SendGrid vs Mailgun
Trying to choose between SendGrid vs Mailgun as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
- 1.4 TrustPilot
- 4.2 Capterra
- 4 G2
Average 3.2 / 5
SendGrid
SendGrid is a cloud-based platform for transactional and marketing emails.
Pricing
Starting at $15/month, dynamic pricing, depends on the number of emails sent monthly and the contact list volume.
Key features
- Email automation
- Email builder with templates
- Email testing
- A/B testing
- Signup forms
- List management
- Dynamic content in emails
Support
Web form tickets, Twitter DMs, live chat support for paid users, phone support for users on Pro/Advanced plans and higher
- 4.2 TrustPilot
- 4.3 Capterra
- 4.3 G2
Average 4.3 / 5
Mailgun
An email marketing platform equipped with dedicated delivery and validation tools. Features include transactional emails, email APIs, and SMTP relays.
Pricing
Starts at $35 a month for 50,000 emails/month
Key features
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Personalization
- Analytics
- Email validations
- Transactional emails
- Integrations with various services via APIs
Support
Ticket support on all plans, chat and phone on weekdays for higher plans.
General info about company
SendGrid
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.
Mailgun
Founded in 2010 by Ev Kontsevoy and Taylor Wakefield. In 2021, Mailgun was acquired by Sinch. Company headquarters are in San Antonio, Texas.
Difficulty
SendGrid
SendGrid may require technical expertise to set up and start working, so it’s not 100% beginner-friendly.
Mailgun
The service is aimed at developers and people with advanced coding knowledge, so it’s not easy to use for the general public.
Best for
SendGrid
Entreprises and tech companies
Mailgun
Large companies with extensive mailing lists that require both marketing and transactional emails, deliverability monitoring, and a stable technological solution.
Free plan
SendGrid
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
Mailgun
No free plan, only a 30-day free trial paid plans.
Pricing
SendGrid
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.
Mailgun
Billed monthly:
- Foundation starting at $35 for 50,000 emails a month. Includes APIs, webhooks, ticket support.
- Scale starting at $90 for 100,000 emails a month. Includes everything from the previous plan and 5,000 email validations, live chat and phone support, dedicated IP pools.
- Enterprise with custom pricing. Includes everything from the other plans and dedicated support, comprehensive onboarding, early access to new features.
Extra emails and email validations available for additional price
Support
SendGrid
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.
Mailgun
Ticket support with 24-hour response time, Knowledge Center, Comprehensive SDKs, Customer Feedback Forum, and Documentation available on all plans.
Chat and phone support are available on the Scale and Enterprise plans. Chat support is available Monday through Friday from 7 am to 7 pm CST. Phone support is available Monday through Friday from 8 am to 5 pm CST.
On the Enterprise plan, users also have access to managed support.
Features
SendGrid
- 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
Mailgun
- Drag-and-drop email builder and templates
- SMTP services for sending transactional emails
- Email validations
- Email previews on 100+ devices and clients
- Inbox placement testing
- Send time optimization
- Email analytics
- Integrations with various services via APIs
- Additional email optimization services for monitoring
Templates
SendGrid
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.
Mailgun
- Basic 7 templates with different layouts.
- Mailgun Templates API allows to integrate other templates into the service and manage the existing ones.
Video/screenshots
SendGrid
Mailgun
Integrations
SendGrid
100+ integrations with other ESPs like Klaviyo and Litmus, CRM systems like AgileCRM, content management systems like WordPress and Verst., and more.
Mailgun
64 integrations including WordPress, Zendesk, Webflow, Airtable, Google Sheets, Jotform, and more.
Devices
SendGrid
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
Mailgun
- Available only on the web.
- No installable solution.
Languages
SendGrid
English
Mailgun
English
Automation
SendGrid
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.
Mailgun
Basic automations using API (requires coding)
Pros
SendGrid
- A solid transactional API
- Good choice of integrations
- Great testing tool
- Good for scaling businesses
Mailgun
- Useful API that easily integrates into other services
- Deliverability features
- Reliability and data protection
- Helpful support
Cons
SendGrid
- 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
Mailgun
- Learning curve for beginners
- Interface is not very intuitive
- Stiff pricing structure
Reviews from experts
SendGrid
SendGrid's email editor allows you to customize existing templates, build a new email newsletter with the drag-and-drop functionality, or code an email from scratch. You can customize the design of the email by changing attributes such as background color, text, and font, as well as add new content blocks, including buttons, images, texts, and snippets of code.
One of the most useful aspects of the email editor is the ability to add tags in the message, which allow you to add custom fields. This includes adding the recipient's name and location, date of last open, or any other information you collect on your subscribers, which enables a high level of personalization.
Sendgrid is a powerful email marketing tool that offers superior services to its customers. Sendgrid is a must-have tool for start-ups, eCommerce businesses, freelancers and corporates. One thing that separates Sendgrid from other email marketing tools is their scalability once our list grows. The free version of Sendgrid allows you to send 100 emails every day.
What I like most about Sendgrid is that most of the tools out there offer easy integration with Sendgrid. Some apps can even directly integrate with SendGrid without using automation software like Zapier.
Mailgun
What do you like best about Mailgun?
Easy to use and reliable. The reporting features are very helpful too. The option for dedicated IP is great for businesses sending lots of emails. The email verification API also helps us protect our domain reputation.
What do you dislike about Mailgun?
Only one API key. I wish we could generate multiple ones with different access levels so we could easily revoke them if anything goes wrong. I wanted to have one key for email verification only, and one key for each application that uses the email API.
What do you like best about Mailgun?
You can integrate it to almost anything. The way that it manages the stream of emails it must send out is what makes this tool almost irreplaceable.
What do you dislike about Mailgun?
Hard to find something to not like about this. It is a very useful tool, it's not for novices. You need to know about email campaigns to know how to make best of it.
What problems is Mailgun solving and how is that benefiting you?
Keeping me out of spam list for the most part. Keeping our email in the green zone when it comes to spam detectors. It makes it easy to remove any bad emails, dnc's, and gauge things correctly.
*This information is current as of 02/13/2024. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
