MindFire Studio vs. Twilio SendGrid

Mindfire is good when using direct mail pieces. You are able to analyze the web and print pieces together. However, it doesn't allow for good scalability of campaigns. While the templates are decent, you do need some coding knowledge to make these campaigns web compliant.

Incentivized

If you're prepared to build out your whole staff UX, audience creation, email production, and analytics on your own using API, this tool may have that flexibility. If you require a sturdy drag and drop production tool, this tool has it but at the expense of a lot of other critical functionality. Out of the box analytics/reporting, is extremely limited. Complex queries, even something like pulling those who haven't engaged in email within a certain time period, is clunky. If you require any support at all, this is not the tool for you. I'm a deliverability consultant and have used many of the top email marketing tools and SendGrid has been extremely difficult for my team. I do not recommend it. Shiny and bright during sales, pretty disappointing thereafter.

• Mindfire provides a direct correlation to a print piece.

Incentivized

• Managing email lists / audiences is easy with features like groups and segments.
• They provide pre-built email templates that are very easy to modify. It is also super easy to create new email templates with their drag-and-drop email builder.
• Provides clear / easy-to-read analytics of email campaigns.
• I can easily import large email contact lists all at once or add a user manually one-at-a-time, when needed.

Incentivized

• The UI is dated and needs to be updated. The ability to delete elements after publishing and going back to edit mode. Better UX needs to be implemented.

Incentivized

• Not necessarily their Email API but their email in general - they are currently in beta for automated email sequences but are still bare bones. Much more work is needed before it can be used mainstream and be able to convert everything to SendGrid.
• Helping with warming up our dedicated IP for the best-sending score.
• We seem to hit the promotions folder a decent amount (maybe the IP problem above) and even a lot of their emails hit my spam or promotions folder (whether they be transactional or marketing) which isn't a great sign when trusting an ESP.
• Transactional email sequences would be a huge plus.
• Now that Twilio owns SenGrid, having an integrated platform where you could see all our transactional emails together.
• Better reporting and split reporting between transactional and marketing emails.

Incentivized

It is usable but needs improvement in overall user experience and ease of use. A new joinee/anyone new to the tool would need more tarining currently before he can use the platform seamlessly. The set-up to value realization time for Twilio SendGrid customers is generally high because of this concern.

Incentivized

Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.

Incentivized

Mindfire wasn't my choice. The only reason it is being used is because it correlated with direct mail.

Incentivized

Sendgrid has a lot of features that other providers have and a few more - like the dynamic template builder, which AWS SES doesn't have. We choose the provider based on the scenario of use and the provider we're using. If we're going to be making regular changes to a template, then we'd go with Sendgrid, as the changes will be easier to make and don't necessarily require developer intervention.

Incentivized

• It has been a neutral experience

Incentivized

• As it was cheaper than the transactional service we previously used, it saved costs.
• The API was relatively easy to work with so it helped us ship the service and test it quickly.
• We still use the transactional email service, even though we recognize its limits as it meets our immediate needs.

Incentivized