When it comes to choosing an email marketing and website builder platform, SendGrid and HubSpot are two of the top options business owners turn to. With powerful features for email, landing pages, e-commerce, and more, these platforms aim to be all-in-one solutions for small businesses.
However, choosing the right software for your needs is crucial – the wrong platform can end up costing you time and money.
In this comprehensive comparison of SendGrid vs HubSpot, we evaluate the two platforms across several key criteria: market position and popularity, ease of use, design customization, features and functionality like blogging, SEO, integrations, and analytics
Our goal is to help business owners understand the strengths and weaknesses of both SendGrid and HubSpot to determine which email marketing solution best fits their company’s needs.
1. Understanding the Basics
SendGrid was founded in 2009 by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins. The company has become one of the largest email service providers, delivering over 60 billion emails per month. SendGrid went public in 2017 and was acquired by Twilio in 2018 for $2 billion.
HubSpot was founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. The inbound marketing and sales platform now has over 135,000 customers in over 120 countries. HubSpot pioneered the concept of inbound marketing and is a leader in the industry.
Both SendGrid and HubSpot have strong market positions and popularity. SendGrid powers email delivery for leading companies like Lyft, Airbnb, and Uber. HubSpot has an entire ecosystem built around its software to help educate customers.
Popularity/Community
SendGrid doesn’t have an official Facebook community but the SendGrid Facebook page has over 15K engaged followers. HubSpot’s Inbound Community for marketers and sales professionals has over 150,000 members globally. This group allows HubSpot users to connect, ask questions, and share advice.
2. Features and Functionality
Marketing Automation
SendGrid
SendGrid offers automation workflows that allow you to trigger emails based on user actions and subscriber data. You can create sign-up flows, welcome series, cart abandonment flows, and more.
With the Workflow editor, you can visually map out multi-step workflows with conditional logic and apply filters to target specific segments. Workflows support wait steps, multiple email sends, custom fields, and RSS feeds.
For more advanced needs, SendGrid offers coding workflows with Workflow Webhooks and the Event Webhook API. You can build custom workflows and integrate data from other apps.
Overall, SendGrid provides a decent automation solution for email marketing campaigns. However, it lacks some of the robust functionality offered in dedicated ESPs.
HubSpot
HubSpot includes an integrated workflow automation tool to personalize engagement across multiple channels like email, social media marketing, ads, and your website.
Workflows are highly visual for easy drag-and-drop creation. You can trigger automated campaigns based on criteria like form submissions, site actions, ticket updates, and more. Real-time notifications keep you updated on how contacts are moving through your workflows.
With customizable workflow templates, you can set up common flows like welcome campaigns, lead nurturing, and customer re-engagement out of the box. Workflows integrate directly with your CRM data for dynamic personalization.
Advanced options include A/B testing workflows, calling custom APIs, updating CRM properties, adding wait timers, and more complex logic with nested conditions and multiple actions per step.
Overall, HubSpot provides more advanced workflow functionality compared to SendGrid for automating multi-channel campaigns.
Winner: HubSpot
With its robust workflow automation features integrated across email, ads, websites, social media, and more, HubSpot Marketing Hub is among the best email marketing tools when it comes to campaign automation. The visual editor makes it easy to set up even complex, personalized multi-channel workflows.
Email Templates
SendGrid
SendGrid provides hundreds of professionally designed, mobile-responsive email templates optimized for all major email clients. Categories include Marketing, Notifications, Newsletters, and Promotions.
The template editor allows easy customization of colors, images, and text through a visual interface. You can also directly edit the HTML source code.
However, compared to competitors, SendGrid offers fewer options for creating new templates from scratch or for personalized branded templates. But it reasonably covers basic template needs.
HubSpot
HubSpot provides over 100 free templates for your sales and marketing efforts, including welcome emails, announcements, invites, and newsletters. Dynamic content blocks enable personalization.
The drag-and-drop builder is easy to use for customizing any template without coding skills – change colors, images, layouts, and content blocks visually.
While HubSpot’s template library is smaller than some competitors, you can easily create new templates and upload externally purchased HTML templates if needed.
Overall, the email marketing tool enables robust branded template creation through its flexible editor.
Winner: HubSpot
With its powerful drag-and-drop editor for visually customizing templates and flexibility to make new templates, HubSpot narrowly wins for best email templates. But SendGrid does provide a decent template marketplace to choose from.
Segmentation
SendGrid
SendGrid enables the creation of contact segments based on email engagement metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. You can also segment by profile attributes such as location, gender, and purchase history.
The user-friendly segment builder allows combining multiple filters using AND, and OR operators to target specific groups. Contextual segments will automatically update based on the latest subscriber behaviors.
