What is SendGrid Used For? Email API Guide With 2023 Examples

What is SendGrid Used For

SendGrid is a transactional email service to help developers send emails through APIs, applications and tools in bulk and directly to users. Developers use SendGrid instead of their own web server because they have built their IP and trustworthiness with the email providers.

In this article, we will learn what SendGrid is, its pricing plans, and its key features. We will discuss in detail the alternatives and competitors of SendGrid. We will also look at the example of sending bulk emails using SendGrid in PHP.

SendGrid Review

In this article, we will discuss the following topics.

What is SendGrid?
SendGrid Pricing Plans.
Key Features of SendGrid.
Sending Bulk Emails using SendGrid in PHP.
The List Of The Best SendGrid Alternatives
Best SendGrid Alternatives Review
Our opinion on the Alternatives to SendGrid

What is SendGrid?

SendGrid( also called Twilio SendGrid) is a reliable and cloud-based email delivery service. It is not just a service for sending emails but offers a complete email marketing suite with analytical tools to monitor email marketing campaigns. Among other features, it also provides the ability to use dedicated IPs.

Sending an email using a SendGrid cloud-based SMTP server has numerous benefits for growing businesses, saving time, and streamlining costs. It manages to send transactional and marketing emails and handle the heavy lifting of sending and receiving emails. You can run Email marketing campaigns with SendGrid, which supports 10,000 requests per second.

SendGrid is good for email marketing because it allows us quickly and easily engage with our audience. We can send emails to multiple people using SendGrid. Large companies such as Uber, Spotify, and eBay use SendGrid’s email marketing API. Its most significant advantages are the high delivery rate and analytics dashboards.

Digging Deeper into SendGrid Email API.

Want to learn more about SendGrid? This is one of several articles where we’ve explored this email service in detail. Check out the following articles to go deeper and learn more about what is SendGrid and how to use it.

SendGrid Pricing Plans

The detailed SendGrid’s free and paid plans list.

SendGrid Email API Plans (Pricing is an estimate before taxes and overages)

Free plan:	You can send up to 40,000 emails for the first month, then 100 emails/day + API key, SMTP relay, webhooks + delivery optimization + dynamic template editor.
Essentials plan	includes all “Free” features + live chat customer support.	40K: $14.95/month — 40,000 emails/month.	100K: $29.95/month — 100,000 emails/month.
Pro plan	includes all “Essentials” features + Email validation + dedicated IP + subuser management + phone customer service from SendGrid support.	100K: $89.95/month — 100,000 emails/month	300K: $249/month — 300,000 emails/month	700K: $449/month — 700,000 emails/month	1.5M: $749/month — 1,500,000 emails/month
Premier	Custom pricing (get in touch with the sales support team) — includes all “Pro” features + customer success manager + prioritized customer support.

SendGrid Pricing Plans

Learn more about Pricing SendGrid.

Key Features of SendGrid

The key features of using SendGrid are the following.

Predefined templates.

SendGrid provides a variety of options when it comes to creating your promotional emails. You can use SendGrid’s built-in email template library to begin writing your draft.

SendGrid offers an HTML and drag-and-drop editor to build your emails from scratch.

These editors can help you with various details regarding your emails or email campaigns, including:

Intended audiences
A/B testing
The content and media included in the email

Robust Reporting.

How would you know how well your emails are performing?

The only way to know how well an email campaign performs is through actual replies and conversions. However, these metrics aren’t enough to give you a detailed understanding of your email performance.

SendGrid lets you track your email performance in real-time across several key metrics, such as:

Emails delivered
Unique opens and clicks
Bounce rate and spam reports
Unsubscribes
And more

This data can help you make sense of your marketing email statistics and improve your email marketing efforts.

Mailing List Management.

The campaign management feature lets marketing teams segment contacts based on engagement metrics and customer data

Furthermore, SendGrid includes domain authentication, compliance and ISP outreach to optimize email delivery. SendGrid also comes with web and SMTP APIs and connects with cloud-based email service providers. We highly recommend you send an email using SendGrid in PHP.

Sending Bulk Emails with SendGrid

We can send bulk emails to an email list in PHP using SendGrid in PHP. We will use the foreach() loop to parse through an array of email addresses and then build a single array of recipients.

SendGrid allows us to personalize each email a recipient receives, and we can modify the content based on the individual email address.

