Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of online marketing. In terms of ROI, email marketing beats out social media, content marketing, SEO, affiliate marketing, and influencer marketing. Your email list is your best tool for communicating with existing customers and onboarding new customers to your brand.
So it’s important that your email campaigns are handled by an email delivery service that works. The ideal email service has high email deliverability and few bounces, and makes sending emails easy. It should be secure and provide real-time email analytics and metrics that allow you to measure email performance and make data-driven decisions for your future marketing campaigns.
We’ve put together a list of the top email service providers in 2023 to make your decision easier.
At a glance...
Best for Overall Email Sending - SendGrid
- Great customer support
- Trusted name
- Large feature set and many supported SDKs
Best for Price - Amazon SES
- Very cheap to send emails
- Limited feature set
- No customer support
Best for Enterprise - MessageBird
- Robust security
- Trusted by many enterprise companies
- Well-documented API
Best for Customer Support - Mailgun
- Responsive support agents
- Large online community for quick FAQ lookup
- Reasonably priced
Best for Small Business - Nylas
- Easy to get started
- High deliverability guaranteed
Best Email Sending APIs for 2023
We looked at several factors when determining the best email API service for 2023: price, API documentation, email analytics, deliverability, ease of use, and customer support.
Let’s take a look at who came out on top.
SendGrid - Best Overall
Managed by Twilio, SendGrid is possibly the most trusted name in email marketing APIs these days. They have been managing transactional emails since 2009 and provide a broad range of services including email campaigns, email analytics, email templates, email validation, and a range of customer acquisition tools.
SendGrid maintains libraries for many popular languages and frameworks, including JavaScript, Java, C, PHP, Python, Go, Node.JS and Ruby.
Pros
- Long-standing and trusted name in email marketing
- A broad set of features covering everything you could ever need for sending emails
- Libraries maintained for nearly all popular programming languages
Cons
- Customer support is reported to have gone downhill since the Twilio acquisition
- Expensive
Customer Reviews
"It has a really good transactional API and the dynamic template is nice and easy to use. Ruby gem for SendGrid is good as well.”
"Service is terrible lodged a customer service request replied quickly with useless information then didn't hear from them for 4 days."
"The built in tracking is quite nice and they make it very easy to configure. Knowing not only opens/clicks but unique values was great.”
Pricing and Usage Limits
SendGrid has multiple pricing tiers that can be customized or configured in a number of ways. Basically, the tiers break down into $19.95/month for 10,000 sends, $249/month for 300,000 sends, and custom pricing for enterprise.
Best for: Overall Email Sending
Mailgun - Best for Customer Support
Mailgun is another email API service that has been around a long time. In the last few years the company has gone through a number of acquisitions that some say has made the service unstable. However, their features are solid and their deliverability and security are robust.
Their API documentation is excellent, however they do not support as many official libraries as SendGrid - just PHP, Ruby, Go, and Node.JS. They have a generous free tier that is reported to be among the best free email API services around.
Pros
- Well-documented API and large online community available to answer questions
- Support is extremely easy to find and use
- Flexible pay-as-you-go pricing (and much cheaper than SendGrid at the lowest level)
Cons
- Fewer languages officially supported
Customer Reviews
"Super pleasant, great chat support, fast email support replies, always quick to help and communicate."
"Unfortunately, the logs only go back to about 2 months or so which meant we had just lost all the old data."
"I've used this service for 2 years and in free tier is certainly one of the best value products. Is very easy to configure and use and has a good customer support.”
Pricing and Usage Limits
Mailgun’s basic pricing breaks down like this: $8/month for 10,000 emails, $235/month for 300,000, $650/month for 1,000,000 emails.
Best for: customer support
MessageBird - Best for Enterprise
MessageBird offers several pricing tiers, but their enterprise-level tier is where they shine. They are trusted by some of the biggest companies to send over 6 trillion emails per year, and they also offer integrations with SMS, Voice and WhatsApp.
MessageBird offers tailored solutions for different industries like retail and packaging, logistics, hospitality, financial services, real estate, eCommerce, and healthcare
Pros
- Beautifully designed, easy to use dashboard
- Bulk pricing is very competitive
- Integrations for many different software solutions
Cons
- Customer service can be slow
Customer Reviews
"Fantastic pricing when purchasing in bulk with a very easy to use interface. Reporting is excellent and it's easy to find out the status of messages sent.”
"The customer service can often be slow. You have to rely on text-based chat since it is located in Amsterdam. The customer service reps are always very polite and informational, but the wait (especially during critical downtime) can be excruciating."
“What I appreciate most about this software is the fact that it integrates easily with other solutions and has a great uptime and performance."
