7 Twilio SendGrid Alternatives for Transactional Emails [2025]

If you are interested in sending transactional emails, odds are you’ve heard about Twilio SendGrid. While the platform offers a wide range of features designed to assist in delivering your business messages to customers, there are other solutions that have speed, deliverability, and security as top priorities. In this post, we’ll explore the best alternatives to Twilio SendGrid in terms of their features, limitations, and cost so that you can identify the best option for you.

Twilio SendGrid features

Before exploring Twilio SendGrid alternatives, let’s take a quick look at what the platform offers.

Twilio SendGrid (formerly SendGrid) is a cloud-based email delivery and marketing platform designed to help businesses send, manage, and track their messages effectively. It provides tools for email delivery, campaign management, testing, reporting, and analytics. The platform supports two email delivery methods — REST API and SMTP relay — giving users flexibility in how they send messages.

Here are some of Twilio SendGrid’s key features and advantages:

• Email templates and custom HTML. You can create emails using built-in templates, custom HTML, or a combination of both to speed up your design process.
• Email automation. The platform enables you to set up automated email flows triggered by user actions and manage your message series from a single dashboard.
• High deliverability. Twilio SendGrid reports an average inbox placement rate of 96%. You can also manage your sender reputation and deliverability with dedicated IP addresses and customized domains.
• APIs and SDKs. The platform supports multiple programming languages, making it developer-friendly and adaptable to different tech stacks.
• Scalability. Twilio SendGrid can handle more than five million emails per month for enterprise-level users.

Speaking of Twilio SendGrid’s cost, it offers a 60-day free trial with a daily limit of 100 emails. Paid plans start from $19.95 per month for up to 50,000 emails.

Reasons to look for a Twilio SendGrid alternative

While Twilio SendGrid offers powerful tools for transactional and marketing emails, it’s not without drawbacks. Before committing, it’s worth weighing the downsides to see if it truly fits your business needs.

Here are some common reasons businesses look for Twilio SendGrid alternatives:

• High overall cost. Twilio SendGrid separates its transactional and marketing email plans. Transactional email plans start from around $20/month, while marketing automation plans begin at $60/month. Combined, Twilio SendGrid will cost you much more than its all-in-one alternatives. Besides, fundamental features, such as dedicated IP addresses and email validation, are only available with higher-tier plans.
• Short email log history. The platform stores only three days of email activity by default, which limits you in analyzing your campaign performance. To access a seven-day log, you must upgrade to the Pro plan, starting from almost $90/month.
• Limited marketing channels. Twilio SendGrid focuses primarily on email. If you want to add SMS, chat, or other communication channels, you’ll need to pay for additional Twilio products.
• Restricted team access. The basic plan supports just one teammate per account. To collaborate with multiple users, you must upgrade to the Pro plan, which allows 1,000 teammates.
• Poor customer support. Support options depend on your plan. Free trial users can only submit tickets, while paid users may access live chat. However, many customer reviews report delayed responses and declining service quality, even on higher tiers.

Customer feedback also highlights recurring issues like sudden suspension or blocking accounts for no reason.

Besides, Twilio SendGrid customers report having their dedicated IP addresses blacklisted, which means that the majority of messages end up in recipients’ spam folders.

There are also reviews mentioning failures to register an account in general and deleted data after pricing changes.

Best Twilio SendGrid alternatives to consider

The decision to switch your transactional email provider is not one that should be made lightly. Our overview will help you evaluate features, limitations, and costs of the best Twilio SendGrid alternatives.

SendPulse

G2: 4.6 ⭐ | Capterra: 4.6 ⭐

SendPulse is an all-in-one marketing platform that lets you run email and SMS campaigns, set up chatbots and live chats, and launch pop-ups, websites, and even your own online courses.

It’s a free Twilio SendGrid alternative that supports both SMTP and API integrations, so it’s easy to send automated emails directly from your website, CRM system, or applications built in PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, Node.js, or Obj-C. It also lets you set up a custom tracking domain and access in-depth analytics to monitor campaign performance.

SendPulse’s transactional email service supports webhooks for you to connect different apps and automate updates. The platform also provides a dedicated IP address, SPF/DKIM authentication, and deliverability controls to help you protect your sender reputation and keep your emails away from spam folders.

SendPulse users can build automated flows based on various user actions — a purchase, a password reset, an account signup, etc. — within a visual drag-and-drop editor. You can also send transactional emails to customers via API from your system using a template with dynamic content.

