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Postmark vs. SendGrid

With Postmark, there's no upcharges—and we'd never upsell you to a higher plan or a dedicated IP to improve deliverability. You get great deliverability and reliable (and fast!) support with every Postmark plan.

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Postmark and SendGrid, compared

Postmark is a solid Twilio SendGrid alternative, providing everything you’ll need for sending application emails, processing inbound email, and tracking user engagement.

Postmark SendGrid
Transactional emails
Bulk/broadcast email
(New in Postmark: Send your promotional or bulk email via Broadcast Message Streams.)
Separate infrastructure for transactional and bulk email
SMTP
REST API
Comprehensive official libraries
Community libraries
Spam score checking
Spam complaint handling
Bounce handling
Shared IPs
Dedicated IPs
(Auto-managed based on individual sending volume)
Separate environments with servers
Pre-made email templates
Template engine
Inbox preview
(Available when you send with Postmark Templates)
Scheduled delivery
A/B testing
Email address validation
Seen something inaccurate? Let us know.

While Postmark and SendGrid both offer inbound processing and parsing, we highly recommend taking some time to dig into the API documentation and implementation for each.

Postmark SendGrid
Inbound email processing
RegEx matching on all email headers ("routes")
Chain multiple filters
UTF-8 encoding
Raw MIME
Strip signature and quote blocks
Spam filtering
Seen something inaccurate? Let us know.
Postmark SendGrid
Delivery rates
Bounce rates
Open rates
Click tracking
Unsubscribe tracking
Spam rates
Full message storage
(45 days)
(3 days)
Automatic tagging
Custom tagging
Custom header metadata tag
Custom tracking domain
Geolocation data
Email client and device tracking
Real-time notifications
Seen something inaccurate? Let us know.
Postmark SendGrid
Time to Inbox
System availability API
Service availability API
Seen something inaccurate? Let us know.
Postmark SendGrid
SPF
DKIM
DMARC
2FA
Opportunistic TLS
Enforced TLS
Seen something inaccurate? Let us know.

On the surface, SendGrid's support looks better, but based on what we've heard from customers, it's not much use if support is available 24x7 if they do a poor job helping when you really need it.

Postmark SendGrid
Dedicated support team
24/7 support
Email support
Phone support
Live chat
Seen something inaccurate? Let us know.

Postmark: exceptional deliverability, for everyone

With SendGrid you'll need to "boost deliverability with a dedicated IP" and pay them more. At Postmark, great deliverability isn't an up-charge. We don't just claim great deliverability. We share live delivery data so you can judge for yourself.

  • Gmail

  • Apple

  • Hotmail

  • AOL

  • Yahoo

Time to Inbox data updated every 5 minutes

With most providers, when deliverability issues arise, they suggest that paying more for a dedicated IP address will fix the problems. We believe that's an abdication of responsibility to ensure your emails reach customers every time. It’s our job to provide you with great deliverability with or without dedicated IP addresses.

Whether you send a few thousand or millions of emails, you’ll see the same quality of deliverability across our entire service. You'll be hard-pressed to find a provider more willing to stand by the quality of their shared IPs than Postmark. If or when the time comes that a dedicated IP address makes sense, we can set you up on one.

Password reset emails delivered by @postmarkapp arrive in gmail in 1 second (vs 64 seconds for SendGrid)

Josh Crews

Josh Crews

via Twitter

Great support at no extra cost

With SendGrid you'll need to pay extra for an upgraded plan with "prioritized support" for "premier" customers. At Postmark, we give everyone great support, and quickly too. Our average time to first response is under two hours. That's hours, not days.

91%
Customer Happiness Rating
  • 😃 Great (91%)
  • 🙂 Okay (1%)
  • 😔 Not Good (8%)

Customer feedback gathered through Help Scout over the past 60 days.

There’s no prioritized support with Postmark. You can use email or live chat (during business hours). You'll usually hear back in a couple of hours. If you’re having delivery problems, we won't recommend upgrading to a dedicated IP address. We’ll dive in and help you get to the bottom of things.

