SparkPost Vs SendGrid: Comparing Features, Pricing & More

We need to measure email marketing success to make good decisions regarding future campaigns and endeavors, but that success you long for might be nearly impossible if you base your assumptions and ideas on chaotic, poorly formatted, inconsistent data. Many tools on the market can help you manage, run and analyze your email marketing campaigns. SparkPost (currently known as MessageBird, after a recent acquisition) and SendGrid are two names that often come up in various “top 5/10” lists. How do their features stack up? What are the prices? What about user reviews? Read our SparkPost vs SendGrid analysis to find out!

What is SparkPost (MessageBird)?

MessageBird is a comprehensive, multi-module customer relationship management (CRM) system that helps companies manage customer data, track and analyze marketing campaigns, manage payments and communicate with their users using various channels, such as Email, WhatsApp etc.). The platform is customizable and easy to integrate with many other systems.

What is SendGrid?

SendGrid (or Twilio SendGrid, to be precise) is a cloud-based service that assists businesses with their email communication needs. It provides a platform for sending marketing and transactional emails at scale and boasts a high deliverability rate. The service offers an Email API and marketing tools that help companies manage their email campaigns efficiently.

SparkPost vs SendGrid: How they compare

Let’s analyze the similarities and differences between MessageBird (SparkPost) and SendGrid. We’ll evaluate their features, integrations, pricing options, customer support and user ratings.

Features

MessageBird (SparkPost) has various features – some related to email marketing, others offering tools for different purposes:

• Promotions, reminders, cross-selling and nurture programs – Recommend items, nurture relationships, offer promotions or alert customers of item availability.
• Customizable journeys – Use pre-built settings or create your in-depth flows (browse reminders, welcome emails etc.).
• Segmentation – Segment audiences by purchasing history, predicted lifetime value, browsing behavior etc.
• AI-driven subject line optimization – Optimize subject lines with the help of AI to maximize open rates.
• A/B testing – Test design, content and offers to evaluate what works best and optimize campaigns.
• Granular targeting – Create messages that resonate with your customers using data about their interests, browsing behavior, purchases etc.
• Personalization – Easily personalize your messages, depending on their purpose.
• Frequency capping – Mitigate the risk of inadvertent over-communication and ensure priority emails reach the inbox.
• Templates – Access a library of well-made customizable templates to ensure proper quality.
• Drag-and-drop editor – Build your emails quickly without writing a single line of code.
• Branding – Brand your emails to maintain a consistent image and create reusable selections for specific groups of messages.
• Track email delivery – Generate email marketing reports, access segment analytics and track over 40 metrics in real time.
• Benchmarking – See how your email performance stacks up against industry standards.
• Optimize email deliverability – Aggregate real-time delivery data to optimize and achieve reliable email delivery.
• Inbox placement assurance – Use over 100 internal checks across 30 different areas to ensure the best possible inbox placement.
• Customer support services – Support your clients via email, live chat, phone, SMS, WhatsApp and social media.
• Payment processing services – Access tools for expense management, financing, paying bills, recurring payments etc.

Here’s SendGrid’s feature set:

• Email marketing automation – Set up automated recurring emails or drip series.
• Sign-up forms – Capture sign-ups and automatically add them to email marketing address lists.
• Email testing – Render previews, conduct spam testing and validate links to ensure excellent quality.
• Email design – Use a drag-and-drop wizard or HTML code to create beautiful marketing and transactional email messages with little effort.
• Dynamic email templates – Use templates with conditional formatting, HTML rendering and previews.
• Email list management – Use recipient segmentation to target your messages to the right groups, avoid deliverability issues and improve engagement.
• Email statistics – Analyze your emails’ performance (email conversion rate, bounce rate etc.) to evaluate and drive future decisions.
• Email validation API – Identify address typos to reduce bounce rate, improve sender reputation and achieve reliable delivery.
• SMTP service – Access a quality SMTP service to send emails without an email server.

The platforms are quite different. Unlike SendGrid, SparkPost (MessageBird) is a comprehensive CRM system with good email and marketing-related capabilities (along with an email API) and customer service and payment processing tools. On the other hand, SendGrid focuses on email communication, providing an end-to-end service, API and a suite of necessary tools.

Integrations

MessageBird offers a long list of possible integrations, including Airtable, Asana, Calendly, Google services, HubSpot and more. SendGrid offers many integration options, including Google Cloud, Auth0, Mircosoft Azure, Drupal, GitHub, Airtable, Agile CRM and more. Neither tool holds a clear advantage in this regard.

Pricing

MessageBird’s pricing depends on the number of monthly contacts:

• Contact-based pricing – €45/month. You get up to 30,000 emails, WhatsApp sends or SMS, access to critical features, plus global coverage.
• Enterprise pricing – Custom pricing. The plan for businesses with substantial needs (over 50,000 monthly contacts).

You can also buy some features separately and evaluate the price based on the number of SMS/WhatsApp messages or numbers (longcode, shortcode and alphanumeric).