Pricing and Usage Limits
MessageBird offers many, many pricing tiers because they have such a vast range of products, from SMS to Voice, to email to WhatsApp. To get an idea of what is available, visit their pricing page. For many options, you will need to contact sales to talk to someone about your specific needs.
Best for: enterprise
Amazon SES - Best for Price
Amazon’s SES is one of the cheapest email API solutions available - but you will pay for that low cost in terms of features and usability. Their offering is a very stripped-down version of what other email APIs offer, with no automatic bounce-handling, no analytics and no deliverability insights.
Customer support is only available to those who have purchased plans with customer service included. If you are already working in the AWS ecosystem, such as with Amazon Simple Notifications Service, SES may make sense, but otherwise, opt for a different service.
Pros
- Very low cost
- Integrates easily with other AWS services
- Highly scalable
Cons
- No support (unless you pay for it)
- Limited feature set
- The platform can feel overwhelming for beginners
Customer Reviews
"The pricing is amazing for such a great service. The API is well documented and SDKs are available for the most popular languages.”
"Need to write our own custom code to track bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints."
"Overall it is one of the most reliable email services out there. It can save you money and help you for both internal dev and marketing."
Pricing and Usage Limits
Amazon SES is far and away the cheapest option on this list, but remember that you will get a very limited set of features for that price. It’s $1/month to send 10,000 emails, $30/month to send 300,000 emails, and $100/month to send 1,000,000 emails
Best for: Price
Nylas - Best for Small Business
Nylas claims to be the fastest and easiest email API service to get up and running in your app. They are used by many enterprise-level companies to handle sending millions of emails every week.
Nylas offers a range of solutions including calendar integration, automated outreach, analytics and embedded contextual email, plus customized plans for certain industries like healthcare, finance, and eCommerce.
Pros
- Easy to get up and running - can get an API key for free
- Robust, enterprise-grade security
- 99.6% deliverability guaranteed
Cons
- Customer support reported to be lacking
Customer Reviews
"The API was stable and reliable. Developer documentation is amazing, everything is covered in detail with both text descriptions and code examples. The SDK was also very nice."
"The customer support team is not very responsive, they spend so much time asking you to gather evidence of the issues and once you gather them, they say they will create a ticket and never respond with resolution of the bug."
"Google Calendar integration was easy to set up."
Pricing and Usage Limits
Nylas offers three basic pricing options: a free tier that allows up to 10 inboxes and access to a testing sandbox, a pay-as-you-go plan that offers month-to-month flexibility, and a custom plan for enterprise. None of the prices are viewable without contacting support.
Best for: small business
Brevo (formerly SendInBlue) - Best Free Tier
Brevo (which used to be SendInBlue) boasts one of the slickest, easiest-to-use drag and drop editors for putting together email content and sending marketing campaigns. They also have a robust API and webhooks for handling email messages directly in-app.
Support is handled primarily through live chat or conversational chatbots, and they also support WhatsApp integration and SMS integration. Their free tier is probably the most generous of any on this list.
Pros
- Easy to get started, generous free tier
- Reasonably priced
- Rich feature set but not so many features that you get overwhelmed
Cons
- API documentation lacking
Customer Reviews
"Customer service was superb. They were awesome and I found the editor of the email easier to use than the competitor."
“Setting up email templates can be tricky without proper guidance. A bug in the settings may cause campaigns to end up in the spam email list.”
"The product has some really good features at a great price. We use chat functionality on our website and it is super easy to design campaigns on the platform.”
Pricing and Usage Limits
SendInBlue offers a free tier that lets you send up to 300 emails/day, has customizable drag and drop templates, and supports WhatsApp and SMS campaigns. Their basic plan is $25/month for 25,000 emails, $65 for 25,000 emails plus some additional features, and custom pricing for enterprise.
Best for: free tier
Side-by-Side Comparison
FAQs
Does an email API need authentication?
Yes. An email API uses an API key to secure communication between the API endpoint and the app it communicates with. When you sign up for an email API you will receive an API key that authenticates you with the API and allows you to make requests. The API key must be included in the header of every request sent to the API.
What is the difference between an email API and a SMTP server?
An SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server handles receiving and sending emails. You can set one up yourself or use a third-party SMTP relay service to handle it for you. Typically, SMTP servers are good for simple use cases and sending one-off emails to users from your app.
If you need to send bulk emails, run marketing campaigns, track analytics, integrate with other services, handle transactional emails or create email content using templates, you should use an email API.
What should I look for in an email API?
A good email program should have robust security and should take users’ privacy concerns seriously (adhering to GDPR and other privacy laws and not selling user data.) It should have high email deliverability and low bounce rates, and should provide insights into important analytics.
