SendGrid Reviews

John Abelardo Manangan II:

Within the first three years, I only used SendGrid for email sending and for the custom applications I made previously. There are transactional emails and some of the marketing parts in the first three years. Then I got a client that wanted to transition into using SendGrid because they have been using Klaviyo, which is expensive on their budget. I think in 2020, and then I asked them how they wanted to use SendGrid. They told me that they wanted to use the solution for their email marketing. Also, they are an e-commerce store. They have an e-commerce store, so they want all the transactional emails that are related to their customer orders, and order updates, they want to be integrated with SendGrid.

I used the solution with WordPress. It's easy to integrate the solution with WordPress. My supervisor asked me if maybe it's possible to segment the customers from each other because they have several stores. I recommend using a contact list. For each signup form, and each campaign they want, we make a separate contact list, and then they ask me to integrate this with custom coding.

The most valuable feature is the conditions in automation. At each interval, each email can have something like a condition if a certain contact matches the condition, it will proceed to send in the email under the automation.

The contact limit alerts need to be improved. The way that I see the limits and the way they implement the limit alerts in the current month will be billed on the next month and it's just not really accurate if you check on the alerts.

The data field of contacts can use improvement, they are just straight labels and values. It would be better if you have the option to add an object that can be added to the custom field of contact. It will be better to display something on the email templates, and then the conditioning or logic in the automation.

I have been using the solution for seven  years.

The solution is stable. I haven't encountered any downtime. Most of the time, the emails are sent properly, and then I can also see the email deliverability, and I can see the status of each email.

The solution is scalable and we send about 20,000 plus emails.

The solution has excellent technical support and I always contact them whenever I need to implement something that the client wants.

We switch to SendGrid to lessen the expense of the email solutions because we already tried Klaviyo and Amazon SES previously and they didn't work well. We always use the spam rate and the reports that SendGrid has.

The initial setup is easy. Actually, The deployment takes 10 minutes to one hour. It depends on the domain and the type of the domain. Most of the time, when you add a domain on SendGrid, it seems like it's real-time. I have no problem with it.

The deployment was completed in-house with the help of the SendGrid technical support team.

We are using the Advanced plan,10K. That is about $100 per month but sometimes we do go over the limit of the plan. The license is not based on the number of users.

I give the solution a seven out of ten because it is the most reliable email sending I have been using for the past few years, and seven also because there are some features that are not available in the SendGrid, but it is also seven because other competitors are more advanced or they have more tools to cater. A seven also because of the pricing. SendGrid is the most cost-effective solution that I have been using.

Using the solution in the first two years was okay because my client was using credit from SendGrid. They are a startup and it came from venture capital. They were granted credit and we made use of it. Once the credits were all exhausted, my client told me that we needed to adjust the budget for the plans on SendGrid, and this is where we have something to do with SendGrid. My client's website and stores have colossal traffic every day, so they have trouble with contacts exceeding the plan limit. They asked me to solve the contact issue with the alert level showing on the dashboard on SendGrid which is a little bit of a hassle to do for clients who don't want to upgrade their plan. I think SendGrid is not ready with the email marketing part because, unlike Klaviyo, which has a diagram that you can drag and drop what happens to an email, and then there is also conditioning. SendGrid is all plug-and-play. You can add something like an interval on each email. I think that's the SendGrid automation. You can just set which contact list to use for the automation. I think it's not really that possible with email marketing. I think the easiest way to work with SendGrid is with segmentation and the deeper filtering of the emails when you want to send to some customers that already have this, or already received their orders. Also in the filtering of different emails or contacts that have something like data that might be unique from each other contact. 

We are a startup company and all of our stores use SendGrid which is made up of three users.

If you are thinking of using the solution for the first time you can start with the SMTP if you are just testing. If you want to have a dedicated IP so that your emails can have almost 100% deliverability, you can sign up for their plan, and also buy the dedicated IP. If you want to automate the emails for your customers, I advise you to use the automation feature in SendGrid.

They provide the APIs. So either you can use their platform to send the emails, or you can use the APIs, and you can connect it with your existing EMS, your Email Marketing Software. With that connection, you can send emails through the APIs.