We also have comprehensive developer documentation and a centralized support center packed full of resources to keep you going when our support team is enjoying some well-earned downtime with their families.


We’re here to help!

Take a moment to meet our customer success team.

  • Anna Ward Anna
  • Ignacio Roig Ignacio
  • Natalie Keshlear Natalie
  • Natalie Robles Natalie

I had no luck with Sendgrid support when I needed it, compared to Postmark support which was super helpful.

Ramy Khuffash

Ramy Khuffash

via Twitter

Postmark without question. High-quality product and unreal support. Dabbled with all over the years, and SendGrid/Mailgun were some of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in terms of both product and support.

Garrett Dimon

Garrett Dimon

via Twitter


Unrivaled troubleshooting capabilities

When it's time for troubleshooting, nobody logs and retains more helpful details about the event history and content of messages than Postmark.

Search, filter, and view 45 days of detailed message activity from the activity feed.
Search, filter, and view 45 days of detailed message activity from the activity feed.
Detailed message event logs for every email.
Detailed message event logs for every email.
Full Content
Full Content

While SendGrid provides 3 days of message event history and offers 30 days of history as a paid upgrade, Postmark provides a full 45 days of both message events and full content rendering to all accounts at no charge by default (and retention can be customized from 7 to 365 days if needed). With Postmark, you'll never again have to wonder exactly what happened to an email when a customer emails support.


Pre-built and fully-tested transactional email templates

Save time getting started with our thoroughly documented, pre-built, and exhaustively tested transactional email templates.

Start from a variety of pre-built templates or build your own.
Start from a variety of pre-built templates or build your own.
Edit and tweak your templates directly in Postmark.
Edit and tweak your templates directly in Postmark.
Preview your templates with easily updatable test data.
Preview your templates with easily updatable test data.

Postmark offers a full set of pre-built and exhaustively tested transactional email templates to help you get started. For each of these templates, we've also written extensive guides about best practices for configuration, usability, engagement, copywriting, and more.

Whether you need more templates or just want to custom-build your own set of templates, we've built and open-sourced MailMason, a complete toolset to streamline building and updating a set of consistent transactional emails. It makes it easier to build your transactional emails by enabling you to use partials, automatically inline your CSS (or SCSS), test emails in Litmus, automatically generate text equivalents, and much more.


Separate your mail streams with servers

Organize your mail streams by environment, domain, client, or anything really.

Postmark servers
Postmark servers

With SendGrid, all of your messages get lumped together in one stream making it difficult to search, filter, and troubleshoot. With Postmark, you can organize and separate those mail streams. This makes searching and filtering your activity stream easier and faster when troubleshooting. It also gives you the ability to manage permissions and API usage on a more granular level.

Customers that already made the switch...

Unfortunately we didn't have great luck with @SendGrid, using @postmarkapp now & very happy with it.

J.R. Storment

J.R. Storment

via Twitter

Sendgrid was giving us countless problems so we switched over to Postmark and went problem-free!

Afterthought Systems

Afterthought Systems

via Twitter

Password reset emails delivered by @postmarkapp arrive in gmail in 1 second (vs 64 seconds for SendGrid)

Josh Crews

Josh Crews

via Twitter

Trying out @postmarkapp for my next react app blog and wow they have much better dev. experience than @SendGrid. Very clear & step-by-step.

Raja Rao DV‏

Raja Rao DV‏

via Twitter

We use Postmark and are very happy with it. Switched from SendGrid due to security problems, dodgy UI, and not storing email content.

Jonny Paylor

Jonny Paylor

via Twitter

Postmark without question. High-quality product and unreal support. Dabbled with all over the years, and SendGrid/Mailgun were some of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in terms of both product and support.

Garrett Dimon

Garrett Dimon

via Twitter

I’ve used SendGrid, Mandrill and Postmark for transactional email in production. Amazing how much better Postmark is than everyone else.

