Campaign Monitor vs SendGrid

Founded in 2004 by Ben Richardson, based in Nashville. Belongs to CM Group, along with other marketing software companies like Sailthru and LiveClicker.

SendGrid is based in Denver, Colorado, and it was founded in 2009. In 2019, the company was acquired by Twilio, the service for customer communications and data storage.

The email editor is WYSIWYG and the platform provides users with a great choice of templates and an automated email builder for your brand — no coding or design skills are required. Campaign analytics come in the form of digestible graphs that are easy to interpret for junior marketers.

SendGrid may require technical expertise to set up and start working, so it’s not 100% beginner-friendly.

Marketing agencies, small organizations, publishers

Entreprises and tech companies

No free plan, free trial only.

The free trial only allows sending test campaigns to 5 people or less, importing contact lists, and creating customer journeys without sending them

SendGrid offers a free plan with a limit of up to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails sent per month. The free plan includes:

• Design & code editors
• Segmentation
• A/B testing & actionable insights
• 3 email testing credits
• 1 signup form
• Ticket support
• 1 user
• Automation

Dynamic, depends on the contact list size and the tariff type:

• Basic: $9–$299/month
• Unlimited: $30–$699/month
• Premier: $158–$989/month

All tariffs are limited to 50000 contacts.

Dynamic pricing, depends on the number of contacts, emails sent per month, the number of users, and the set of platform features:

Basic: $15–200/month, 5–100K contacts, up to 300K emails per month. Includes:

• Design & code editors
• Segmentation
• A/B testing & actionable insights
• 10 email testing credits
• 5 signup forms
• Ticket & chat support
• 1 user

Advanced: $60–900/month, up to 200K contacts and 1 million emails/month. Unlike the Basic plan, it includes:

• 60 email testing credits
• 15 signup forms
• Up to 1,000 users

The plan also unlocks access to:

• Automation
• Dedicated IPs
• Guaranteed response times on ticket, chat, & phone support

Custom: Custom pricing for high-volume sending over 200K contacts and 1 million emails/month.

An in-app Digital Assistant tool. Support agents around the world are available in the following hours:

• America: Mon to Fri 6 am to 5 pm PST/PDT
• Australia and Asia: Mon to Fri 9 am to 5 pm AEST/AEDT
• Europe: Mon to Fri 9 am to 5 pm BST/GMT

Limited support (unspecified working hours) is available on weekends and during holidays. Support phone numbers are only available for Premier users.

Aside from online support, Campaign Monitor offers:

• Video tutorials for newbies and experienced users
• A 30-minute Getting Started course
• Email Academy — an email marketing course
• Resources for developers
• The in-app Help Center with documentation

Support is available 24/7 in English via the following channels:

• Twitter DMs and web form tickets — for all users
• Live chat support — for paid users
• Phone support — for paid users on Advanced email marketing plan/Pro API plan and custom high-volume plans

SendGrid also provides a knowledge center for marketers and developers with screenshots and video tutorials. Articles in the knowledge base are partially translated to French, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), German, and Spanish (Mexico). The videos are only available in English.

• Supports SMS notifications
• Advanced segmentation — available for Premier users
• Link Review — checks for broken links
• Free email template builder
• Campaign analytics
• CAN-SPAM compliance checker
• Integrations with CRM systems and more

• Email marketing automation
• Signup forms
• List management
• Email editor: both no-code and code
• Email templates
• A/B testing
• Analytics
• Email testing
• Dynamic content
• Deliverability insights

108 free mobile-friendly templates available without signing up, templates sorted by email types from announcements to transactional.

If you don’t like templates, you can build emails from scratch using blocks in the email builder.

Recently launched their own stock with free images.

Campaign Monitor also has an automated custom template builder where you fill in the questionnaire and get a bunch of email templates with the logo of your business and custom design.

60+ free templates for different campaign types and industries, including:

• Healthcare
• Traveling
• E-commerce
• Non-profits
• Emails for small businesses

SendGrid also offers templates for:

• Welcome emails
• Holiday emails
• Promotional emails
• Newsletters
• Transactional emails (i. e. order confirmation, shipping confirmation, etc.)

Some of these templates contain dynamic content.

• Data for marketing: Salesforce, WordPress, Shopify +
• List growth: Intercom, OptinMonster, Unbounce +
• CRM: Raiser’s Edge NXT, Lexer, Qgiv +
• Advertising: AdRoll, Facebook Lead Ads, Rungopher+

More than 100 integrations are available for CRM, list management, surveys, and more

100+ integrations with other ESPs like Klaviyo and Litmus, CRM systems like AgileCRM, content management systems like WordPress and Verst., and more.

• A web app accessible from phones

• No mobile app

A web app and an iOS app with limited functionality (management and troubleshooting only), you can find an APK for Android but it’s not an official release

English

English

The drag-and-drop interface for creating automated email sequences that includes:

• Triggers — subscribers’ actions that start or continue the sequenc
• Yes/No rules for personalization
• Timers — for example, you can send emails 3 or more days after a certain subscriber’s action or the previous email in the sequence

The sequence is visualized like an activity diagram where every element is customizable.

SendGrid offers a tool for building custom automated sequences and a pre-built welcome series. The automation editor allows users to select entry criteria, enable and temporarily disable the sequence, set conditions, and add as many emails to the sequence as they want.

• Good WYSIWYG email editor interface
• Easy and simple email automation
• Easy-to-understand campaign reports with good infographics

• A solid transactional API
• Good choice of integrations
• Great testing tool
• Good for scaling businesses

• No live chat support + no 24/7 support
• All of the tariffs are limited to 50000 contacts
• No functional free trial you can actually use for work
• Contact importing is difficult when matching custom fields
• Split testing only allows 2 email versions
• No landing page builder

• Slow customer support
• Many reviewers complain about deliverability issues like blacklisted IPs
• Bugs like no 2FA emails to log in to the platform
• Could be more user-friendly