I work with multiple clients. Based on their needs, my company uses this product. Basically, it is for sending bulk emails to customers. It is a legit bulk email - not any kind of spam. SendGrid is pretty restrictive on that. We follow all the compliance requirements and send via SendGrid.

There are lots of things that are quite good with SendGrid as compared to other platforms. For example, it is very easy to set up, and it is very clean and simple to use. The email integration is fairly easy, and I can say it is reliable. 

It also allows you to implement services from other platforms as well. So you can have multiple things in a single place. We're using the API. They provide certain add-ons, like Azure add-ons. You can connect with Azure as well.

They have decent support in terms of any issues. 

They have a nice dashboard as well. It gives almost all information in a single place, and it is scalable.  

The reporting part needs improvement. They give us the reports on the dashboard, yet it is still very limited. In 2016, the reporting was straightforward. They have made some changes nowadays; however, they should be more comprehensive. We need to do a lot of manual work. After fetching the report, we have to do the data analysis by ourselves. It should be done by the platform.

It's been more than five years now. I started using the product in 2016 - more than five years ago.

The solution is stable and robust. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I'd rate the stability a ten out of ten.

The solution is scalable.

Right now, I'm using two IPs (per sub-users), with ± one million sends per day. However, if the requirement is to send 10 million in the coming months. I can easily upgrade and scale it up and add more IPs.

Anyone related to the email delivery part would use the solution. Anywhere from 30 to 40 people are using the solution right now.

Technical support has been helpful and responsive. 

Sometimes there are some gaps, so we have to wait for a longer period. Once we get a response, they end up solving issues very fast.

Positive

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. 

Their documentation is pretty good. If you go through that, you'll be able to easily set it up properly.

The first part of the deployment is a bit tricky. When you apply and fill in the signing form, they review it to see whether or not you are registered - which is a good thing since, nowadays, people are spamming a lot. 

If a spammer gets access to a platform like this, they will be able to send multiple emails, and it could harm people. That's why they do due diligence, and they would like to know your history, how you want to send the email to people and whether the people you are sending to signed up with you or not. If they find that you are a legit sender, then only they will approve your account. That's the part that takes some time. Once it is approved, then it hardly takes a single day or two to finish the rest of the setup.

I am a specialist, an MTA specialist, so I don't need anybody to help me with the setup or integration. I do it by myself.

They have different plans, like Essential Pro and Premier support. We are on the Pro plan. The basic plan starts at €90 per month. You can do add-ons. For example, the number of emails that you want to send could be one million or more than 1.5 million plus emails per month. You will maybe need to use more emails and need Premier support. They will let you know, based on your volume, what specific plan would work for you.

There are extra items you can buy to add to SendGrid. If we need to clean up the list we got from the Synapse pages, we can definitely clean it up. They have their own tool they provide that costs an extra amount.

For some accounts, we have been paying more than $1,000 a month, based on the volume that we are sending to. It's worth it based on the open rate that we get thanks to the infrastructure. They provide very good IPs, and their technical team is very good at implementing email. It's worth the money.

I'm a customer and end-user.

Our company decided to use this solution due to the fact that it's a stable and easy integration. Also, from the user perspective, when we talk about our email delivery people, they are not tech-savvy people. Therefore, if I ask them to do a complex configuration, they will get confused. However, this product makes everything very simple. At least with our platform, we did not face any issues. We followed the documentation and integrated it with our CRM. 

Apart from that, SendGrid provides lots of things within the tool. 

They have a feature called Auto Warmup IP, so we don't have to do it for every single client manually. We have the Auto Warmup feature enabled, and it will automatically warm up all the IPs. It also supports sub-user management. We can have 30 or 40 people working on the same thing and we can create multiple users and give them their own credentials to work on a separate account. It makes it very easy to track everybody to see who is doing what.

I'd rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for the mail-sending functionality. 

We send high volumes of email, over a million messages a year, for an event management platform.

We need guaranteed deliverability, so we use SendGrid to send out invitations for corporate events to guarantee the solution is sent and delivered.

The email-sending and validation features are great. 

They've added email validation, which is very, very helpful. We've been able to reduce our use of other third-party validation services.

We find the initial setup to be very easy.

It's quite stable. 

The solution scales well. 

