SendGrid

Pluspunten

1. Have AB Testing enable.
2. Manage unsubscribe emails.
3. Easy to Integrate via API or SMTP.
4. Email Reputation indicator.
5.Full detailed report. You can see if the email it's blocked, bounced or delivered.
6. Have a Forever Free plan . (40.000 Emails in the trial period, then 100 Emails Daily forever)

Minpunten

Send grid interface it's a little bit confuse.

No more cons to highlight, for me it's a perfect tool.

Pluspunten

1. On the bottom left side of the dashboard is a small reputation percentage bar, that measures your reputation. The bar is updated daily based on your email sends, your reputation goes down if your email bounces or is marked as spam.
2. Stats: SendGrid provides A LOT of data on the performance of your email campaigns, these stats are: Requests, Delivered, Opens, Unique Opens, Clicks, Unique Clicks, Unsubscribes, Spam Reports, Bounces, Blocks, Bounce Drops, Spam Report Drops, Unsubscribe Drops and Invalid Emails. SendGrid also provides stats such as: Global Stats, Category Stats, Category Comparison, Subuser Stats, Subuser Comparison, Geographical, Email Clients & Devices, Mailbox Provider Stats, Mailbox Provider Comparison, Browser Stats, and Browser Comparison
3. A/B Testing
4. Unsubscribe Groups: This is without doubt my favorite feature from SendGrid. When you click on "Marketing" on the left side of your dashboard, and select tour from the drop down, it sort of lists steps to set up for sending marketing emails. Step 3 on the list of things to do is to create unsubscribe groups. Here you can Create groups that represent types of email that you regularly send to your recipients. If a recipient chooses to unsubscribe, they will have the option of selecting which of these groups they want to unsubscribe from.

Minpunten

1. The Email templates in SendGrids gallery are a bit basic which initially wasn't a problem as I liked creating my own template, but I did not like how I couldn't modify the "columns" module to my taste.

I wanted to create a template with three columns with the center column bigger than the two on the side. The idea was to have my client's images linking to their projects (On their websites) on the side columns, with the write up in the center column.
However, that couldn't be done (At least so far it seems so as I can't find any option to tweak the size/width of each column) as each column has an equal width.

2. No automation function: I'd like to create a sort of If/Then sequence where I can resend an email to a group of people after x days, for example, I'd like to resend an email (With a different heading of course) to people who have not opened the first email after four days.

Pluspunten

We use SendGrid for transactional emails, such as welcome messages & notifications. Generally, SendGrid offers great tools to integrate emails into a variety of different application platforms and programming languages. We really like its level of detail when checking on the status of emails. Sendgrid is also free for basic transactional emails, which makes it easy to try and ensure it will work with your application. We use a third-party library called Nodemailer with Sendgrid, so switching from a different service to Sendgrid was trivial.

Minpunten

While the service is easy to use and offers comprehensive email activity metrics, there are a few things about it we didn't like. First, because the free tier uses shared IPs, we consistently had emails that wouldn't get delivered because of IP blocks. There were a handful of IPs that we had that experience with, and it persisted for weeks -- without any support intervention. Sendgrid must have deliverability metrics on their side as well, so I am surprised they didn't drop these IPs from their IP pool proactively. We had to upgrade to the PRO plan, which was the least expensive plan that had a dedicated IP. We also had to pay extra for 30 days of email history, you get 3 days by default. I'd love to see all these options be a-la-carte, but I get that you need to make revenue somehow, and few companies send enough emails to justify jumping to the next paid plan -- unless you NEED that deliverability guarantee that you get w/ dedicated IPs, which we did.

Pluspunten

It did work and it did send the email newsletters that we needed it to. Therefore, it wasn't a complete waste of money :D Compared to many other options for email marketing, SendGrid was one of the cheapest options (except for sending the newsletters manually through one's email) and that was one of the reasons why we went with it.

Minpunten

It's got a lot of features, but they feel half-baked (I'm sorry, but they do.) For example, you can unsubscribe those whose emails have bounced or who unsubscribed. But in order to do that, you need to download those lists, then upload them to a special list you can call "unsubscribes" or whatever, and then, right after you've imported this list, you delete it - along with associated accounts. THIS deletes the people who bounced from your lists. Seriously?!

The annoying thing was the styling within the newsletter. I am a perfectionist, so all text sizes and everything should be consistent. However, SendGrid kept changing the styles of my text and I had to choose "Normal" several times (even after copy-pasting the text from Notepad that doesn't support formatting AT ALL). And if you click on "Edit HTML" (which I often do because it's a fast way to clean away all the annoying tags), SendGrid would convert my block to HTML and would have an entirely different set of styles for it.

Also, the support pages were written for someone who is native to this SendGrid thing and not a newbie. Despite doing email marketing for years, I had a hard time understanding what I need to do.

Pluspunten

Sendgrid is ready for your scale. From the smallest Saas apps to the largest enterprises, Sendgrid was built with scale in mind. It handles transactional emails very well, and is relatively simple to integrate into your codebase or product workflow. Templates come out of the box, but some coding knowledge is needed to style transactional emails. All templates can be easily versioned.

Concerns on security and blacklisting are limited. As long as you follow their recommendations, Sendgrid will deliver your email.

Pricing is very fair and generous. In years of use, I've never gone over a plan limit.

Minpunten

Functionality can be limited in interesting ways depending on your plan. On the most basic paid plans, several code features are just missing. Reporting is the most glaring issue, with basic reporting showing only a rolling group of recently sent emails. Without a deeper dive into your logs, you may miss issues.

Transactional emails also lack some features that seem required, like weblinks for email and easy native unsubscribe. There are workarounds for both, but not without challenges. Version tracking for templates is also completely missing, unless you use new versions for each edit you make.