With almost one-half of decision-makers believing that omnichannel strategies are vital for e-commerce, it's not a surprise that MessageBird is a very popular platform.
Frequent contact with customers is essential, but that doesn't mean quantity should come before quality. Let's face it: MessageBird doesn't offer the same quality for all marketing channels, and email marketing is not its strongest side.
Limited analytics, lack of integrations and slow customer support are some of the reasons more people are turning to MessageBird/SparkPost alternatives.
If you're one of them, this article will help you find the right alternative for you.
MessageBird (ex. SparkPost) alternatives & competitors: selection criteria
Here are the criteria we considered when choosing the best SparkPost alternatives for you.
UX and UI
We focused on finding SparkPost alternatives with modern designs and intuitive interfaces accessible to all users, whether you're an email marketing professional or a beginner. Complex UI doesn't mean a tool is better; in fact, the opposite is often true.
Metrics and KPIs
Make sure that the email analytics tool you choose can track all the email marketing KPIs you want to monitor, from basic metrics such as open and click rate to the number of subscribers, user engagement and the size of your list.
If you're using email campaigns to market and sell your products, make sure that you choose a tool with advanced revenue-related metrics such as campaign ROI, total revenue, average order value and similar.
Integrations
Choose a tool that integrates with the tools you're already using, whether they're email service providers, e-commerce platforms, analytics tools or your CMS.
Pricing
It's essential to find the right balance between features and pricing, and only you can do it considering the size of your business, your needs and your budget. We've included SparkPost alternatives for every budget, from free and affordable to enterprise and paid plans.
MessageBird (ex. SparkPost) alternatives & competitors for email analytics
SEINō
If you want to take full control over your email marketing data, SEINō could be the best alternative to SparkPost and other traditional email marketing platforms.
These platforms may offer transactional email service, but they often lack other more advanced features that take email tracking to the next level.
Here are the main features that make SEINō stand out from other SparkPost alternatives:
- Transactional metrics: Most email marketing platforms are limited to basic metrics like open rate and CTR. That's where SEINō comes in and saves your campaign with revenue-related metrics, such as total revenue, average order value, number of transactions and revenue per email sent.
- Campaign benchmarking: You no longer have to focus on and analyze only one campaign because SEINō allows you to compare and benchmark different email marketing campaigns and puts the stats in one unique report.
- Advanced A/B testing: With our tool, you can test every single element of your campaign to the smallest detail, optimizing your campaign performance. Our real-time testing allows you to optimize your campaigns faster and more frequently, increasing their ROI.
- Advanced analytics: This feature helps you analyze large amounts of data quickly and efficiently and automatically integrates the metrics with Google Analytics. It allows you not only to monitor your campaign performance but also your subscriber list growth.
- Integrations: SEINō integrates with many email service providers, such as ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Deployteq, Selligent, Salesforce Marketing Cloud etc. If you're using some of them, all you have to do is add SEINō to your toolbox and boost your campaign performance even more.
What's more, our tool has a simple interface and user-friendly dashboards and reports that everyone can understand. It can help you eliminate manual work and boost your productivity by up to 90%, as we did for our clients.
Client stories
Case study #1
Glanbia, the largest online sports supplement seller in the world, was struggling to analyze the large number of campaigns they were sending to different countries. That's where SEINō stepped in and helped them analyze multiple campaigns at once by providing weekly reports in a matter of minutes. This saved their marketing team 16 hours a week, which they now use for optimizing their strategy.
Case study #2
Teemer Group, with its three fashion brands and more than 150 shops, has fully automated reporting and stopped using spreadsheets since switching to SEINō. With more time on their hands, they managed to make more sales and improve relationships with their customers.
Features:
- Transactional metrics
- Campaign benchmarking
- Real-time tracking
- Advanced A/B testing
- Integration with major ESPs
Pricing:
- Basic plan: €59 per month for up to 50,000 transactional emails sent
- Standard plan: €129 per month for up to 250,000 transactional emails sent
- Pro plan: €199 per month for up to 1,500,000 transactional emails sent
- Enterprise plan: €499 per month for unlimited transactional emails sent
*We offer a 30-day free trial if you want to test our features and see how we can improve your email campaigns. Schedule a demo now!
Mailjet
Source: G2.com
As one of the SparkPost alternatives, this email service provider allows you to create, send and track transactional and marketing emails. Its intuitive and user-friendly interface supports a whopping 17 languages.
Here are its main features:
- Dedicated IP: Apart from having the ability to send transactional emails from shared IPs, Mailjet also uses a dedicated IP for additional security. We recommend using a dedicated IP if you're sending more than 100,000 emails per month.
- Email templates: You can easily create and customize emails by dragging and dropping elements from the templates library.
- Metrics and KPIs: While Mailjet is great for split testing all elements of your email, its metrics are limited to basic KPIs such as open and click rate and similar. If you're looking for more advanced email analytics, check out Mailjet alternatives.
- Integrations: Mailjet has hundreds of integrations, such as WordPress, Zapier, Zendesk, Google Cloud etc., allowing you to smoothly connect your e-commerce platform, CRM or website and send bulk emails.
