Mailchimp vs. SendGrid: Which Email Marketing Tool is the Best For You [2023]

When you think of email marketing, 2 names come to mind….Mailchimp🙈 and SendGrid📤. But which one’s better for your business? Which email marketing📧software has more templates? Who gives you better deliverability🚚?

Ah! So many questions to answer.

If you, too, are confused about which email marketing platform you must use, read this Mailchimp vs. SendGrid article and use the one that best suits your business needs.

Mailchimp Overview

Mailchimp is an email marketing software that provides various email marketing solutions and services to businesses in multiple categories. It offers email marketing tools enabling businesses to send personalized emails that convert. 

Mailchimp comes with a set of tools that help you target and segment your audience right. 

Their marketing automation tools deliver the appropriate message at the right time to the right people. 

The platform also offers customizable templates, reporting & analytics tools, as well as content creation tools. 

What’s more, with Mailchimp, you can integrate with over 300+ apps, including Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce, Canva, BigCommerce, etc., and run your email marketing campaigns flawlessly. 

Also read🔍: Mailchimp vs. ActiveCampaign: Comparing the best email marketing software

SendGrid Overview

SendGrid is a reliable platform for delivering trusted email at scale. It offers a bunch of tools for crafting engaging email campaigns, which include: 

• Email automation signup forms 
• SMTP service
• Email validation
• Deliverability insights 
• Dynamic templates 

And much more👍…

The email marketing software also provides expert services for setup help, email delivery help, and ongoing consulting. 

SendGrid is being used by Uber, Spotify, Glassdoor, Airbnb, Instacart, and Yelp, among many other leading brands. They offer resources for developers as well as integration via APIs.

How Does Mailchimp Work?

Here’s a brief overview of how Mailchimp works:

• Audience Management: When you start, create an audience list or contacts in Mailchimp. You can import an existing list or add contacts manually. There are also signup forms that you can embed on your website or social media to gather new subscribers for your business.
• Segmentation: Once you have an audience, you could segment them based on different criteria like demographics, engagement, purchase activity, etc. This allows you to send targeted messages to specific groups.
• Campaign Creation: Mailchimp provides a wide range of campaign creation options and has pre-designed templates for the same. You could personalize your campaign via the use of merge tags and several customization options.
• Automation: Mailchimp offers automation tools that let you define triggers for specific actions. For example, you can set up an automated welcome email for new subscribers or a sequence of emails for customer onboarding.
• Analytics and Reporting: After sending your campaigns, monitor their performance using Mailchimp’s reporting features. See open rates, click rates, audience growth, and much more.
• Integrations: Mailchimp integrates with numerous other platforms as well as services and allows you to sync data, automate tasks, and at the same time, expand the functionality of your marketing.

Working of Mailchimp and SendGrid varies in terms of email sending process; here’s how:

How Does SendGrid Work?

SendGrid is a cloud-based email delivery service that allows businesses to send emails without having to maintain their own email servers. 

SendGrid manages all of the technical details of email delivery, including infrastructure scaling, ISP outreach, reputation monitoring, and real-time analytics.

There are two ways to send email using SendGrid:

• SMTP: SendGrid provides an SMTP service that allows you to deliver your email via their servers instead of your own client or server. This is the simplest way to integrate with SendGrid, and it’s a good option if you’re already using an SMTP library in your application.
• Web API: SendGrid also provides a Web API that allows you to send email programmatically. This gives you more control over how your email is sent, and it’s a good option if you need to integrate with SendGrid from a variety of different applications.

When you send an email using SendGrid, the following steps take place:

• Your application sends the email to SendGrid’s servers
• SendGrid validates the email and checks the sender’s reputation
• SendGrid delivers the email to the recipient’s inbox
• SendGrid tracks the email’s delivery status and provides analytics

Benefits of Using Mailchimp

• Ease of Use: Even beginners without any knowledge of email marketing can use Mailchimp to create and send emails.
• Marketing Automation: You can run your email marketing campaigns automatically, leaving you free time to do other things while getting effective results from your email campaigns.
• Segmentation and Personalization: Segmenting out your audience allows you to customize your emails thoroughly, resulting in increased engagement as well as conversion rates.
• Analytics: Mailchimp comes with reports that provide you with full insight into the performance of your campaigns.

Benefits of Using SendGrid

• Reliable Deliverability: SendGrid ensures that all your emails are delivered successfully to the inbox and not in the spam folder of the receiver.
• Scalability: It can process any volume of emails from small businesses with a handful of emails to big enterprises with thousands of daily emails.
• Email API and SMTP Relay: Applying these features eases integration with your applications when it comes to sending emails.
• Email templates: SendGrid comes with pre-built templates and a dynamic editor for crafting professional-looking and compelling emails.

Let’s now compare features and Mailchimp and SendGrid and see which one’s the best for your business.

Features: Mailchimp vs SendGrid

#1. Ease of Use

Mailchimp is considered user-friendly, especially for beginners. It provides a drag-and-drop email builder that makes it easy for you to design and customize emails. The interface of the platform and onboarding is simple and straightforward. 

The only part I think is a little complicated is finding campaigns on mobile devices compared to web versions. 

SendGrid is more developers-focused and might have a steeper learning curve if you aren’t a coder/developer. 

