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.
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 | ✘ | ✔ |
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 | ✔ | ✔ |
| 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 | ✔ | ✔ |
| Postmark | SendGrid | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to Inbox | ✔ | ✘ |
| System availability API | ✔ | ✔ |
| Service availability API | ✔ | ✔ |
| Postmark | SendGrid | |
|---|---|---|
| SPF | ✔ | ✔ |
| DKIM | ✔ | ✔ |
| DMARC | ✔ | ✘ |
| 2FA | ✔ | ✔ |
| Opportunistic TLS | ✔ | ✔ |
| Enforced TLS | ✘ | ✔ |
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 | ✔ | ✔ |
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.
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)
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.
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.
Take a moment to meet our customer success team.
Anna
Ignacio
Natalie
Natalie
I had no luck with Sendgrid support when I needed it, compared to Postmark support which was super helpful.
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.
When it's time for troubleshooting, nobody logs and retains more helpful details about the event history and content of messages than Postmark.
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.
Save time getting started with our thoroughly documented, pre-built, and exhaustively tested transactional email templates.
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.
Organize your mail streams by environment, domain, client, or anything really.
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.
For outgoing transactional mail I strongly recommend Postmark. Had bad experience @ Mailgun and SendGrid with delivery.
Password reset emails delivered by @postmarkapp arrive in gmail in 1 second (vs 64 seconds for SendGrid)
Two months since I switched from @SendGrid to @postmarkapp and deliverability/time to inbox has been significantly better. Plus, Postmark's support team is fantastic! Highly recommend using @postmarkapp for your transactional emails.
Ok, clearly I hate SendGrid. PostMark 5x better.
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.
I finally moved from SendGrid to @postmarkapp for @MetricsWatch. So happy! Great support, awesome product, stellar delivery and speed.
Had a horrific experience with SendGrid so i would avoid. We use Postmark and are very happy with it :D
I am baffled that anyone would choose Sendgrid over Postmark. If they tried both, they probably wouldn’t. Delivery rates are just night and day honestly!
We use Postmark and are very happy with it. Switched from SendGrid due to security problems, dodgy UI, and not storing email content.
| 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. |
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.
Dedicated IPs are available to high-volume senders. Read about our policy for issuing dedicated IPs.
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.
We accept payments via Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners, and JCB. We do not accept PayPal or Purchase Orders.
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.
Yes! Contact us to learn more about our high-volume pricing.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
