans to meet different needs:
- Free plan: Up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month
- Essentials plan: Starting at $9.99 per month billed annually for up to 500 contacts
- Standard plan: $14.99 per month billed annually for up to 10,000 contacts
- Premium: $299 per month billed annually with up to 200,000 contacts
Additional charges apply as you scale up for more emails, contacts, and advanced features.
SendGrid has volume-based pricing, with plans including:
- Free plan: 100 emails per day up to 40,000 emails for first 30 days
- Essentials: Starting at $15.95 for up to 15,000 contacts and 150,000 emails
- Professional: Starting at $89.95 per month for up to 120,000 contacts and 2 million emails
Enterprise plans are also available for much heavier volumes. As with Mailchimp, costs scale up with additional usage, contacts, and capabilities.
Entry-level options are similar, but SendGrid premium plans are more affordable for managing huge subscriber lists. Consider exactly how many emails you need to send on a monthly or yearly basis.
Comparing Key Use Cases
Now that we‘ve done an in-depth comparison of features, let‘s examine how Mailchimp and SendGrid fare for some common email use cases:
Ecommerce: Promotional Emails, Abandoned Carts, Transactional Messages
For ecommerce stores, personalized promotional campaigns and recovering lost sales opportunities are crucial. But you also need to deliver high-volume operational emails like order confirmations and shipping updates.
In this case, Mailchimp excels at complex segments and sending targeted promos to re-engage customers. Easy template customization also helps craft branded content. Pre-built automations streamline onboarding shoppers and recovering abandoned checkouts.
Where Mailchimp falls short is providing an email infrastructure to reliably transmit thousands of transactional messages. That‘s where SendGrid‘s core competency around scalable email delivery and reliability comes into play.
We recommend utilizing Mailchimp‘s marketing capabilities for promotions and automations, while integrating SendGrid‘s API to safely dispatch high-volume operational emails.
Digital Agencies: Building Campaigns for Clients
If you are a digital agency or marketing freelancer managing email outreach for multiple businesses, choosing a platform with strong white labeling capabilities and client reporting is paramount.
In this scenario, Mailchimp is the ideal solution. Segmentation tools make it simple to divide up subscriber lists by client. Extensive branding customizations allow tailoring emails and landing pages to unique client needs. The ability to restrict access through user permissions and generate branded reports keeps data isolated and provides transparency.
While SendGrid has APIs and analytics to potentially support multi-tenant environments, capabilities around white labeling, access restrictions, and client reporting are not native strengths suited for agencies. Stick with Mailchimp for simplicity and safety of not co-mingling sensitive client data.
SaaS Companies: Onboarding, Engagement, Upsells
For subscription software/SaaS companies who need to onboard users, drive engagement, and facilitate upsells via targeted communication, Mailchimp is again the top choice.
Mailchimp‘ssegmentation tools and automation workflows make it easy to track users by plan type or usage and define the right messaging to showcase value. Templates can also be tailored for self-serv upgrades. For reliably transmitting password resets or invoice notices, SendGrid APIs can fill transactional needs.
Nonprofits: Donor Outreach and Fundraising Campaigns
Nonprofits rely heavily on email to build meaningful relationships with donors and organize fundraising efforts. Segmentation by past donation levels and automating multi-step nurturing journeys is also common.
For all these reasons, Mailchimp stands out. Pre-built templates make it easy to craft appealing outreach. Automations can send updated based on past advocacy actions or trigger donation reminders. Extensive reporting provides campaign transparency to stakeholders.
The Pros and Cons of Mailchimp and SendGrid
Based on our analysis of features and typical use cases, let‘s summarize the major advantages and limitations of both platforms:
Key Benefits of Mailchimp
- Intuitive drag-and-drop email builder and editor
- Great selection of customizable templates for various use cases
- Powerful segmentation and personalization capabilities
- Sophisticated automations tailored for common marketing workflows
- In-depth analytics on audience engagement over time
- Generous free plan and affordable pricing for early-stage businesses
- Ideal for multi-tenant usage supporting agencies and resellers
- Great fit for regular business-to-consumer marketing emails
Common Complaints About Mailchimp
- Deliverability rates weaker than dedicated providers like SendGrid
- Automations builder less intuitive than leading marketing automation platforms
- Missing real-time usage metrics and granular analytics that developers expect
- Mobile app very limited compared to web experience
Key Advantages of SendGrid
- Industry-leading inbox placement and email deliverability
- Proven reliability across billions of transactional emails per month
- Scalability to support huge email volumes as you grow
- Flexibility to integrate via SMTP or API for web and apps
- Real-time tracking and monitoring capability
- Cost savings at high monthly email volumes compared to Mailchimp
Common Complaints About SendGrid
- Email templates have limited customization and personalization
- Steeper learning curve for both users and developers vs alternatives
- Lack of deep segmentation and sophisticated automations driven by user behavior
- Analytics dashboards create complexity instead of clarity
- Addon costs accumulate quickly for desired functionality
Final Recommendations on Mailchimp vs SendGrid
So when should you choose Mailchimp or SendGrid as your email marketing provider?
Here are our recommendations based on different use cases:
- For small businesses sending basic promotional or transactional email, Mailchimp provides an all-in-one solution to get started. Pricing is simple and affordable.
- Companies focused exclusively on high reliability and deliverability for transactional or operational emails should choose SendGrid.
- Organizations wanting to execute multi-dimensional workflows across marketing, sales, and customer success should stick with Mailchimp due to segmentation capabilities and automation functionality.
- Digital agencies managing email outreach across many different businesses are far better served leveraging Mailchimp’s extensive white labeling options.
- Large enterprises with huge lists sending 100+ million emails annually will likely achieve more scale and better pricing through SendGrid.
- Technology startups looking for developer-friendly email APIs that easily integrate with modern web and mobile apps are better aligned with SendGrid.
As you can see, Mailchimp aligns better with typical marketing use cases while SendGrid dominates transactional email delivery. But for more complex needs, the two solutions can absolutely complement each other.
We recommend using Mailchimp’s free trial and SendGrid’s free plan to validate the best solution for your particular email requirements. Testing different options with your own data and workflows will clarify the ideal platform for your needs.
No matter which provider you select, focusing on great email content tailored to your subscribers and sticking to good sender practices will drive the highest long term returns from email marketing.