SendGrid is a great solution. I don't have any areas of improvement. 

I've been using the solution for about ten years. 

The solution is 100% stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable, and the performance is good. 

It's scalable and easily expands to fit your needs. 

We have 12 administrators, and then we have two SAS applications that use the platform.

We do not have plans to increase usage in the future. 

Technical support has been helpful and responsive. 

Positive

We previously used Mailgun before switching to this product.

The implementation process is extremely straightforward. 

We do not need any staff for deployment and maintenance tasks. 

We have noted a positive ROI. 

We pay $100 a month in order to use the solution. 

We did look into SendinBlue. 

I'd advise new users to understand email deliverability exceptionally well. 

It does everything we need. It's got templating. It's got email validation. It's great. I'd rate it a ten out of ten. 

I use it for sending transactional emails for a couple of Fintechs. We use SendGrid to inform the clients, and we lead during the onboarding process and during the transactional period of time. We'll be doing the life cycle of financials for the client through the onboarding and during the business relationship with the financial entity concerning any activity that happens with their funds or during the onboarding process.

They enable us to automate all the communication with our clients around commercial campaigns, marketing activities, and also during transactional tasks, basically, any transaction that happens on the account. It is the main preferred way to communicate with the client.

My integration team likes that it's very easy to integrate and very easy to automate based on activities that happen on our core banking application. The ease of integration with an external application is something that we appreciate.

Also, I like the dashboard. You can check one by one if you need to see the messages that SendGrid sent. That was also a nice feature.

The solution is stable. The performance has been good.

It can scale well.

Maybe they could have a mobile application to give to admins, so they could see some insights related to the data. That could be nice. With SendGrid, if you need to check some info, you need to go to the website. It would be easier if it was just an app.

If they could make it easier to develop a communication tree, that would be ideal.

I've been using the solution for four years.

We haven't sent a lot of emails since the two projects were not so big in terms of the quantity of clients and the quantity of messages. However, I've noted they send tons of emails daily. In order to have some problem with the performance, you would have to be playing with millions of customers, and maybe, in that case you need to coordinate with the technical team of SendGrid. However, we are not that big and haven't had any issues with stability at all.

It's a SaaS, and it totally scalable.

We don't have anyone that is totally working on it since it's a part of the process; however, when we used to run the project, it was usually an assignment to someone on the technical team and me on the pro side and maybe someone on the marketing team. That was only when it was needed to send something. It's something that you only need to run when you need to send a message. It's something that happens automatically just based on the API integration, so you don't need a lot of users.

We are using it in general for all our emails. We used to use to send all our emails ourselves. We increase usage when we increase the number of clients. We are also increasing usage when we are trying to send more messages around marketing or launching a new product.

We haven't used support much. We used them a little three years ago, and it was okay. When we set up our subscription, we signed an agreement with the technical support of SendGrid, and they assigned someone to help us. At the end of the month, this person will send us the total hours logged and our usage of the support, and they charge based on that.

We have used MailChimp as well. We use SendGrid for transactional emails and MailChimp for marketing communication. The marketing team is in charge of the MailChimp account.

The implementation process varies in difficulty. If you only want to try to connect it with something very simple, it's easy. It's based on the applications that you have on your side and the complexity of the message that you want to send.

You need to develop a tree of communication, and also that will be a factor. If the tree is complex, the setup will be complex.

For example, if you want to only send an email each time a client buys something and send a thank-you message after the purchase, and you don't need to personalize anything, that will be very quick. If you are on the other side and based on a lot of complex rules, maybe for a financial investor on a stock change and you need to send a lot of warnings on the information of operation, that could be tougher.

That said, in general, it's very easy to integrate, and it's something that, even if you didn't work with it in the past, you could learn easily.

Since it's software as a service, we only need to check that it's working. When the endpoint sends an error message, we need to check on that. Other than that, it doesn't require maintenance.

We did the setup ourselves.

In a couple of companies, we have an IT team to take the request and assign someone to enter details into SendGrid and make the connection or upload the designs in HTML to have the right design for some messages.

I haven't calculated an exact ROI. We'd have to compare against someone manually doing the work; however, it's not easy to compare since SendGrid is 24/7 for $90 a month, and having a person available wouldn't be possible at that price, so it's a no-brainer.

