SendGrid vs ConvertKit

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.

ConvertKit was founded in 2013 and is based in Idaho, the US. It was created by Nathan Barry, a blogger and creator who needed a better way to promote his books and courses.

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

Not beginner-friendly, since you need to code while creating emails.

Entreprises and tech companies

Bloggers, coaches, course creators, writers, and everyone who makes content for living.

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

The forever free plan includes the contact list of up to 1,000 subscribers and the following features:

• Unlimited landing pages
• Unlimited forms
• Unlimited “broadcasts”, or one-off email campaigns, sent right away or scheduled
• Audience tagging and segmentation
• Selling digital products & subscriptions
• Community support
• Free recommendations

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.

Dynamic pricing depends on the size of your contact list and the features of interest.

Creator: $9–1,916/month billed yearly for 300–400,000 subscribers. Includes all the free features plus:

• Live chat & email support
• Paid recommendations
• Free migration from another tool
• Automated email sequences
• Visual automation builders
• Third-party integrations
• One additional team member

Creator Pro: $25–2,166/month billed yearly for 300–400,000 subscribers. Includes all the Creator features plus:

• Newsletter referral system
• Subscriber scoring
• Advanced reporting

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.

Community support:

• The internal forum where you can ask questions and receive answers from ConvertKit support specialists and other platform users
• Available even on the free plan

Email and live chat support:

• Available for Creator users
• Priority support via email and live chat available for Creator Pro users

ConvertKit also provides a knowledge base and a YouTube channel with tutorials. The platform also runs online workshops for newbies in marketing.

• 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

• Email builder
• Email marketing automation
• Landing pages
• Sign-up forms
• Tools for selling digital products and paid subscriptions
• List segmentation
• Lead scoring
• A/B testing
• Reporting and analytics
• Internal referral systems for creators to earn off putting links in your newsletter or paying to get promoted by other creators

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.

25 email templates made for content creators by content creators, includes templates for:

• Newsletters
• Content promotion
• Product sales pitch
• Waitlist

The templates are sourced from other users and you can create and share your own.

ConvertKit also offers 50+ landing page templates not specified by purpose.

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

120 integrations with third-party apps for:

• Memberships and courses
• Analytics
• Lead capture
• E-commerce
• Giveaways
• Quizzes
• Workflows
• Webinar
• Affiliate management
• CRM
• Scheduling
• Email verification

ConvertKit also supports Zapier for even more integrations and provides users with the API docs for custom integrations.

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

• Web app only

English

English

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.

10+ visual automation templates for starting a paid newsletter, releasing a new podcast, crowdfunding for a music album, and other tasks that professional content creators might face.

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

• Good platform for content creators
• Great deliverability
• Supports paid newsletters and has a “tip jar” functionality for free donations from subscribers
• A flexible tagging and segmentation system for targeted campaigns

• 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

• Very basic reporting
• Expensive compared to other email marketing tools
• Not great for midsize and large businesses
• No drag-and-drop builder which makes it harder to design emails from scratch