It offers a range of features, but some users have reported difficulties with integrations. And to truly customize your emails, you might need some coding skills😟 . 

Winner🏆: Mailchimp (suitable for both beginners and pros).

Also read: Best email testing tools to use for your mailer campaigns

#2. Automation

Mailchimp is known for its user-friendly interface and powerful automation features. It offers pre-built automation workflows across common scenarios like welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, reengagements with customers, etc. 

The platform also allows complex multi-step ‘customer journeys based on triggers and conditions’, which makes it a formidable tool in the hands of businesses looking to automate their email marketing efforts. 

SendGrid also has some automation features, but they are more focused on transactional emails and less so on marketing automation. 

SendGrid’s automation is more about the reliable delivery of transactional emails like receipts, password resets, etc., as well as other notifications. 

It does boast some marketing automation capabilities, such as the ability to send automated emails based on user behavior, thus not being so limited in scope.

Winner🏆: Mailchimp

#3. Email Templates

Mailchimp comes with a wide variety of pre-designed email templates that cater to different industries and use cases. The software also offers a drag-and-drop email builder that helps you make custom emails without any coding skills. 

Due to this feature, it’s an appropriate choice for beginners. In addition, Mailchimp’s content studio allows you to play around with image files for crafting catchy email campaigns.

SendGrid also has email templates and a design feature with drag-and-drop functionality. However, when I used it, I noticed one thing. You might need to know how to code if you want your emails to look a certain way, so that could be a drawback for non-technical users. 

Winner🏆: Mailchimp

#4. Deliverability

Mailchimp’s deliverability is acceptable but not necessarily good. They have quite a wide range of features that support email marketing, but when it comes to deliverability, it’s not something where the tool shines (and they accept it). 

SendGrid’s best asset is email deliverability. They send more than 18 billion customer engagement emails every month. To take care of deliverability, they have sub-features like:

• Dedicated IP addresses (on their most expensive plan)
• Feedback loops
• SPF records
• Consultation from delivery experts
• Partnerships with mailbox providers 
• Automated queue handling and threat detection 

However, it’s important to point out that with Free and Basic plans for SendGrid, shared IPs can still affect deliverability. 

Winner🏆: SendGrid

#5. Reports and Analytics

Mailchimp offers strong reporting and analytics features. The tool gives reports about your email campaigns that track metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and other engagement KPIs. 

You can also see which emails led to website visits as well as see how your audience grows over time. 

Mailchimp’s reports are visually stunning, so they can be understood easily by you and your clients who want to track progress, making it data-driven at the same time. 

On the other hand, SendGrid is more about comprehensive analytics but is mostly focused on deliverability metrics. 

You can track the delivery rate of emails, bounce rates, spam reports, and many other metrics related to email deliverability. 

SendGrid’s analytics are a lot technical, which may be good for users who have a good grasp of email marketing metrics. 

Winner🏆: Both Mailchimp and SendGrid

#6. Customer Support

Mailchimp has a knowledge base, email support, and chat support. However, it is important to note that phone help isn’t available. 

The chat support is availed only for some plans, and the response time can differ too. 

SendGrid provides both phone and chat support, along with an extensive knowledge base. 

Their service is available 24/7, and they also provide dedicated IP and deliverability support. 

If you ask me, SendGrid has a little edge over Mailchimp here. 

Winner🏆: SendGrid (by a small margin)

Mailchimp Use Cases

Mailchimp is a versatile email marketing tool that can be beneficial for various industries:

• E-commerce: Mailchimp seamlessly connects with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. It offers features like product recommendation emails, abandoned carts emails, and post-purchase follow-ups, via which you can boost sales and customer retention.
• Nonprofits: With their automation features, Mailchimp can help non-profit organizations maintain a long relationship with their donors by regularly updating them on donation reminders as well as sending personalized thank you emails once the transaction is complete.
• Publishing: Publishers can leverage Mailchimp to send out newsletters, updates, and personalized content that help enhance engagement and increase loyalty.
• Real Estate: Real estate agents use Mailchimp to send property listings, open house invitations, and market updates to prospective buyers.
• Healthcare: Healthcare providers can use Mailchimp to send appointment reminders, health tips, and updates about services to their clients.

SendGrid Use Cases

Here are a few use cases of SendGrid:

• Tech Companies: The API of SendGrid is pretty strong, so the platform’s a great choice for tech companies looking to send transactional emails – password resets, account confirmations, and notifications.
• E-Commerce: For high-volume email campaigns relating to eCommerce, such as promotional emails, order confirmations, and shipping notifications, Sendgrid can handle your business needs. It also gives your business analytics dashboard where you can track customer engagement.
• Marketing Agencies: SendGrid’s scalability and reliability make it a perfect fit for marketing agencies handling email campaigns on behalf of multiple clients.
• Banks and Financial Companies: Banks and financial institutions can use SendGrid to send transactional emails like account updates, transaction alerts, and transaction statements.

And the winner🏆 is…

From the table above, it’s pretty evident that if you want user-friendliness, better automation, and several email templates, Mailchimp is your go-to solution. 

But if you are focused on better email deliverability and want customer support all the time, go with SendGrid. 

But remember – both platforms have a free trial, so use both this email marketing software and see which one’s the best for your business.

Next up, the best email subject line testers to use before you send newsletters.