We do have dedicated paid support from SendGrid.

It's a software as a service and therefore you're paying for what you use. The price depends on the volume of emails.

They have the packages on the website. Costs will depend on the volume and also on some special requirements. You may need some extras for, be able to integrate or something, for example, however, it is very clear on the price. They have an API plan and that is the common way to use it.

The licensing is easy to understand. They have a free version and five more plans and you need to see which would be most suitable for you. The last of these five is custom pricing when you need to talk with an expert in case you need something special.

I use the essential plan which is $20 a month. After that, we use the pro which is $90 a month, and had all our costs bundled in.

We looked for solutions, and it appeared SendGrid was the leader in the space, so we went with the leader.

I'm a customer and end-user.

I'm not sure which version I'm on. It's a SaaS, so it will be the one available from 2018 to 2022.

New users should consider the tool and what they need it to do, and under which team. They need to look at if they need API integration and if they have a technical team that can manage the product or if they only have a non-technical person. It's a good idea to have someone that is very technical, who can understand it well, and be able to look at the insights and data and be comfortable with the dashboard. You may need someone who understands HTML as well. You need someone who is technical, operational and understands marketing. Or, you need three people, one to cover each of these aspects.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'm using SendGrid for marketing and transactional emails.

Easy API documentation is the most valuable feature of SendGrid, including its deliverability rate.

SendGrid has room for improvement in the UI/UX or dashboard usability for users. It still needs to improve in advanced features.

Another area for improvement in the tool is its conditional logic facilities.

The response time of SendGrid technical support needs improvement.

The scaling-up process for SendGrid needs to be self-serve, so this is an additional feature I want to see in the next version of the tool.

I also want to see more advanced features, such as conditional flows in SendGrid, on the user account directly.

I'd give the tool a rating of eight out of ten because of its ease of deployment and stability.

I'm a SendGrid customer.

I've been using SendGrid for four years.

SendGrid is a stable product; once deployed, you don't have to look at it again.

SendGrid is easy to scale, but the only problem is you need to get in touch with support to unlock higher sending rates. It's not self-serve.

I'd rate the technical support for SendGrid as seven out of ten because it's not chat support, so you have to wait for about two days to receive a response.

Neutral

My company went with SendGrid because of the high delivery rates, and many other large enterprises use SendGrid.

The initial setup for SendGrid is easy, and the tool took one month to deploy.

An in-house team implemented SendGrid for the company.

In terms of seeing ROI from SendGrid, it's a seven out of ten for me.

My company pays for SendGrid monthly, and though I cannot share the amount, my feedback is that the vendor should accept other modes of payment apart from a credit card.

The tool does get expensive if you scale it.

I've been using the V2 API of SendGrid. I started with V1 API and then moved over to V2 API.

Five to six applications rely on the SendGrid email service. My company has a technical team with five people that takes care of the maintenance of the tool.

I'd advise anyone thinking about using SendGrid for the first time to go for it, but you need to account for all the setup processes and do the setup correctly.

The usage depends on the project and different scenarios. Most of the time, we have been using it to embed and forward emails. 

Specifically, I've been using it in one of my e-commerce stores. I use that, too, for e-customer orders, customer invoices, follow-ups, and things like that. I've been using SendGrid for that purpose. 

I work with a Germany-based client. They are also using SendGrid to forward training-related emails, marketing campaigns, and stuff like that. We have been using SendGrid there too.

It's comparatively quick and easy to configure as compared to other solutions. For example, Mailchimp is a popular competitor. I find it quite easy comparatively, with less configuration is required. You just need to get the key that's embedded in your code, and you are good to go. 

Other than that, in one of my projects, I use it to import the pre-configured templates and stuff like that. That was pretty easy, and the simplicity was beyond my expectations. We don't use it, particularly in development. However, we had a good experience.

The UI is fine.

It is easy to set up.

I find the solution to be stable.

So far, this solution meets my requirements. 

A long time ago, I may have had an issue, and I had to wait for support, which wasn't that helpful. However, that was a very long time ago. Overall, I've had a good experience. 

I've been using the product in a couple of my projects for six or seven years. 