However, segmentation is primarily limited to email targeting. There are no native options to leverage contact segments for personalization across other marketing channels.
Overall, the email marketing software provides decent email-focused segmentation but lacks robust functionality compared to more advanced platforms.
HubSpot
HubSpot offers powerful behavioral and demographic segmentation thanks to its integrated marketing, sales, and CRM capabilities.
You can build segments across multiple engagement events – form submissions, site page visits, content downloads, email clicks, etc. Complex nested segment logic is supported through an easy drag-and-drop UI.
Saved segments automatically synchronize in real-time across email, website, ads, and other channels tied to HubSpot’s CRM. This enables personalized messaging tailored to customer interests.
With its unified customer data and flexible segment builder, HubSpot stands apart in allowing segment-based personalization beyond just email.
Winner: HubSpot
The SendGrid HubSpot Marketing Hub comparison shows that HubSpot is the clear winner thanks to its robust, CRM-powered segmentation synchronizing real-time user data across marketing channels. SendGrid segmentation works for basic email targeting, but the email marketing platform is lacking with regard to advanced features.
Analytics
SendGrid
SendGrid provides email activity analytics like open rates, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, spam reports, delivery statistics, and more for individual campaigns or aggregate-level data.
The Email Activity feed enables drilling down into metrics like open and click rates. Event webhooks allow streaming SendGrid data to external analytics platforms.
Insights feature top engagement links, highest performing sender IPs, and most engaged contacts across email programs. A/B testing options help optimize campaigns.
However, analytics are limited to email stats. No website, conversion, cross-channel, or business insights are available.
HubSpot
HubSpot delivers an integrated analytics suite across marketing, sales, and revenue metrics thanks to its CRM foundation.
Visual campaign reports display engagement rates, list growth, and unsubscribe impact over time. Conversions by channel, visitor counts, and high-traffic sources provide website analytics.
With unified customer data, you can directly tie multi-channel analytics to closed deals, monitor sales cycle stages, and calculate ROI across email, web, ads, and more.
HubSpot provides significantly more powerful analytics for optimizing performance holistically.
Winner: HubSpot
HubSpot easily wins given its robust, CRM-integrated analytics that unify cross-channel data to provide true visibility into marketing and revenue effectiveness beyond just email stats offered by SendGrid.
Unique Features
SendGrid
SendGrid offers unique email delivery, security, and infrastructure capabilities given its focused specialization.
The SendGrid Delivery War Room utilizes proprietary technology to monitor email deliverability in real-time across hundreds of providers. This helps maximize inbox placement and avoid issues like blacklisting, blocking, or landing in spam folders.
Another differentiator is SendGrid’s SMTP Relay feature. This leverages SendGrid’s dedicated IP reputation for improved delivery rates while protecting your domain IP if problems occur. Easy API integration makes setup seamless.
SendGrid also provides cloud-based dedicated IPs with included reputation monitoring. This helps prevent pricing tiers from being blocked by major ISPs.
HubSpot
HubSpot delivers innovative features that enhance collaborations, personalization, and consumer experience.
The integrated website chatbot builder makes communicating with visitors easy. Chatbot conversations can be analyzed for insights.
HubSpot also offers an all-in-one Meetings tool with video conferencing and screen sharing directly built into CRM deal and contact pages.
Additionally, HubSpot identifies and tracks website visitors across devices, tying activity to one unified timeline and profile within the CRM. This provides complete visibility into every contact.
Winner: Tie
Both platforms offer unique innovations aligned to their specialized strengths – SendGrid in email infrastructure and HubSpot in integrated marketing. For uniqueness, this remains a tie.
3. Ease of Use
SendGrid
SendGrid provides an intuitive user interface with a left sidebar for navigation between settings and tools like Contacts, Email Activity, Statistics, and Reports modules.
The dashboard displays a graphical summary of account usage, emails sent, complaints monitoring, top links, and bounces. Customization options are limited but they provide adequate data.
The UI visual editor enables easy creation of sign-up forms, templates, and campaigns through drag and drop. Backgrounds, layouts, and blocks simplify building.
As an exclusively email-focused platform, SendGrid offers simplicity. However, those with advanced workflow needs may desire more customization and complexity in the product experience.
HubSpot
HubSpot provides a clean, modern interface across its marketing, sales, and service tools accessible through an intelligent CRM-powered dashboard.
The home screen displays key metrics and shortcuts to commonly used features to minimize clicks. Drag-and-drop page builder, email designer, workflow creator, and other tools provide visual ease of use with back-end complexity.
While the breadth of options creates a steeper learning curve, HubSpot Academy training resources help customers skill up. The organized layouts cater equally well to new users and experts.
Overall, HubSpot prioritizes usability while providing depth for growth over time as customers evolve in expertise. The UI strikes a solid balance.
