SendGrid vs. Mailchimp: Which email platform is better?

Compare SendGrid vs. Mailchimp to discover key differences and benefits. Choose the right email marketing platform for your business needs.

Discover how SendGrid vs. Mailchimp stacks up for your email marketing needs. Explore our detailed reviews to find out which platform suits you best.

Is it ease of use or advanced features you’re after?

Our comparison answers these questions and more as you delve into the article.

SendGrid vs. Mailchimp: At a Glance

Criteria	SendGrid	Mailchimp	Winner
SMB Guide’s Rating	7.4/10	8/10	Mailchimp
Marketing Automation Capabilities	Basic automation	Basic automation	Mailchimp
Email Builder	Straightforward, basic	Intuitive, easy-to-use	Mailchimp
Personalization & Customization	Dynamic fields	Basic personalization	Tie
Campaign Performance Tracking	Essential metrics	Standard metrics	Mailchimp
Email Deliverability	✅	✅	SendGrid
List Management	Basic list management	Simple lists	Mailchimp
A/B Testing	✅	✅	Mailchimp
Advanced Reporting & Insights	Functional, but limited	Basic reports	Mailchimp
Compliance & Security	✅	✅	Tie
User Experience and User Interface	Simple interface	User-friendly interface	Mailchimp
Integrations and Compatibility	120+ integrations	300+ integrations	Mailchimp
Customer Support	Email and knowledge base	Phone, live chat, and email	Mailchimp
Pricing	Free – $900/mo	Free – $1,600/mo	SendGrid
Scalability	✅	✅	SendGrid

SendGrid: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

SendGrid is known for its excellent email deliverability, ensuring high inbox placement thanks to its reliable infrastructure.

It offers scalable solutions tailored to growing businesses, with flexible pricing plans for various budgets.

While its marketing automation and email builder are basic, they provide essential tools for straightforward email campaigns.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

• Free: $0/month/year (up to 100 contacts and 6,000 emails per month)
• Basic: Starts at $15/month based on the number of contacts and emails per month
• Advanced: Starts at $60/month based on the number of contacts and emails per month

Mailchimp: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

Mailchimp is a dynamic platform for email marketing, crafted to assist businesses in crafting, managing, and assessing their email campaigns efficiently.

It offers tools for creating visually appealing emails, automating marketing tasks, and segmenting lists for more focused communication.

With comprehensive analytics, Mailchimp allows users to monitor engagement and fine-tune their strategies, making it a perfect fit for both small businesses and larger corporations aiming to elevate their marketing initiatives.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

Mailchimp’s pricing plan is straightforward, offering four plans, including a freemium. The free plan has feature limitations compared to competitors, but paid plans provide better tools.

Here are the plans:

• Free: $0/month/year for up to 1,000 monthly emails
• Essentials: $38/month ($11/month with annual billing) for up to 25,000 monthly emails
• Standard: $51/month ($17/month with annual billing) for up to 30,000 monthly emails
• Premium: $298/month billed annually for up to 1,500,000 monthly emails

Marketing Automation Capabilities

SendGrid provides basic marketing automation features that are straightforward to use. Its simplicity is ideal for businesses ensuring high email deliverability and scalability.

SendGrid reliably places emails in inboxes, making it a strong choice for companies prioritizing consistent communication with their audience.

This platform efficiently supports growing businesses with its scalable solutions, making it suitable for those who need to expand their reach over time.

Mailchimp is well known for its comprehensive marketing automation tools, which are designed to handle complex workflows and enhance customer engagement.

Its automation capabilities allow businesses to create intricate, personalized campaigns that can adapt to various customer interactions.

Mailchimp offers extensive customization options, enabling users to tailor communications to specific audience segments.

This is particularly beneficial for businesses looking to deepen customer relationships through detailed segmentation and targeted messaging.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Email Builder

SendGrid’s email builder is straightforward, efficient, and designed with simplicity in mind. It provides users with basic design capabilities, making creating clean and professional emails easy without much hassle.

This builder suits beginners or businesses, prioritizing quick setup and straightforward design over complex features.

Its minimalistic approach ensures that users can focus on content rather than design intricacies, which is perfect for those who need to get emails out quickly and efficiently.

Mailchimp offers a more advanced and user-friendly email builder with many templates and customization options. This builder lets users craft visually appealing and highly personalized emails tailored to their brand’s aesthetic.

Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop interface makes it accessible even to those with limited design experience, yet it still provides the depth needed for more complex design needs.

This makes it an excellent choice for users who want to leverage detailed branding and customization in their email campaigns.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Personalization & Customization

Both platforms offer strong features for personalizing email content based on recipient attributes and behaviors.

SendGrid excels in high-volume sends and deliverability, with effective segmentation capabilities and dynamic content options.

Mailchimp, on the other hand, provides a more user-friendly interface with powerful AI tools for segmentation and personalization, making it easier for marketers to create targeted campaigns.

Both platforms have their strengths, making it a tie in terms of personalization and customization capabilities.

✅ Winner: Tie

Campaign Performance Tracking

Both platforms offer tracking for essential metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

However, Mailchimp provides a more comprehensive real-time reporting dashboard, allowing users to set and track specific campaign goals such as lead or revenue generation.

Mailchimp also excels in ease of conducting A/B tests and offers deeper insights.

Mailchimp integrates seamlessly with third-party analytics platforms like Google Analytics, providing a more holistic view of campaign performance.