Example of Sending Bulk Emails using SendGrid in PHP

<?php
 
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
 
use SendGrid\Mail\Personalization;
use SendGrid\Mail\To;
 
// Load our `.env` variables
$dotenv = Dotenv\Dotenv::create(__DIR__);
$dotenv->load();
 
// Declares a new SendGrid Mail object
$email = new \SendGrid\Mail\Mail();
 
// Defines the primary email
$email->setFrom("your@email.com", "Abid");
$email->setSubject("Group Email to Twilio Subscribers");
$email->addTo("receiver@gmail.com", "First Recipient");
 
// Defines the additional email addresses
$email_addresses = [
    'youreamil@gmail.com',
];
 
foreach ( $email_addresses as $email_address ) {
 
    $personalization = new Personalization();
    $personalization->addTo( new To( $email_address ) );
 
    $email->addPersonalization( $personalization );
}
 
 
$email->addContent("text/plain", "We are Sending bulk emails is easy with SendGrid");
$email->addContent("text/html", "We are Sending bulk emails is easy with SendGrid");
 
$sendgrid = new \SendGrid(getenv('SENDGRID_API_KEY'));
 
try {
    $response = $sendgrid->send($email);
    print $response->statusCode() . "\n";
    print_r($response->headers());
    print $response->body() . "\n";
    echo "email sent!\n";
} catch (Exception $e) {
    echo 'Caught exception: '. $e->getMessage() ."\n";
}

The List Of The Best SendGrid Alternatives

Here is the list of the most popular SendGrid competitors:

AWS SES
Mailgun
Mailjet
Sendinblue
Mailchimp

Comparison Table of the Best Alternatives to SendGrid

Name	Best For	Price
Mailgun	Cloud-Based Transactional API for Developers	$35/month for 50000 emails, – $80/month for 100,000 emails – $ 90/month for 100,000 emails
Mailjet	Email API and marketing solution.	Free plan available, Basic plan for $9.65 per month, Premium plan for $20.95/per month,
SendinBlue	Customizable Email Marketing Campaigns and Transactional Emails.	Free for 300 emails per month, Lite: $25/month, Premium: $65/month, Enterprise: Contact them.
Constant Contact	Email Marketing Automation and Contact List Management.	60 days free trial available, Core: $9.99/month, Plus plan: $45/month.
HubSpot Email Marketing	Integration with HubSpot products	Free plan available, $45/month for 1000 marketing contact, $800/month for 2000 marketing contact, $3200/month for 10000 marketing contacts.
Mailchimp	All-in-One integrated branding solution	Free plan available with 2000 contacts/month, Essential plan – $9.99/month, $14.99/month, Premium – $299.
Mandrill	SMTP Transactional Email Service	Starts at $20 for 25000 emails per month.

Comparing SendGrid Alternatives

Best SendGrid Alternatives Review

There are several numbers of alternatives to SendGrid.

1) AWS SES.

Amazon SES (Simple Email Service) is a top-rated cloud-based service offered by AWS. It is one of the alternatives to Sendgrid. It allows for sending and receiving emails and is mostly suitable for transactional emails. Its users often use it alongside other AWS services, such as SQS or EC2, and take advantage of seamless integrations. It also works perfectly fine as a standalone offering.

It also provides a variety of deployments, including dedicated, shared, or owned IP addresses. And also, reports on sender statistics and a deliverability dashboard help businesses make every email count.

One of the best features of Amazon SES is its low cost. The AWS SES service is chosen and used by companies such as Netflix, Reddit, and Duolingo.

Another important feature is the integration, through the console itself, API, or SMTP, it is possible to configure the sending of emails. In addition, Amazon SES not only allows sending of emails but also receiving them.

SendGrid is more like an all-inclusive tool, suitable for sending all kinds of emails, while Amazon SES mainly does transactional emails. SES works with pay-as-you-go pricing, while SendGrid offers pre-designed plans. The rates also differ, of course.

With AWS SES, a user gets to send 5 emails per second. This number can go up to 50000 emails per day. However, numbers can further go up if the users happen to maintain an excellent email-sending reputation.

SendGrid differs a little bit from Amazon. Here, a user needs to buy a huge quantity of emails with which they can slowly increase their email limitation. This limitation entirely depends on the email-sending reputation.

Features:

Build customized email marketing campaigns
Content filtering
Dedicated IP addresses
Integrate easily with other applications

2) MailGun.

Mailgun is a great cloud-based email service for developers. You can still use it for transactional and mass emails, but it doesn’t offer independent functionality for marketers, like templates and a media library.