Winner: HubSpot
With its clean and intelligent interface that visually guides users through the creation of complex, multi-channel campaigns, HubSpot wins for overall ease of use and learning curve.
4. Email Deliverability
SendGrid
SendGrid specializes in email deliverability with advanced tools to maximize inbox placement. Proprietary SendGrid Delivery War Room technology provides real-time monitoring across major ISPs.
Features like dedicated IP reputation monitoring, cloud-based dedicated IPs, and SMTP relays improve delivery rates. Granular email activity analytics provide visibility into deferrals, bounces, and spam complaints.
Robust email infrastructure and anti-spam tools including sender authentication like SPF, and DKIM help avoid spam folders and blacklists. Overall, industry-leading deliverability rates.
For an email-focused platform, SendGrid hits the mark with strong email deliverability capabilities.
HubSpot
HubSpot emails leverage a third-party sending infrastructure instead of owning their email servers. Deliverability rates are decent but have less customizable control compared to specialized ESPs.
To help with inbox placement, HubSpot emails authenticate sender identity through methods like SPF, DKIM, etc. Unsubscribe links in emails aim to minimize spam complaints.
Granular analytics provide visibility into email engagement, blocks, bounces, etc. Automatic list cleaning and list segmentation by engagement help maximize future deliveries.
But for those focused exclusively on maximizing email deliverability, HubSpot lacks some advanced infrastructure options compared to SendGrid.
Winner: SendGrid
With its industry-leading customized tools explicitly designed to maximize email deliverability, specialist SendGrid is the clear winner over the more generalized marketing platform HubSpot when it comes to specialized email deliverability.
5. Customer Support and Community
SendGrid
SendGrid provides 24/7 customer support via email, chat, and phone. All customers get ticketed email assistance with decent response times within 12-24 hours on weekdays.
Higher-tier “Pro” plans add the ability to call or chat support directly for quicker real-time help. For self-service, SendGrid provides written documentation, searchable guides, webinars, and how-to resources.
However, there is no official online SendGrid user community group. Customers can follow the company’s Facebook page for updates. So community resources need to be improved though direct assistance is reasonably good.
HubSpot
HubSpot delivers 24/7 email and live chat included for all plans. Higher-tier pricing unlocks phone support. But average response times tend to be slightly slower at 24-48 hours via tickets.
Extensive self-help resources are offered including the HubSpot Academy platform with on-demand webinars, documentation, and discussion forums covering strategy, product help, and troubleshooting.
The active 150,000+ member HubSpot User Groups Facebook community allows crowdsourcing answers from peer experts. So HubSpot edges out with more community help.
Winner: Tie
With HubSpot providing better-crowdsourced community resources and SendGrid offering more responsive direct email support, customer service ends in a tie – both platforms serve core assistance needs reasonably well through differing channel strengths.
6. Integrations
SendGrid
SendGrid integrates with popular CRMs, marketing, and sales automation platforms via APIs.
Native integrations are offered for over 50 partners including Salesforce, Shopify, Magento, and WordPress to streamline syncing contacts and power transactional emails.
Zapier, Workato, and Integromat expand automation connections further to more niche business apps. For analytics, SendGrid enables sending email interaction data to top platforms like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Mixpanel, and more through webhooks.
However, SendGrid lacks breadth and depth of integrations beyond core platforms for syncing contacts and analytics purposes. Custom development helps, but out-of-the-box options remain relatively limited.
HubSpot
HubSpot provides one of the largest integration ecosystems with hundreds of apps available via its Marketplace. Partners span diverse categories like CRM, CMS systems, marketing, payments, analytics/business intelligence, and more.
For example, popular connected apps include Salesforce, Slack, MailChimp, WordPress, Shopify, and Marketo showing depth across communication, website, and marketing needs. Analytics platforms like Tableau and database tools integrate as well.
Robust developer options also allow building custom integrations using flexible APIs and webhooks. So HubSpot outpaces SendGrid when it comes to pre-built integration numbers and variety.
Winner: HubSpot
With breadth and depth across hundreds of ecosystem integrations spanning communication, website, payments, analytics, and more, HubSpot easily wins over SendGrid’s relatively narrow out-of-the-box connectivity centering primarily around syncing contacts and basic analytics.
7. Pricing
SendGrid
SendGrid offers a free plan for up to 100 emails/day and 2k contacts. Paid plans start at $15/month billed annually for 40k emails/month and 5k contacts.
Higher volume tiers include the Advanced plan at $60/month with 50k emails and unlimited contacts. The plan offers flexible customization and add-ons are available for dedicated IP, and spam testing tools.