Mailjet is known for its exceptional delivery rates, thanks to dedicated IP addresses. Galeries Lafayette achieved a 97% email delivery rate even though they were sending over 50,000 receipts to their customers every month.
Features:
- Dedicated IP address
- Great email deliverability
- Split testing
- Email templates
Pricing:
- Free plan: for up to 6,000 emails sent (200 emails per day)
- Essential plan: starting at $15 per month for up to 15,000 emails
- Premium plan: starting at $25 per month for up to 15,000 emails (plus additional features such as marketing automation and A/B testing)
- Custom plan: custom price available upon request
SendGrid
Source: Capterra.com
SendGrid is another SparkPost alternative with excellent email deliverability characteristics. As an email service provider, it provides great support to customers and is suitable for both freelancers and big businesses.
Here's what you can use SendGrid for:
- Dynamic content: With its wide array of templates, SendGrid allows real-time customization depending on the target audience. Its dynamic elements are not restricted by location, language, imagery etc.
- Email automation: You can use SendGrid to automate the whole customer journey, from dynamic sign-up forms on your website to different types of autoresponders.
- Metrics and KPIs: SendGrid metrics focus on email deliverability. Each of them, such as bounces, clicks, unique opens and unsubscribe drops, provides different deliverability details and insights. However, its analytics is otherwise a bit limited compared to some other SendGrid alternatives.
- Integrations: SendGrid offers many integrations, especially those related to e-commerce, such as Shopify, Magento, Salesforce etc.
Even Shopify relies on SendGrid for sending alerts and transactional emails, with an average delivery rate of 99.5%!
Features:
- Email automation
- Dynamic content
- Excellent deliverability
- E-commerce integrations
Pricing:
- Free plan: up to 100 emails a day
- Essentials plan: starting at $19.95 for up to 50,000 emails per month or $34.95 for up to 100,000 emails
- Pro plan: starting at $89.95 per month for up to 200,000 emails or up to $749 per month for 1,400,000 emails
- Premier plan: custom price available upon request
GetResponse
Source: Capterra.com
GetResponse is an AI email marketing automation platform businesses of all sizes can use for creating customer journeys and converting subscribers into paying customers.
Here are its core features:
- Autoresponders: Autoresponders are an essential part of advanced sales automation with the goal of increasing your conversion rate and revenue. Thanks to diverse email templates, automation feels like one-on-one conversations with your subscribers.
- AI engine: This tool’s two most important uses of AI are AI-powered personalized product recommendations and automatically generating email copy. While the former boosts sales and customer loyalty, the latter is helpful for A/B testing when you need more versions of a particular campaign.
- Metrics and KPIs: This alternative to SparkPost offers more advanced tracking features, depending on the plan you choose, from tracking basic metrics (open rate, click rate etc.) to tracking your monthly subscription rates that lead to the growth of your subscriber list.
- Integrations: GetResponse integrates with most tools related to e-commerce, such as Shopify, Magento, PayPal and Stripe.
Sabaton, one of the most famous metal bands, uses GetResponse for creating customer journeys and selling their merch. Since switching to this tool, they've increased their click-through rates to more than 10% in sales emails and increased conversions thanks to personalized product recommendations.
However, those advanced features are available only on more expensive plans. Therefore, you might want to check out GetResponse alternatives.
Features:
- AI-powered product recommendations
- AI-powered copy generator
- Autoresponders
- Integrations with payment platforms
Pricing:
- Free plan: up to 500 contacts
- Email marketing: starting at €16 per month for 1,000 contacts
- Marketing automation: starting at €54 per month for 1,000 contacts
- E-commerce marketing: starting at €106 per month for 1,000 contacts
- GetResponse max: starting at €999 per month (dedicated infrastructure and priority support team)
Customer.io
Source: G2.com
Customer.io is a multi-channel marketing automation platform with the goal of sending a consistent brand message through all touchpoints of the customer journey. You can push notifications, SMS, in-app messages and create personalized emails thanks to the access to real-time behavioral data.
Here are its key features:
- Segmentation: This feature is specifically built to boost open rate, knowing that 65% of marketers agree that segmented emails get more opens than unsegmented ones. Since segmentation isn't limited, you can group people by pages they view, personal attributes, their behavior and more. You can use these segments to improve recipient lists, filters, conversion goals and more.
- Transactional API: By applying existing layouts and styles to your transactional messages, you boost deliverability, reliability and save time.
- Metrics and KPIs: Customer.io offers more than basic metrics like opens and clicks. It measures campaign success based on the number of conversions and can benchmark metrics from different channels.
- Integrations: This software integrates with dozens of tools, such as Google Analytics, Zapier, WordPress and various e-commerce platforms.
Hunter, an email outreach platform, relied on Customer.io’s advanced segmentation to increase open rates by almost 50% and boost conversions.
Features:
- Advanced segmentation
- Transactional API
- Campaign benchmarking
- Improved safety
Pricing:
Unlike some Customer.io competitors, this software doesn't have a free plan. Its pricing depends on the number of contacts. Here are the three options available:
- Essentials: starts at $100 (for small companies)
- Premium plan: starts at $1,000 (for high-growth companies)
- Enterprise plan: custom price available upon request (for large companies)
Drip
Source: Capterra.com
Drip is a popular email service provider and a marketing automation platform that allows you to automate every step of your customer journey. It's suitable for businesses of all sizes, and you can also use it for sending transactional emails.
