Mailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.
$35
per month
Twilio SendGrid
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns provides users with segmentation, campaign editing, and deliverability. According to the vendor, Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns is trusted by over 80,000 customers globally, including Airbnb, Spotify and Uber. Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns aims to help users by providing: MORE EFFICIENT EMAIL BUILDING The campaign building process is free from frustrating, rigid step-by-step wizards that slow users down. The vendor says…
$15
per month
Pricing
Sinch Mailgun
Twilio SendGrid
Editions & Modules
Foundation
$35
per month
Growth
$80
per month
Scale
$90
per month
Flex
Free
Basic
$15
per month
Advanced
$60
per month
Free
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Sinch Mailgun
Twilio SendGrid
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Sinch Mailgun
Twilio SendGrid
Features
Sinch Mailgun
Twilio SendGrid
Email & Online Marketing
Comparison of Email & Online Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Sinch Mailgun
-
Ratings
Twilio SendGrid
7.1
Ratings
11% below category average
WYSIWYG email editor
00 Ratings
7.00 Ratings
Dynamic content
00 Ratings
6.80 Ratings
Ability to test dynamic content
00 Ratings
5.60 Ratings
Landing pages
00 Ratings
8.00 Ratings
A/B testing
00 Ratings
7.20 Ratings
Mobile optimization
00 Ratings
7.00 Ratings
Email deliverability reporting
00 Ratings
7.40 Ratings
List management
00 Ratings
7.60 Ratings
Triggered drip sequences
00 Ratings
7.20 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Sinch Mailgun
-
Ratings
Twilio SendGrid
7.6
Ratings
1% below category average
Dashboards
00 Ratings
7.40 Ratings
Standard reports
00 Ratings
8.20 Ratings
Custom reports
00 Ratings
7.20 Ratings
Pre-Send Testing
Comparison of Pre-Send Testing features of Product A and Product B
Even with the list of negatives, Mailgun is still a great solution for how easy it is to work with and how ubiquitous it is to find examples and libraries out there on the internet. The company has great support and are usually quick to address and fix things. I do think they have some room for improvement with the lack of templates and the outdated UI log handling/filtering.
I think Sendgrid is a great tool for sending out emails of all types. I've primarily used it for transactional emails as we've had other solutions for marketing emails, but I'm sure it would do just a good job - there is a "Marketing" section within the app you can use. Sendgrid integrates really easily with the development frameworks I've used, such as Laravel and Lumen; I've also integrated it with Moodle with ease.
Mailgun is used by spammers, and sometimes your assigned mail server will get blacklisted because of other users on it.
If you end up with a mail server that is blacklisted, your mail will go nowhere. And, below the $300 and up pricing tiers, there is no one at Mailgun to help you get this problem resolved. You are just stuck.
In other words, Mailgun is unreliable as a mission-critical service. I would strongly recommend using a service with better processes in place.
Actually viewing previous emails dispatched. SendGrid does not have this feature - although it provides numbers on emails dispatched within 3 days for the cheapest plan.
The service asks you to pay more (although a minimal amount) to have visibility on email activity upto 30 days in the past.
The API doesn't allow an export of a report of email activity over a period of time. It can be quite frustrating at times to be limited in this way.
Their customer support isn't the best. Certainly some room for improvement there.
The time for the initial setup is very quick, since you can start sending (thus developing) from their sandbox in no time. The actual configuration involves, as usual, some DNS changes that may require time but are well explained and documented. Once everything is set up, there are a lot of monitoring tools that you can use to optimize your lists.
It has the potential to be really cool. However, it feels as if it was created by developers for developers (and I work with developers, yet even for me the instrument was somewhat not easy to use - just read SendGrid's help manuals...) However, if you are into data and your way of thinking is more mathematical rather than lyrical, you'll enjoy this instrument
There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.
The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.
MailGun's support staff is both friendly and helpful. They were very instrumental early on with helping out during the setup process by answering questions, providing documentation on best sending practices, detailing information about the advantages of sending from a dedicated IP rather than an IP pool, and helping us to remove ourselves from blacklists.
Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.
Not really a con but I typically choose SendGrid over Mailgun simply because I've been using SendGrid for so long. Overall, SendGrid and Mailgun are both rock solid and very affordable. You could probably flip a coin on which one to use. I would definitely look into SendGrid's Accelerate Program too.
Twilio SendGrid is generally economical and thus can give better ROI compared to competitors and in a short period of time. Twilio SendGrid can be used for mass email campaigns and thus any marketer would prefer that for mass email marketing compared to say Outreach because Outreach is more of a sales tool and suitable for sending lesser emails.
Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.
Switching to Sendgrid has saved us over $3000/year compared to using other platforms.
Sendgrid has saved us time as the process for creating email campaigns is so easy.
Because of the time and financial savings, we have been able to spend more time/money on creating more appropriate marketing strategies which, in turn, has generated more revenue.