Discounts of up to 30% apply for annual vs monthly billing. Overall, SendGrid provides flexible and scalable pricing for small to large-volume email needs. However, those needing multi-channel marketing tools would require additional systems.
HubSpot
HubSpot offers a free CRM and some basic marketing features. Paid plans start at a steep $20/month for 1 million emails annually including email and landing page builders, and basic reporting.
Higher tiers add features like chatbots, workflows, and analytics at the Professional $800/month (1.2 million emails) and Enterprise $3,600+/month tiers targeted at growing agencies and enterprises. Given the breadth beyond just email, costs add up for sophisticated needs compared to SendGrid.
Winner: SendGrid
For strictly managing high email volume needs, SendGrid provides more affordable and scalable pricing tiers compared to HubSpot’s steep costs for broader functionality including marketing tools – making SendGrid the winner if email is your primary requirement.
8. Reviews and Reputation
SendGrid
SendGrid earns positive reviews for its email deliverability and reliability as a specialized ESP. Users praise the flexible API and integration options making it easy to leverage SendGrid for sending transactional and marketing emails.
The intuitive UI dashboard, real-time email tracking, and technical support also receive kudos. Constructive feedback notes occasional deliverability hiccups to Gmail and, a lack of advanced automation features compared to dedicated marketing platforms.
Ultimately SendGrid wins recommendations as an affordable, dependable email delivery infrastructure suitable for developers and marketers alike.
HubSpot
HubSpot garners praise for the breadth of its integrated marketing and sales platform spanning email to CRM, analytics, chatbots, meetings, and more. The robust features cater well to growing inbound marketing teams.
The ease of getting started combined with powerful campaign creation capabilities makes HubSpot a versatile hub. Some downsides mentioned include the steep learning curve, high costs for enterprise needs, and occasional software bugs.
Reviews applaud HubSpot for enabling sophisticated marketing that drives real business growth. The tool earns its leading industry position as an analytics-driven inbound marketing platform.
Winner: Tie
Both SendGrid and HubSpot earn strong reputations in reviews – the former as a top email delivery service and the latter as a leader in integrated marketing. Each wins in their niche so this category is a tie.
9. FAQ’s
SendGrid
- What types of email does SendGrid offer?
SendGrid powers transactional email sending through its secure and reliable delivery infrastructure. It also enables sending marketing emails like newsletters and promotions. - Does SendGrid offer free plans?
Yes, SendGrid offers a free plan for up to 100 emails/day and 2,000 contacts. Paid plans start at $15/month billed annually. - What integrations and APIs does SendGrid have?
SendGrid integrates with over 50 platforms including Salesforce, Shopify, Magento, and WordPress. It also provides developer APIs and webhooks for custom systems. - How can I get started with SendGrid?
Getting started is easy – simply sign up for a free SendGrid account, integrate using their plugins or APIs, upload contacts, create templates, and send your first campaign.
HubSpot
- What does HubSpot offer?
HubSpot offers an all-in-one inbound marketing, sales, and service software platform with integrated tools for email, websites, CRM, analytics, and automation. - What kind of support does HubSpot provide?
HubSpot offers 24/7 email and live chat support on all plans. Phone support and additional training resources are provided for enterprise-tier subscriptions. - Does HubSpot offer integrations?
Yes, HubSpot provides over 300+ integrations with apps like Salesforce, Slack, MailChimp, and payments systems available via its marketplace and APIs. - Can I get started for free on HubSpot?
Yes, HubSpot offers a free CRM plan and some free marketing tools. Paid plans with more features start at $20/month. Sign up for a HubSpot demo account to tour the platform.
Final Thoughts
Choose SendGrid If…
SendGrid is a great choice if you primarily need to manage high volumes of email and maximize deliverability into the inbox.
With its proprietary email infrastructure technology, dedicated IP reputation monitoring, and tools to reduce blacklisting, SendGrid excels in deliverability. The platform scales easily for sending millions of emails.
The intuitive UI and integrations make SendGrid easy to leverage for developers and marketers alike focused exclusively on email campaigns and transactional email use cases.
Choose HubSpot If…
HubSpot is ideal for small businesses that desire an all-in-one inbound marketing, sales, and service platform.
The wide array of capabilities spanning email, landing pages, websites, CRM, analytics, and workflows provides robust functionality for full-funnel marketing. Powerful campaign creation tools and templates accelerate execution.
While more costly at scale, the integrated end-to-end platform helps drive real ROI across pipelines using analytics for complete optimization.
Ultimately the right platform depends on your specific needs. For focused email delivery at scale, SendGrid is a leading choice while HubSpot wins for those seeking an integrated hub to manage complex multi-channel marketing across the customer journey.
We urge you to thoroughly evaluate both these platforms to determine what best allows you to achieve your business goals.