SendGrid offers the following pricing plans:

• Free – Mostly for trying the service out, with a limit of up to 2,000 stored contacts and 6,000 emails/month.
• Basic – Starts at $15/month (exact price depends on the number of contacts and emails, which you can specify), no automation features or access to dedicated APIs.
• Advanced – Starts at $60/month (exact price depends on the number of contacts and sent emails), complete feature set.

However, the email API service is priced separately:

• Free – For up to 100 emails/day.
• Essentials – Starts at $19,95/month (the exact price depends on the number of emails per month). Offers access to foundational email features.
• Pro – Starts at $89,95/month (the exact price depends on the number of emails per month). A plan for companies that want to maximize their deliverability.
• Premier – Custom pricing. Offers extra support.

The tools provide different pricing models and feature sets, so it’s hard to compare them one to one. However, SendGrid does have one advantage – it offers a free plan that you can use to evaluate the service before you commit. MessageBird doesn’t have anything similar (not even a free trial).

Customer support

MessageBird has a detailed documentation page and also a series of guides that help you learn the platform’s various features and possibilities. When you need help, you can use a dedicated support center with FAQs. The website doesn’t specify any ways to reach the company directly.

SendGrid also offers a knowledge center, FAQs and various guides that describe plenty of valuable topics. You can also ask for help using a dedicated support page (after logging in).

User rating

SEINō: SparkPost and SendGrid alternative for email analytics

SEINō is a powerful, highly customizable solution that works with various email providers and focuses on a data-driven email marketing approach. It can easily replace SparkPost (MessageBird) and SendGrid when it comes to email analytics (of course, you need an ESP, many of which SEINō integrates with). The platform provides a comprehensive overview of your campaigns and offers plenty of powerful features for tracking metrics, subscriber engagement and behavior and more. 

See also: How to create an effective email marketing report with SEINō

Features

• Campaign benchmarking – SEINō allows you to compare and benchmark several campaigns in one reporting view, making the data very easy to compare.

• Transactional metrics platform – With SEINō, you can track transactional data that other platforms won’t let you monitor (total and per-client revenue, number of transactions, average order value etc.).
• Subscriber list monitoring – Our platform lets you monitor subscriber lists and track customer base development.

• Advanced A/B testing – Send two campaigns to the same audience, and our Data Explorer will evaluate which email campaign idea works better. You can also learn which of the two audiences/markets is more valuable for your business by sending the same email to both of them.

• Powerful analytics – SEINō’s analytics allow you to monitor key metrics and email marketing KPIs such as open rate, email conversion rate, click-through rate, deliverability, bounce rate etc. You can also set specific targets for each monitored metric.
• Automatic alerts – Create alerts that notify you of a worrying increase in unsubscribe rate or deliverability (or based on other message events).

• Great export data options – Download your data in popular formats (CSV, Excel).
• Visual dashboards and graphs – Our email marketing dashboard offers customizable graphs you can use to visualize critical data.

• Data filtering and segmentation – Our powerful segmentation and filtering functionalities allow you to target, group and pivot data in various ways.

Integrations

SEINō integrates with most reliable email service providers, such as Selligent, Klaviyo, Salesforce Marketing Cloud etc. You can connect it to web analytics tools (Google Analytics) and tools like Google BigQuery, SMTPeter etc.

Pricing

We offer four pricing plans:

• Basic – €59/month ($590/year with annual billing).
• Standard – €129/month ($1290/year with annual billing).
• Pro – €199/month ($1990/year with annual billing).
• Enterprise – €499/month ($4990/year with annual billing).

Customer support

We prioritize customer satisfaction and strive to provide the best customer support possible. If you need help with integrations, dashboard customization or troubleshooting, you can contact us by phone or email.

Case studies

You can read some of our case studies to evaluate our solution’s effectiveness.

SparkPost vs SendGrid vs SEINō: Comparison table

Conclusion

SparkPost (MessageBird) and SendGrid are solid tools. One acts as a comprehensive CRM that offers some email-related features, while the other is all about email marketing and aims to provide users with an end-to-end service. 

However, neither has a particularly strong focus on email campaign analytics. If that’s what you need, consider giving SEINō a try. It's easy to connect to your chosen email provider and offers A/B testing, subscriber monitoring and the ability to track transactional metrics. You can access any email-related data you need with its powerful email analytics platform. Interested? Learn more about SEINō or schedule a free demo!

FAQ

Here are answers to some common questions regarding MessageBird and SendGrid.

Why do people use SendGrid? SendGrid provides a reliable, scalable email delivery trusted by large-scale businesses like Spotify, Uber or Airbnb.  

Is SendGrid good for email marketing? The 4.0 scores on both G2 and Capterra are a good sign - they suggest it’s a decent tool, but there’s still room for improvement.  

Why use SparkPost? SparkPost (MessageBird) offers a comprehensive, highly customizable suite of tools for email marketing, payment management and customer service.