On top of that, you can get customer support 24/7 in five languages, even with the free plan, and find profound feature guides in their help center.

Pricing. SendPulse’s SMTP email service offers a free plan for up to 12,000 monthly emails. The cheapest paid plan starts from $60/month (billed annually) for 100,000 emails, a dedicated IP address, and unlimited sending domains. You can also choose a pay-as-you-go option – for example, 20,000 emails valid for 12 months will cost you $28.

Postmark

G2: 4.6 ⭐ | Capterra: 4.7 ⭐

Postmark is another email delivery service primarily focused on transactional emails through SMTP and API. This Twilio SendGrid competitor includes bulk email sending using the same methods as well.

To prevent any sender reputation issues and guarantee quick and reliable delivery of your messages, Postmark splits email traffic into transactional (reset password emails, receipts and invoices, welcome emails, order tracking updates, etc.) and bulk (promotions, announcements, newsletters, etc.) through Message Streams.

Each Stream’s activity feed provides access to comprehensive insights, including delivery events, bounces, opens, and clicks for a default period of 45 days. You can also use webhooks to get notified when the triggering event occurs without making any calls to the API.

Postmark doesn’t have a visual editor for email templates. When building your email, you have two options: code it yourself from scratch or start with one of the pre-built templates for common types of transactional emails like password resets, comment notifications, trial expirations, invoices, etc.

If you have difficulties navigating the service, you can check the platform’s user-friendly documentation or contact customer support – the reps are available from Monday to Friday.

Pricing. Postmark offers a free plan that includes 100 emails per month. Their pricing model is volume-based, starting at 10,000 emails for $15/month. Each plan also differs in the number of streams, servers, and sending domains. A dedicated IP is available for customers who send at least 300,000 messages per month; it comes as an add-on for $50/month.

Brevo

G2: 4.5 ⭐ | Capterra: 4.6 ⭐

Brevo stands out as another strong alternative to Twilio SendGrid that lets you send transactional emails with dynamic content, contact attributes, and other parameters in several ways.

Firstly, you can use the email API. It’s available for the most commonly used programming languages, including C#, Go, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Typescript-node. It lets you create, schedule, and send transactional emails in large volumes using basic HTML and pre-designed templates.

Another option is Brevo’s SMTP relay, which integrates with all major CMS platforms or apps to trigger messages when users perform specific actions.

You can also use webhooks to interconnect multiple systems and get notifications anytime a tracked event occurs. You can track expanded email activity through webhooks – you’ll see when your message is sent, delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, deferred, caused a complaint, been blocked, or resulted in an error.

Besides, this Twilio SendGrid alternative stores all transactional logs and email previews without time limits – you can specify this period yourself. You’ll also get assistance via email regardless of your pricing plan. Phone support option is available for higher-tier plan users.

Pricing. Brevo’s free plan includes SMTP and API, but it is limited to 300 emails a day. The cheapest paid plan with no sending limits will cost you $8.08/month (billed annually) for 5,000 emails. However, a dedicated IP is available as an add-on to higher-tier plans and costs $251 per year.

MailTrap

G2: 4.8 ⭐ | Capterra: 4.8 ⭐

Next on our list of Twilio SendGrid alternatives, we have MailTrap, a scalable API and SMTP service for reliable email sending. Thanks to its email sandbox, you can run safe tests and debug your emails in staging, development, and QA environments.

To help you ace your email deliverability and signal to providers that you are a trusted sender, the platform offers a dedicated IP, which goes through a mandatory three-week-long warm-up process, sending domain verification, and suppression list management. This alternative to Twilio SendGrid supports webhooks – you can group up to 500 events and send them as a batch.

MailTrap enables you to access an extended email history log for up to 30 days on paid plans, allowing you to check the status of each message, its preview, event history, and HTML source. You’ll also get extensive analytics, including critical deliverability alerts and all key metrics like opens, bounce rates, unsubscribes, etc. Besides, this Twilio SendGrid alternative allows you to group your transactional emails into various categories like password changes, invoices, and confirmations. For each category, you’ll be able to view the corresponding metrics.

The platform provides customer support via email and live chat for 20 hours in total on weekdays and 24/7 on premium plans. You can also browse a profound knowledge base.