Here are its main features:
- Automation: With Drip, email sending runs on autopilot. You can plan, set and forget your day-to-day marketing tasks because the software takes care of them.
- Insights: Visual and very detailed dashboards provide you with a zoom-in on the impact of your marketing strategies on customer behavior. You can use that data to improve customer experience.
- Metrics and KPIs: This email service provider offers very limited analytics, tracking only basic metrics, such as open, bounce and click-through rates. For more detailed analytics, check out Drip alternatives.
- Integrations: Drip offers over 100 integrations, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Stripe, HubSpot and others.
The Spice House used Drip to set up email marketing automation, leading to a 90% increase in online sales in just one year since switching to Drip.
Features:
- Campaign automation
- Transactional emails
- Visual dashboards
- Insights into customer behavior
Pricing:
Pricing depends on the number of contacts on your lists. It starts at $39 per month for up to 2,500 contacts and can go up to $1,899 for up to 170,000 contacts. If your list is bigger than that, you can ask for a custom solution.
MessageBird (ex. SparkPost) alternatives & competitors: Comparison table
PlatformFeaturesPricingBest forMessageBird (SparkPost)Deliverability analytics
Outbound and inbound emails
Inbox placement
Email validationPricing depends on the channels and features you want to use. When it comes to email tracking, it depends on the number of emails sent. It starts at $20 per month and goes up to $525 per month. There’s also a custom enterprise plan for those who need additional features.Those who need an all-in-one inboxSEINōTransactional metrics
Campaign benchmarking
Real-time tracking
Advanced A/B testing
Integration with major ESPsBasic plan: €59 per month for up to 50,000 transactional emails sent
Standard plan: €129 per month for up to 250,000 transactional emails sent
Pro plan: €199 per month for up to 1,500,000 transactional emails sent
Enterprise plan: €499 per month for unlimited transactional emails sentEmail tracking and analyticsMailjetDedicated IP address
Great email deliverability
Split testing
Email templatesFree plan: for up to 6,000 emails sent (200 emails per day)
Essential plan: starting at $15 per month for up to 15,000 emails
Premium plan: starting at $25 per month for up to 15,000 emails (plus additional features such as marketing automation and A/B testing)
Custom plan: custom price available upon requestImproving email deliverabilitySendGridEmail automation
Dynamic content
Excellent deliverability
E-commerce integrationsFree plan: up to 100 emails a day
Essentials plan: starting at $19.95 for up to 50,000 emails per month or $34.95 for up to 100,000 emails
Pro plan: starting at $89.95 per month for up to 200,000 emails or up to $749 per month for 1,400,000 emails
Premier plan: custom price available upon requestDynamic customizationGetResponseAI-powered product recommendations
AI-powered copy generator
Autoresponders
Integrations with payment platformsFree plan: up to 500 users
Email marketing: starting at €16 per month for 1,000 contacts
Marketing automation: starting at €54 per month for 1,000 contacts
E-commerce marketing: starting at €106 per month for 1,000 contacts
GetResponse max: starting at €999 per month (dedicated infrastructure and priority support team)Personalized product recommendationsCustomer.ioAdvanced segmentation
Transactional API
Campaign benchmarking
Improved safetyEssentials: starts at $100 (for small companies)
Premium plan: starts at $1,000 (for high-growth companies)
Enterprise plan: custom price available upon request (for large companies)Advanced segmentationDripCampaign automation
Transactional emails
Visual dashboards
Insights into customer behaviorIt depends on the number of contacts on your lists. It starts at $39 per month for up to 2,500 contacts and can go up to $1,899 for up to 170,000 contacts. If your list is bigger than that, you can ask for a custom solution.Email marketing automation
Conclusion
In this article, we've presented you with the best SparkPost alternatives available on the market, but choosing the right one for you will depend on what you are looking for.
If you want to analyze and optimize your email marketing campaigns faster and with more details than ever, SEINō may be the right tool for you.
Campaign benchmarking, transactional metrics and advanced A/B testing are just some of the advanced features that differentiate our tool from traditional email marketing tools.
Schedule a demo and enter the new level of email analytics with SEINō.
MessageBird (ex. SparkPost) alternatives: FAQ
What is the free alternative to SparkPost? Some of the tools that offer a free plan are GetResponse, Mailjet, Mailchimp and SendGrid, but bear in mind that free plans are often limited in terms of features and the number of emails you can send.
What is the difference between Mailgun and SparkPost? While Mailgun is mostly used by developers and small businesses, SparkPost is designed to handle large-scale email volumes, making it a more scalable email marketing solution.
Why use SparkPost? SparkPost is excellent for sending transactional emails at scale, and it can be a great option for e-commerce businesses that want to automate this process.
How much does SparkPost cost? Pricing depends on the number of emails and features you need. It starts at $20 per month and can go to over $500 for an enterprise plan or custom solutions.
