SendGrid Alternative – BigMailer

SendGrid is one of the largest transactional email sending services and delivers emails for companies like Spotify and Uber. It offers a number of different APIs and supported client libraries. In addition to sending standard transactional emails over its API, SendGrid also offers a marketing platform with a drag-and-drop email template editor and online list management. So are there better alternatives to SendGrid? Absolutely, here are the reasons why.

Transactional Vs. Marketing (Bulk) Campaigns

The transactional and marketing (bulk) emails at Sendgrid are priced completely separately – you pay for number of contacts stored for marketing emails and separately for the number of transactional emails sent. In other words, there is no financial advantage of consolidating your emails in a single platform like SendGrid. If you do, you pay twice to send two types of messages to the same email.

BigMailer supports bulk + automation + transactional emails with single price point based on number of contacts stored on the platform. SendGrid charges are based on a fixed number of campaigns per month with overage charges ranging $3.5-7.5 per 1000 emails, compared to BigMailer flat overage fee of $0.1 per 1000 emails, more than 10 times cheaper!

For senders that only send 1 or 2 emails per month SendGrid pricing is more favorable. For high frequency senders that send more than 2 emails per month BigMailer pricing is more cost effective and offers exceptional ROI.

Subscriber Data Management

The subscriber list and more importantly bounce rate data in SendGrid isn’t synced up between the 2 systems that help you manage transactional and marketing emails. If you already use SendGrid for your transactional email and want to send marketing emails you need to manually import the list of customers into SendGrid marketing system and manually filter bounces from that list by exporting your bounce list from the transactional emails system first then importing it into marketing side. Seems like an unnecessary painful separation.

Campaign Tracking Options

While the marketing and transactional systems have separate separate subscriber record management this separation doesn’t apply to all account data and settings. There is only one place to define link tracking so the values are global and used on both marketing and transactional emails, including campaign level utm_campaign for Google Analytics (which shouldn’t be set on account level, but rather on campaign level).

SendGrid global tracking settings.

Lastly, link tracking is disabled by default so you need to actually turn it on to start sending your email engagement data to Google Analytics.

In BigMailer you can add unique parameters to your links on every campaign, allowing you greater control and more granular tracking for your email marketing activities.

If you don’t track it, you can’t improve it! So consider your tracking requirements when choosing your email provider.

Deliverability, Inbox placement, and Dedicated IPs

When using BigMailer with your Amazon SES account for email sending you can expect comparable deliverability and inbox placement compared to Sendgrid, however you also have an option to add dedicated IPs to your Amazon SES accont at only $25 per IP per month.

When on BigMailer Business Plus plan (no SES connection required) you can expect better deliverability and inbox placement, but still have an option to get your own dedicated IP addresses (recommended for high volume senders only).

Is it time to consolidate all email types in a single platform with simple flat pricing? We certainly think so.

Not convinced? Check out the price and basic benefits comparison below.

Have questions about some features or volume discount pricing? Reach out to us via chat or schedule a demo.

Ready to give BigMailer platform a try? Get started with a free account.