Overall, Mailchimp’s user-friendly interface and advanced features make it the superior choice for campaign performance tracking.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Email Deliverability

SendGrid stands out for its focus on email deliverability, offering tools to help users identify and resolve issues that might lead to emails being marked as spam.

It provides capabilities to run spam filter tests, allowing users to preemptively address potential deliverability problems.

SendGrid offers comprehensive tools to monitor and maintain sender reputation, including tracking bounce rates and spam complaints.

Mailchimp also provides effective deliverability tools, though its primary strength lies in its broad range of marketing features.

It includes basic spam filter testing and gives users insights into bounce rates and spam complaints, helping maintain a positive sender reputation.

Mailchimp’s interface makes accessing and understanding these metrics easy, although it may not offer the same depth of deliverability-focused features as SendGrid.

While both platforms offer valuable tools for managing deliverability, SendGrid is more specialized in this area.

✅ Winner: SendGrid

List Management

SendGrid provides effective segmentation options, allowing users to create lists based on demographic and behavioral data.

It supports custom segmentation criteria, enabling marketers to tailor their campaigns more precisely.

SendGrid also includes tools to clean and maintain email lists by removing duplicates, inactive subscribers, and invalid email addresses, ensuring high deliverability rates.

Mailchimp allows for extensive demographic, behavioral, and custom segmentation, making it easy to target specific audience segments.

Mailchimp excels in list cleaning features as well, automatically identifying and removing inactive subscribers and invalid email addresses.

Its comprehensive subscriber preference management offers clear opt-in/out options, detailed subscription preferences, and a seamless subscription confirmation process.

Both SendGrid and Mailchimp provide strong segmentation and list management features, Mailchimp offers more depth and flexibility.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

A/B Testing

Both platforms offer features that allow users to enhance their email marketing strategies, but they differ in approach and depth. 

Mailchimp excels in A/B testing by providing an intuitive interface that makes it easy to set up tests on various elements of email campaigns. Users can experiment with subject lines, content variations, and sending times.

SendGrid also offers A/B testing features, focusing on flexibility and insight. Users can test subject lines, content variations, and sending times, similar to Mailchimp.

While setting up tests in SendGrid is straightforward, it may require more familiarity with the platform to fully utilize its capabilities.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Advanced Reporting & Insights

Both platforms provide comprehensive tools to help users understand their email marketing performance, but each has unique strengths.

Mailchimp stands out with its thorough reporting and predictive analytics approach, making it ideal for users who want deep insights and forecasting capabilities.

SendGrid offers straightforward and effective reporting, suitable for those who prefer a more hands-on approach to understanding campaign results without extensive predictive features.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Compliance and Security

Mailchimp and SendGrid are dedicated to providing secure and compliant email marketing solutions. Mailchimp offers slightly more comprehensive tools for GDPR compliance management.

SendGrid, while effective, may require additional manual configuration for managing some compliance aspects.

✅ Winner: Tie

User Interface and User Experience

Mailchimp delivers a user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing experience, ideal for users seeking a streamlined and accessible platform.

SendGrid, while efficient and practical, might be better suited for those with a bit more experience and desire for in-depth control over their email marketing tasks.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Integrations and Compatibility

Mailchimp offers more comprehensive integrations and user-friendly tools, particularly for businesses seeking seamless CRM, e-commerce, and social media integration.

SendGrid, while offering strong API capabilities and essential integrations, might appeal more to users who prefer a technical, hands-on approach to customization and setup.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Customer Support

Mailchimp offers a more accessible and user-friendly support experience, particularly for users who may require more hands-on assistance.

SendGrid provides reliable support, especially for those with a technical background, and offers extensive resources for self-guided troubleshooting.

✅ Winner: Mailchimp

Pricing

Both platforms offer multiple plans to choose from, so you can adjust as you grow. Pricing for Mailchimp ranges from free to $1600 a month, and SendGrid ranges from free to $900/month.

✅ Winner: SendGrid

Scalability

While both are scalable platforms, SendGrid’s pricing, API, and modular architecture make it the winner here.

It’s easier for businesses to integrate additional features to expand capabilities as requirements change over time. The process is a bit more complex than Mailchimp, though.

✅ Winner: SendGrid

Standout Features of SendGrid

API and developer tools

SendGrid offers a powerful suite of APIs and developer tools, allowing extensive customization and integration into existing systems. This feature is ideal for businesses seeking technical flexibility in email marketing solutions.

Event webhooks

SendGrid provides event webhooks, enabling real-time notifications and integration with third-party applications for event-driven workflows.

This feature is useful for businesses that need to automate responses or actions based on email events like opens, clicks, or bounces.

Standout Features of Mailchimp

All-in-one marketing platform

Mailchimp provides an all-in-one marketing platform that includes email marketing, social media advertising, landing pages, and more.

This allows businesses to manage multiple aspects of their marketing strategy from a single interface.

Creative assistant

Mailchimp’s Creative Assistant uses AI to automatically generate custom email campaign designs. This feature is handy for businesses without dedicated design resources, making it easier to create visually appealing content.

SendGrid vs. Mailchimp: SMB Guide’s Verdict

While both tools are solid for email marketing, Mailchimp wins overall because it’s easier to use and offers more flexibility with complex automations. Ultimately, the choice comes down to your business’s budget and unique needs. 

To decide which platform aligns with your business goals, we encourage you to explore both SendGrid and Mailchimp. Try them to experience firsthand which delivers the results you need to elevate your marketing strategy.