It's very stable. It's rare that I would see an email fail, for example. It's very reliable, and the performance is excellent. 

I haven't really tried to scale the solution and, therefore, cannot speak to how helpful or responsive it would be. 

Currently, we are approximately 20 people. Everyone has, for now, used this product at some point. We are a services-based company, so we work for our clients, and it depends upon the client what service he will use. 

I had to contact support one or two times, and whenever I've reached out, they have been helpful and responsive. 

A long time ago, I might have had an issue where they were slow, however, that was very long ago.

Positive

I have been using different email services. However, SendGrid is also one of them.

We work for different clients and different companies. They are basically the decision-makers. Sometimes, we can just suggest a product for certain scenarios. They can compare options and choose what would work best for them.

The solution is very straightforward and simple. It's easy compared to other products I've used. 

I'd rate the ease of setup nine out of ten.

The deployment is just a matter of a few clicks. I just used it to get the API key and use that in my code. Other than that, for building templates, creating funnels, and stuff like that, I'm not handling that. I have not used that portion. 

I don't deal with licensing. I'm not sure what the cost of the product is. 

I am an end-user.

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using.

I would recommend the solution to others. I find it pretty easy to use, and working on it is fast. Anyone can use it.

I'm a happy customer. Therefore, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

We have two separate things. One is marketing, where the contacts are maintained and certain emails are sent to people, and the second one is automated emails through API.

The API side of things is valuable. It is flexible enough to handle pretty much anything that needs to be done in an automated manner.

The biggest problem that we have faced is with the authentication during login. For certain people, SendGrid requires MFA, which is good as a security feature, but it doesn't always work in all geographies. We've got people and users who are based in Nigeria, and some of those people had real trouble logging into SendGrid because the MFA wouldn't send codes to people on their numbers. The security mechanism that they use for login doesn't work in all geographies. Our people in Nigeria had to figure out their own mechanism of how to get things set up on their end, but it was very difficult because SendGrid doesn't have an alternative for their security mechanisms. For example, if you look at some of the other players who do multiple authentications, you can either get a code or you can call, you can get different ways of doing that authentication. SendGrid doesn't allow anything else. There is exactly one way of initiating that authentication, and when that doesn't work, there is no way. Their system isn't built for handling anything else. So, even support people couldn't help us.

The Single Send that they have is not very intuitive for people who are not tech-savvy. Those who, for example, don't understand HTML find it a little difficult to build it. I've had cases where I've had to train our marketing folks to understand how to create that email.

I have been using this solution for a little more than two years.

I've never faced any issues. We are good there. 

It can scale. It just costs accordingly. We never got to a stage where we need to go to the enterprise level. So, we haven't really seen whether the costing scales appropriately.

Depending on the plan that you take, you can add a number of people. There are certain plans that allow for one team member, and there are plans that allow for up to 10 team members, and so on. At the moment, we've got one admin and one other person accessing it. That's the current usage, but we've had requirements where we've had to expand our plan and then scale back.

The only issue where we needed troubleshooting was the login issue for people in Nigeria, and the SendGrid team wasn't able to resolve it. The support people were quite helpful, but they couldn't solve it because the product itself doesn't allow them to solve it. There were probably some regulatory elements within Nigeria that caused that, and some people would get it and some wouldn't. It was not necessarily in SendGrid's control but because they didn't have any other way of doing it, they couldn't fix it. Overall, I would rate them a three out of five.

Positive

I've not used many other products, but I have used Mailchimp. We do have a subscription for both for different things. We have different reasons for using Mailchimp. Some of the things that need to be done are better done there.

What we like the most about SendGrid is the way APIs are set up. The API configuration is much cleaner in SendGrid. The marketing and Single Sends are comparable, and I don't see much of a difference. There is a cost difference because SendGrid can be scaled according to what you need, whereas even the lowest rate on Mailchimp is much costlier.

It was straightforward. It was not very difficult. The SendGrid documentation is good enough, and its setup is fine.

There are two different sides to it. The marketing and email side is straightforward. It is there by default. You just upload the customer contacts and start writing things. On the automation side, integration needs to be done. The documentation is straightforward.