Pricing. MailTrap offers a free plan that supports up to 3,500 monthly emails and 3 days of email logs. For a dedicated IP, more emails, and extended logs, you’ll have to pay at least $85/month.

SendLayer

Trustpilot: 3.6 ⭐

SendLayer is a reliable transactional email delivery platform built for developers. It offers you a clean, JSON-based API and an optimized SMTP relay to send user account emails, eCommerce notifications, or system alerts.

SendLayer’s SMTP connects seamlessly with your website on WordPress, WooCommerce, or Joomla, and its email API lets you build with PHP, Python, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and other programming languages or frameworks.

This Twilio SendGrid alternative also authenticates your domain as an email sender via DNS records. Besides, it lets you create and manage a suppression list to prevent sending messages to email addresses that could hurt your domain’s sending reputation. The platform automatically adds hard-bounced email addresses to this list and those that unsubscribed or submitted a spam complaint.

Thanks to detailed logs for every message you send, you can track email activity, delivery information, server responses, and more. In your SendLayer dashboard, you can check the performance of individual emails and filter them by delivery status or recipient for a more granular view.

Just like Twilio SendGrid, this alternative offers customer support through a ticketing system.

Pricing. The platform doesn’t offer a free plan, but all the paid options come with a 14-day money-back guarantee. The cheapest paid plan costs $5/month (billed annually) for 1,000 monthly emails, 1 sender domain, and 3-day log history. Plans with higher limits cost from $15 to $25 per month (billed annually).

Mailjet

G2: 4.0 ⭐ | Capterra: 4.2 ⭐

Mailjet is a cloud-based email marketing platform that provides tools for creating, sending, and tracking transactional emails via SMTP server or RESTful API. Its SMTP server integrates easily with popular eCommerce solutions, developer tools, automation platforms, etc. You can also use ready-to-go libraries in PHP, Ruby, Python, C#, Java, Node.js, and other programming languages.

To optimize your deliverability, this alternative to Twilio SendGrid lets you set up a dedicated IP address and authenticate your domain via SPF, DMARC, and DKIM records. The platform also allows you to categorize your messages in four categories to define their sending priority, with the transactional emails belonging to a high-priority queue.

Mailjet offers a drag-and-drop email editor where you can design your transactional emails – just pick a base template you’ll build upon and customize it. Using variables passed to the Send API, you can create conditional sections to trigger unique content for each recipient. You can also access sample code for testing and collaborate on your templates with team members in real time.

You can access opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, and more, and receive each event notification in real time thanks to webhooks.

Customer support is available 24/7 in English, French, Spanish, and German for paid plan users. There is also a help center and API documentation you can check.

Pricing. With Mailjet’s free plan, you can send up to 6,000 emails/month, with a daily limit of 200 emails. For $24.3/month (billed annually), you can send up to 15,000 emails and access advanced statistics. A dedicated IP and priority support via chat and phone are included in paid plans with at least 100,000 emails for $94.5/month (billed annually).

Netcore

G2: 4.4 ⭐ | Capterra: 4.3 ⭐

Netcore is a transactional email API provider and a solid alternative to SendGrid that lets you connect your systems using either SMTP or RESTful API. It also comes with additional communication channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications.

Its dashboard offers detailed email performance analytics, including delivery rates, bounce data, and engagement metrics, along with AI-powered features to improve your delivery speed and inbox placement. Its standout feature is “Send Time Optimization,” which delivers your emails when your recipients are most engaged based on behavioral data for the last three months.

What’s more, Netcore’s API provides enterprise-grade security and full compliance with GDPR and CCPA regulations. To get help with the platform, you can raise a ticket or browse their knowledge base. You can also contact customer support via chat.

Pricing. Netcore doesn’t list prices publicly, but you can request a demo and custom quote based on your email volume and needs.

Best alternatives to Twilio SendGrid in a nutshell

To recap the top Twilio SendGrid alternatives we reviewed in this post, here’s a comparison table with their features, limits, and pricing.

When you compare Twilio SendGrid alternatives, take the time to evaluate each platform carefully. Explore their free plans or trials to understand how they perform in real scenarios, and check user reviews on trusted platforms to paint a clearer picture.

Conclusion

While each Twilio SendGrid alternative has its strengths and preferred use cases, SendPulse stands out as a powerful all-in-one marketing solution with an omnichannel approach, an intuitive interface, and responsive customer support.

Getting started is simple — sign up for a free account and set up your transactional emails in a few easy steps.