Andreas Zecher

Andreas Zecher

Founder and Developer at Promoter

Okay @postmarkapp is amazing. Why has no one told me about this? Good riddance to all their competitors I've put up with for too long.

Alexander Obenauer

Alexander Obenauer

via Twitter

Ok, clearly I hate SendGrid. PostMark 5x better.

Archit Gupta

Archit Gupta

via Twitter


Clipboard with a checklist.

What would it take to switch to Postmark?

We’ve put together a comprehensive guide that covers everything you need to know about switching from SendGrid to Postmark.

Join the thousands of companies that already trust Postmark

How much does Postmark cost?

10,000 emails
/month
125,000 emails
/month
700,000 emails
/month
Annual Savings $59 /year - -
Postmark Includes great deliverability and support as standard $15 /mo. $115 /mo. $455 /mo.
SendGrid Essentials Plan $19.95 /mo. - -
Pro Plan - $114.95 /mo. $449 /mo.

Do you offer a free trial?

All new accounts start off on our free developer plan with 100 emails per month. Use it for however long you need, it doesn’t expire.

Do you offer dedicated IPs?

Dedicated IPs are available to high-volume senders. Read about our policy for issuing dedicated IPs.

What happens if I go over my plan’s monthly email limit?

Extra emails on our paid plans are calculated at the end of your billing cycle and included with your plan cost for the upcoming month.

What payment types do you accept?

We accept payments via Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners, and JCB. We do not accept PayPal or Purchase Orders.

Can I send bulk marketing email through Postmark?

Yes you can! To comply with industry best practices and to maintain our high deliverability, it's important though that transactional and marketing emails never mix. That's why we created Message Streams, a parallel but completely separate sending infrastructures for your transactional and broadcast emails.

Do you offer high-volume plans?

Yes! Contact us to learn more about our high-volume pricing.

Are you the only SendGrid alternative out there?

Actually, we’re not—and since we know that Postmark might not always be the right choice for you, we put together this list of SendGrid alternatives that includes a handy comparison spreadsheet.


Make the best choice for a SendGrid alternative

If you’re looking for a reliable, easy-to-use email service, we believe Postmark is the best alternative to SendGrid, but we’re also a little biased. So check out other email services and see how their features, service quality, and pricing compare to SendGrid and Postmark—and choose the one that’s right for you.

Mailgun

Fans of Mailgun point out their pay-as-you go pricing that comes in handy while you’re figuring out how much email you’re sending. But we’ve also seen reports of deliverability issues and unresponsive customer support. Message and log retention times vary greatly across Mailgun plans, so if it’s important for you to have access to event and email content history for troubleshooting, you’ll have to opt for Mailgun’s higher-tiered plans.

Read our full Mailgun comparison

Mandrill

Mandrill used to be a standalone email service provider but is now only available as a paid add-on for Mailchimp users. If you’re using Mailchimp for your email marketing, Mandrill might be worth exploring. But if you’re not a Mailchimp customer, Mandrill is really expensive—and likely isn’t the best solution for you.

Read our full Mandrill comparison

Amazon SES

Amazon Simple Mail Service is one of the most affordable sending services. If your application is hosted on Amazon, you can benefit from a generous amount of free email. But while SES beats other competitors in pricing, be aware that its feature set is limited. For example, SES doesn’t let you track and monitor message events, so crucial functionality like suppressing delivery to bounces and spam complaints isn’t available out-of-the-box. You’d have to build these features yourself—and that takes time and effort.

Read our full SES comparison

Sparkpost

With enterprise-level analytics, competitive intelligence tools, and more, Sparkpost offers a selection of features that go beyond email delivery. In that sense, Sparkpost and SendGrid are quite similar! If you’re working for an enterprise with complex email needs and are looking for a comprehensive toolkit to wrangle all our email sending, data insights, and deliverability, Sparkpost might be a good choice for you. If you’re “just” looking to send emails, it might be a bit overwhelming though.

Read our full Sparkpost comparison

Let’s put an end to deliverability issues

Fast and reliable delivery. Easy-to-use API. Fantastic support.