SendGrid vs Zoho Campaigns
Trying to choose between SendGrid vs Zoho Campaigns 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
- 4.3 GetApp
- 4.2 Capterra
- 4.3 G2
Average 4.3 / 5
Zoho Campaigns
A complex marketing solution with email campaigns. Features include automations, integrations, and SMS marketing.
Pricing
Starts at $3 a month for 500 contacts (billed yearly)
Key features
- Email automation
- E-commerce workflows
- Mobile app for email sending, reporting, and contacts import
- Integrations with various services
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Signup forms
Support
Weekdays support during working hours via email, live chat, and phone by default. Limited support during weekends. On the free plan, the support is only available for the first 14 days.
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.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns is the product of Zoho Corporation — an Indian-American company. The company was founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas. Global headquarters in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, and corporate headquarters outside of Austin in Del Valle, Texas.
Difficulty
SendGrid
SendGrid may require technical expertise to set up and start working, so it’s not 100% beginner-friendly.
Zoho Campaigns
Possible to create emails and automations without coding or design skills. At the same time, many people find the interface to be not very user-friendly.
Best for
SendGrid
Entreprises and tech companies
Zoho Campaigns
E-commerce businesses that require simple, essential workflows like post-purchase emails or digital marketing agencies working with different clients.
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
Zoho Campaigns
Has a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers and 6,000 emails a month. The support is only available for the first 14 days. The features are limited. Segmentation, scheduling, and automation are excluded.
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.
Zoho Campaigns
For up to 500 contacts, billed yearly/monthly:
- Standard $3 / $4
- Professional $4.50 / $6
Other pricing features:
- 14 days free trial with all the features
- A Pay As You Go plan
- Discounts for non-profit organizations
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.
Zoho Campaigns
Weekdays support during working hours via email, live chat, and phone by default. Limited support during weekends. The response time is 8 hours depending on the pricing plan.
On the free plan, the support is only available for the first 14 days.
Offers paid additional support packages.
The Premium plan (an additional 20% of the Zoho subscription) includes 24/5 support and a three-hour response time.
The Enterprise plan (an additional 25% of the annual Zoho subscription with additional requirements) includes 24/7 support, one-hour response time, a dedicated technical account manager, a quarterly report, and early access to new features.
Knowledge Base, community forums, text and video guides, virtual classrooms, and self-service support portal.
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
Zoho Campaigns
- Email automation in a drag-and-drop builder
- Integrations with various services
- SMS campaigns
- E-commerce workflows with content sync between the store and email campaigns and AI product recommendations
- Signup forms
- Drag-and-drop email builder and templates
- A mobile app for Android and iOS to send emails, see reporting, and import contacts
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.
Zoho Campaigns
240+ email templates including responsive email templates
The free plan doesn’t have advanced responsive templates
Templates for:
- Welcome messages
- Deals and offers
- Newsletter
- Webinars
- E-commerce
- Emergencies and crises
Video/screenshots
SendGrid
Zoho Campaigns
Integrations
SendGrid
100+ integrations with other ESPs like Klaviyo and Litmus, CRM systems like AgileCRM, content management systems like WordPress and Verst., and more.
Zoho Campaigns
60 integrations including Zapier, Shopify, Salesforce, Twilio, Flickr, WordPress, Zendesk, 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
Zoho Campaigns
- Website
- A mobile app for Android and iOS to send emails, see reporting, and import contacts, etc.
- No installable solution.
Languages
SendGrid
English
Zoho Campaigns
Dutch French German Hungarian Italian English Portuguese Spanish Chinese Danish Polish Russian Turkish Vietnamese Hindi Thai Indonesian Swedish Ukrainian Bulgarian Croatian Czech
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.
Zoho Campaigns
Many pre-built automation workflows:
- Different welcome series
- Reengagement
- Nurture series
- Customer retention
- E-commerce
- Conditional
Pros
SendGrid
- A solid transactional API
- Good choice of integrations
- Great testing tool
- Good for scaling businesses
Zoho Campaigns
- E-commerce-focused features
- Integrations with other services including Zoho CRM
- A lot of templates and pre-built automations
- Various support options
- A mobile app
- Relatively cheap prices
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
Zoho Campaigns
- Slow loading times
- Low deliverability
- Design options and the email builder are limited
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.
Zoho Campaigns
There are occasional glitches in the execution of campaigns but overall it's a fantastic marketing tool that is more user-friendly than it's competitors.
Pros: Zoho Campaigns has readymade templates that can be reused to save time.It is an affordable product in it's category making it a first choice for most businesses. Zoho Campaigns integrates well with other products such as Zoho Analytics, to generate some valuable end user data visualization that can help organizations take better & informed decisions.
Cons: Zoho's problems remain the same irrespective of the product, their customer support is sluggish and query resolution takes much time. Zoho Campaigns uses automation for scheduling campaigns but the user needs to take care of validation errors in advance else the scheduled job will fail.
Best Campaign Tool for Zoho One Users
This tool is connected in the backend to all Zoho Apps which really helps the Marketing team to track a lead in its entirety. We can have the whole life history of the lead and do lead scoring which can help the Sales team to prioritize.
Still, the deliverability is an issue and there are lot more fine-tuning needed in the features. The intelligence metrics that can come as part of a campaigning tool are not fully achieved in Zoho Campaigns
*This information is current as of 02/14/2024. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.