If you’re looking for a SendGrid alternative, you’re probably in the market for a transactional email service. Although it offers other core email features as well, that’s what it’s best known for.
Transactional emails are very different from marketing ones. Not only can any website or application make use of them, but they also need to be personalized with dynamic contact information to deliver registration info, order details, and password resets. That’s why speed, deliverability, and security are top priorities when choosing an email service provider.
Let’s look at the SendGrid offering and how SendGrid competitors stack up.
The information in this article was last updated on August 14, 2026.
Table of Contents
Overview of the best SendGrid alternatives
| SendGrid/Alternative | Free | Plans start at | Transactional sending options | Email marketing campaigns | Log retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SendGrid | Up to 100 emails/ day for 60 days | $19.95/ 50,000 emails/ mo | API / SMTP | Separate pricing | 30 days (add-on) |
| Brevo | 9,000 emails/month forever | $9 / 5,000 emails/ mo | API/SMTP/webhooks Plugins/marketing automation | Marketing + transactional emails for $9/mo | Unlimited |
| Mailtrap | 4,000 emails/month forever | From $15/10,000 emails/mo | API / SMTP | Separate pricing | Up to 30 days |
| Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) | 500 emails one time | $20 / 25,000 emails/ mo | API / SMTP | Add-on plan on Mailchimp | Up to 30 days |
| Mailgun | 100 emails/day forever | $15 / 10,000 emails/ mo | API / SMTP | Separate plan on Mailjet | Up to 30 days |
| Postmark | Up to 100 emails/month forever | $15 / 10,000 emails/ mo | API / SMTP | With limitations | Custom retention available as add-on |
| Amazon SES | 3,000 emails/month for 12 months | $0.10 / 1,000 emails pay-as-you-go | API / SMTP | No | Custom via CloudWatch (up to 10 yrs) |
Our methodology at Brevo: How we tested
This article covers the best SendGrid alternatives including our own platform, Brevo. Our suggestions are based on our own research and testing. We don't earn commissions from any links on this page. To learn exactly how we evaluate tools, check out our dedicated methodology article.
Please note that the features listed here are just a selection of what each SendGrid alternative offers. For exact pricing and a full, up-to-date feature list, check the providers' websites.
What SendGrid offers
SendGrid — a subsidiary of Tilio — is a large-scale email solution, providing email automation, signup forms, and list management. However, it’s best known as a leading transactional email platform offering email Rest API and SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol).
SendGrid is developer-oriented and usually integrated into stand-alone applications, rather than used as a SaaS.
Pros
- Email templates with conditional formatting available
- Advanced testing options (inbox look, links, spam filter risk)
- Email validation API available to check email addresses before emails are sent and bounce.
- Good email delivery rates
- Monitoring and tools for sender reputation management
- Paying customers get chat, ticket, or phone (on higher plans) support
- Scalable for large-volume operations
Cons
- They sign you up for ISP feedback so you can remove contacts who complain about your emails from your list. Other solutions save time by automatically removing them for you.
- 30-day email activity history is a paid add-on.
- You need other Twilio add-ons for chat, SMS, and push notifications.
- You need a separate email marketing plan to be able to send other kinds of emails apart from transactional ones. Charges are based on contact list size as well as email volume.
- You also need the email marketing plan to use a drag-and-drop email editor if you don’t want to code your emails.
- SendGrid is not a customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
SendGrid pricing
There’s a 60-day free trial enabling 100 emails a day. Paid plans start at $19.95/month. Dedicated IPs are available on Pro plan or higher, starting at $89.95/month. Marketing Campaigns plans also offer a free trial (100 contacts, 100 emails/day) and start at $15/month.
Related: The best transactional email services compared. For a broader look at affordable email marketing platforms beyond transactional tools, see our guide to cheap email marketing platforms.
The best SendGrid alternatives compared
Here’s an overview of the prices and main features SendGrid competitors offer as transactional email solutions.
1. Brevo - The best SendGrid alternative
Brevo vs. SendGrid
Brevo is a cost-effective SendGrid alternative built for teams who want transactional email and marketing in one place. The free plan allows up to 300 emails/day, making it one of the most generous free SendGrid alternatives too.
Now let’s dive into what Brevo offers.
API, SMTP, and webhooks
As a SendGrid competitor, Brevo offers transactional emails via email marketing API and SMTP relay. You can also connect it to all major ecommerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop) via plugins. Set up automations to trigger transactional emails when certain events occur. Brevo's free SMTP server lets you easily set up webhooks and track events.