In terms of duration, the marketing bit is off the bat, so it doesn't matter. For the API bit, it was not really a matter of any integrations to be done from the SendGrid side. It was just that the solution from our side took some time, but integration was never a problem. It was straightforward. Overall, I would rate its setup a four out of five.

It was implemented in-house.

For the basic things, it's not really free. There are a few small things that are free, but there is a cost involved. When we were using it at the peak, we were paying a decent amount. Among the other options out there, SendGrid is decently affordable. They have competitors that are much costlier, but it depends on how much they're used, and the pricing is dependent on the right use.

You have to plan in advance as to what it is that you're budgeting to use. The way they do it is that at a fixed price point, you buy a certain block, and if you exceed what you paid for, they charge you dynamically. You have to then plan for it. If you're planning to use more than what you're currently paying for, just change or upgrade your plan.

Its cost can vary. It can go as low as $10 or $15 to $1,000 depending on how much you use it.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Our main use case is integrating SendGrid with Sentinel, and we use the .NET API.

For SendGrid with the .NET API, any use case can work. We can accomplish anything, but for example, contact forms with some Lambda functions. We are using it for more simple sites.

When a user submits a form, it is a perfect use case because when you create an account, there are very well-defined instructions on how to integrate with the API using your specific language that you have a project in. When a user submits the form, it uses the SendGrid client and secret token. It sends a request to SendGrid backend, and there the magic happens.

I do not have anything specific to add about my main use case or anything unique about how my team uses SendGrid.

In my experience, the best features SendGrid offers include the dashboard, which is very nice to review if emails were delivered or if something was wrong. For example, I did not know that they have templates, but we made our own. We used to send full HTML through our API. We just input the user message into the template, and then it looks beautiful when the email arrives.

I find the dashboard useful because it is very extensible. You can slice and dice data. You can have a quick peek at the latest information, so you can use it for quick checks but also for deeper investigations if you want to gain more insights.

SendGrid has positively impacted my organization as we moved to it from our own email servers, though it also gives us less control over everything.

I think SendGrid is great already as it is. If they keep developing it, that would be beneficial. If I were a power user, then I would probably have some ideas, but it is perfect for my use case.

SendGrid can be improved with better user interface design. By default, there is a white, hard-for-the-eyes background. A dark mode by default would be nice. I have not visited the dashboard in quite a while, but I think they do not follow the system color preference. That would be a nice addition. Otherwise, I think they are pretty good, and they are popular for a reason.

I do not have more to add about needed improvements. If there was something significant, I would create a ticket, so my use case appears to be covered.

I have been working in my current field for almost four years.

In my experience, SendGrid is stable. I do not recall any issues with it.

I am sure SendGrid's scalability is good; however, we did not need this feature. Of course, I would imagine any large email service is able to handle that. It should be, of course. SendGrid is designed for both small businesses and large ones, so I cannot provide feedback, but I imagine it is covered.

I never had to contact SendGrid's customer support. There is nice documentation that answers a lot of questions, as well as frequently asked questions and a lot of examples outside of the documentation. Usually, everything is covered.

I used an on-premises solution before SendGrid.

I cannot speak to the return on investment from using SendGrid because I am not involved in that. It is also very hard to see the effect of implementing it. SendGrid gives us some business opportunities sometimes if someone reaches out to us through emails sent through SendGrid. It is really hard to estimate.

I was not the person choosing the tech stack, but at least to me, SendGrid is the option I would choose. There are also others, such as Twilio. In our company, we search for multiple options and spend some days to evaluate which one is better for our team and which covers our needs the most.

My advice to others looking into using SendGrid is to think about whether you actually need to use it or if you can use something different. Spend time researching other options. Then, if you are sure you need SendGrid, spend time designing the code architecture so that it is easy to send emails from anywhere in the code and it is not hard-coded. Consider integrating with templates, as they are available. Make sure that everything is configured correctly. Spend time reading the documentation and learning the tool properly before attempting to do something, because it can cost you money and time later to refactor.

I think SendGrid is also useful for solo developers or people who want to learn web development and need a tool to allow them to send emails without setting up their own server, which can be difficult and also be spam-filtered. There is also a free tier for people like that, so it is great to learn it. I would be happy if another company that I join in the future will be using it. I give this product a rating of nine out of ten.