Mailgun is an email service that allows us to use the SMTP protocol or API to send emails. It also provides us with reports to track the number of emails sent and also allows us to check addresses for typos or spam problems. It has an email validation service that provides accurate validation results on the market.

Mailgun website offers you lots of information and enough space to get confused. Here is a list of the main options. You won’t find the obvious splitting for different types of emails.

Mailgun is one of the most helpful email APIs that developers use. We can easily send transactional or bulk emails using Mailgun’s SMTP and HTTP API in PHP. Mailgun allows you to choose how you want to send your emails through API or SMTP.

Mailgun also allows you to create eye-catching emails in minutes. You can create a personalized email targeted at a specific audience. And the Email analytics, based on performance data of your sent emails, lets you know the best time to send your messages.

In Mailgun, you can have the option to choose how you want to send your emails using Mailgun’s API (A popular method of sending emails that can integrate with languages like Python, PHP, Ruby, and more.) or using the SMTP method (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which is an easy way to transfer your emails.)

Features:

Easy SMTP integration and flexible HTTP API
Personalize and schedule emails
Automatic Email Parsing
Improved Email Deliverability
Email analytics

3) Mailjet

Mailjet is the best for Email API and marketing solutions. Mailjet provides an easy-to-use platform for designing and sending email marketing campaigns, newsletters, and automated emails.

You can design beautiful responsive emails in a few minutes using Mailjet Email Marketing API. You can start from scratch or select from a variety of pre-designed templates in Mailjet.

There is a free plan which offers you to send 200 emails per day and 6000 emails per month, have unlimited contacts, and provide statistics about the performance of your emails. The premium plan costs $15 for 15,000 emails per month.

Features:

Intuitive Online Email Builder
Real-Time online collaboration
Send Transactional emails easily via SMTP relay or RESTful API
Personalized email templates
Transactional SMS API

4) SendinBlue.

Sendinblue is an excellent choice as an email marketing API. It is fast, simple, and accessible to everyone. You can send millions of marketing emails in no time using Sendinblue’s robust Email API. Their email API can accept up to 120k emails per minute, and 99% of emails are processed in less than 2 seconds.

Sendinblue also provides digital marketing and sales tools for your business to expand. The features offered by Sendinblue including email designing, marketing automation, launching Facebook ads for a targeted audience, and much more.

The free plan contains 300 emails a day, and the paid ones cost $20 for 20,000 emails a day and $1000 for the business plus plan.

Features:

Separate dashboard for transactional email configuration
A/B Testing for emails
Drag and drop email builder
Advanced report generation

5) Mailchimp.

Best for an all-in-one integrated branding solution. Mailchimp is a powerful marketing API service that provides you with intelligent marketing tools. It works with your favorite apps and web services and helps you do more with your email marketing. It can also find the tools you use or discover new ways for email marketing.

Mailchimp’s API client libraries and mobile SDKs make it so easy to work with Mailchimp Marketing and Transactional APIs with your language or platform of choice.

Features:

Drag and Drop Custom Email Builder
Email Automation
Store content like images to use later in the campaign.
Send transactional emails
Real-time analytics

Our opinion on the Alternatives to SendGrid

As you can see, some amazing alternatives to SendGrid are widely used today. Compared to SendGrid, all these tools are extremely easy to deploy and offer an exhaustive list of features that simplify the process of sending or receiving transactional and marketing emails.

They are also reasonably priced, as everyone, from startups to large enterprises, can use these tools to communicate better with their customers.

As for our recommendation, if you are looking for an all-in-one SMTP and API email solution designed for developers, Mailgun and Mailjet will deliver in spades. If you are looking for a hardcore email marketing solution, then Mailchimp will be the best option.

Using SendGrid for Sending Emails Explored

We highly recommend you send emails using SendGrid in PHP. SendGrid is a reliable and transactional email delivery service that provides a cloud-based email delivery service. It can handle all the heavy lifting in sending and receiving emails.

SendGrid-PHP library helps you with a quick SMTP setting to send emails through SendGrid using PHP. It also allows you to integrate flexible APIs into our app easily.

This article explains what SendGrid is, its pricing plans, and its features. There is also an example of sending bulk emails using SendGrid in PHP.

This article also focuses on the popular alternatives and competitors to SendGrid in detail, and we hope you find this article helpful.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the article. Stay tuned for more at FuelingPHP

What is SendGrid Used For? Email API Guide With 2023 Examples