We understand performance is essential for this type of communication. That’s why Brevo offers detailed email analytics on all key metrics. Plus, it offers the advantage over other email delivery services of keeping unlimited logs (i.e. the history of individual emails sent to each recipient).
Premium deliverability
With over 10 years as a transactional email provider, Brevo maintains 99% email deliverability.
We have a dedicated team of email deliverability experts who monitor sender reputations on our shared IPs to make sure your emails reach the inbox. We also have a strict vetting process to keep spammers out and protect your sending and open rates.
All-in-one marketing platform
Brevo's more than a SendGrid alternative for transactional emails. It offers a full range of email marketing services and sales tools on one platform. Multichannel marketing (SMS, WhatsApp, push, live chat, chatbot, popups, business phone, meetings), sales management, loyalty tools, and automation are all available within Brevo. You can upgrade for advanced tools at any time, allowing you to only pay for the features you need, when you need them.
Grow your list first with signup forms and start sending a newsletter. Then, run a promotional campaign. Confirm each individual order that comes in. After that, automate engagement with tailored offers based on the products purchased. And maybe send a mass email to announce a new product range. Send all your transactional, marketing, and automated emails from one place.
And there's more:
- Unlimited send log retention — most competitors cap this at 30-45 days
- Full GDPR compliance built in: consent-based signup forms, automatic unsubscribe handling, and more
- No-code email builder with drag-and-drop design and dynamic personalization — no developer required, though full API docs are available for teams that want them
- Multilingual support: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese
Brevo pricing
You can activate API or SMTP service even on Brevo’s free account (300 free emails/day).
For transactional and marketing emails, the starting paid plan is $9/month with automation, AI Assistant for content generation, signup forms, email templates, SMS, and no daily sending limit. Note: the email sending credits can also be used to send transactional emails, giving users ultimate flexibility.
Overall, Brevo is a good SendGrid alternative for small businesses that prefer an intuitive way to send transactional emails and want to send all communications from one platform.
Excellent first experience with their support — Free account review
I've been using Brevo since its Sendinblue days, mainly for email marketing and SMTP relay with our office printer [...] The transition to Brevo brought noticeable improvements. What stands out is their customer support - even as a free account user, I received personalized, non-canned responses to my queries. This prompt and considerate support, especially for minor issues like the SMTP key length for our printer, is commendable.
Pat B.,
Sales and Marketing Director
SMTP & Transactional email provider
We've been using Brevo (Sendinblue) as an SMTP for our transactional Woo emails since 2021 and intend to continue even longer. And here's why. Recently, our account was postponed and all our transactional emails stopped being sent. We couldn't understand the reason behind it and appealed for support. Hats off to the Brevo team, we've received it quickly. The support team found a spam bot activity and helped us resolve this issue by advising us on our steps. Again, we never experienced any issues with the service itself. But it's great to know that Brevo's quick assistance is there if something goes wrong.
Tatiana Lebedeva,
Brevo user
Several sales and marketing tools in one system
We stumbled upon Brevo by accident as we were using a system just for sending marketing emails. We discovered quickly that Brevo offered multiple different digital sales and marketing tools to enhance both our manual branded client engagement tasks, but also offered automation tools to aid our day to day sales efforts. Brevo has allowed us to move away from three other, separate systems and we now use Brevo for all our outbound sales and marketing endeavours. This has saved us a lot of time and money and has increased our output. The system is easy to use and the support is excellent and prompt.
Stephen Day,
Brevo user
2. Mailtrap
Mailtrap is an email delivery platform for product companies with high sending volumes. It offers three separate products — Email API/SMTP, Email Sandbox, and Email Marketing — each sold on its own plan, with its own free tier and paid options. This makes Mailtrap flexible for both developers (API/SMTP, Sandbox) and marketers (Email Marketing), but it isn't a single unified plan — you'll need to subscribe to more than one product if you want both transactional sending and marketing campaigns.
The platform has high inboxing rates by design, meaning your emails will land in inboxes regardless of the pricing plan you choose.
Mailtrap pricing
Email API/SMTP plans start at $15 for 10,000 emails per month. There are 4 different tiers for different business scenarios and use cases. Email Marketing plans start at $15 for 10,000 contacts and 30,000 emails per month.
The free plan includes up to 4,000 emails per month (Email API/SMTP plan). All paid plans offer higher sending volumes with additional features, like dedicated IP, auto warm-up, and SaaS safeguard. One downside is that even the highest plan offers only 30 days of log retention.
Related: The best free smtp servers and the best email API services compared.
3. Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill)
Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is another SendGrid alternative for transactional email. It offers a full range of features: dynamic content (merge tags), conditional rules and webhooks to react to specific behaviors, click tracking, and A/B testing.
However, transactional email is only available as an add-on to Mailchimp's Standard, Premium and the legacy Monthly plans.
Mailchimp pricing
Sign up for the Mailchimp Transactional Email Demo to get 500 emails to test for free. After that, you need a Mailchimp Standard or Premium plan (from $20 for 500 contacts) and add blocks of 25,000 emails starting at $20/month. Price per block goes down as volume goes up but unused email quota doesn’t roll over to the next month. Dedicated IP add-on is $29.95/month.
Discover the best Mailchimp alternatives as well as the best Mandrill alternatives.
4. Mailgun
Mailgun is a close SendGrid competitor. It’s an API-first solution for developers or B2B and is often white labeled by other applications. It offers additional email deliverability services, inbox placement, email verification, and transactional SMS as well.
If you’re a marketer, though, Mailgun can be intimidating.
You’ll probably need developer’s help for sending any email because it’s not done directly from the platform as with email marketing software. At least you have an alternative to creating the emails in HTML. Mailgun acquired Mailjet for email marketing (promotional emails, newsletters, drip campaigns). Now, you can use Mailjet’s drag and drop email builder to create transactional emails as well.
Email log retention is capped at 1 day on the Free and Basic plan, 5 days on the Foundation plan, and 30 days on the Scale plan.
Mailgun pricing
Mailgun offers a free plan with an email sending limit of 100 emails/day. Then, the Basic plan starts at $15/month, which includes 10,000 emails.
Dedicated IPs are available on Mailgun's Scale plan (from $90/month), or on Foundation once you scale up email volume. Additional IPs can be added for $59/IP/month.
Discover the best Mailgun alternatives.
5. Postmark
Postmark is another SendGrid competitor on the transactional side. It’s built as a transactional email service provider for applications so it’s perfect for SaaS, apps, etc. It’s a robust solution for the tech savvy with detailed reporting and 45 days log retention, boasting superior customer support.
But it lacks campaign building capabilities such as list management, contact segmentation, or a user-friendly design tool needed for ecommerce marketing, for example. Only pre-built transactional email templates are available or alternatively you can use their open-source toolset MailMason with CSS.
It's good to know too that Postmark was acquired by ActiveCampaign in 2022.
Postmark pricing
Postmark’s pricing starts at $15 per 10,000 emails a month, and you can top up with additional blocks of 1,000 ($1.80 each on the Basic plan, $1.30 on the Pro plan, and $1.20 on the Platform plan).
Dedicated IP addresses are available on Pro and higher, starting at $50/month per IP plus the price of your email plan. Note that in order to use the add-on, you need to send 300,000+ emails/month.
Custom log retention can be added to Pro plans and higher to create log periods that are not 45 days. The pricing depends on the monthly email plan you are using.
Read more: The best Postmark alternatives compared.
6. Amazon SES
Amazon SES can be counted as a SendGrid alternative as it’s the most basic solution for service emails. The name literally stands for Simple Email Service. It offers APIs and SMTP, core metrics, and a focus on the tech side as it’s a part of the AWS suite for enterprise. Prominent users are Reddit, Netflix, and Duolingo.
It’s a developer tool, usually integrated into stand-alone applications. And so you can’t log in and simply send your emails from its platform. It doesn’t offer a user-friendly interface or email marketing functionality as it is code-only. It works best if you’re hosted on Amazon too.
Amazon SES pricing
Amazon SES is often cited as the cheapest SendGrid alternative. This can be true, but keep in mind that price depends on your location, your setup, and hosting. New accounts default to the Essentials plan at $0.16 per 1,000 emails; a cheaper à la carte option at $0.10 per 1,000 is available but must be selected manually. Dedicated IPs are $24.95/ month.
Related: The best Amazon SES alternatives compared.
In sum: choosing a SendGrid alternative
All of the listed SendGrid competitors offer the basic functionality for sending transactional emails. From there, your decision depends on what additional features you need in one email service provider. It’s a good idea for small businesses to try a few SendGrid alternatives for free and see which one’s easiest to use.
Here are a few options to consider:
- Brevo for all-round and user-friendly email sending
- Mailtrap for high deliverability and analytics at scale
- Mailchimp Transactional as an add-on for Mailchimp users
- Postmark for high deliverability rates and speed
- Mailgun for the most powerful API features
- Amazon SES for a robust infrastructure
