A SendGrid email API alternative

In this article, we’re comparing Waypoint vs SendGrid email API platforms. Before we get started, it’s important that we clarify that both platforms are great options for reliable email delivery at scale. Each service simply has different approaches and, therefore, prioritize things differently.

Also worth clarifying, SendGrid offers two main products with two different pricing plans: An email API software for transactional emails, and marketing campaign software for email blasts. For this comparison we’ll only be looking at SendGrid’s email API product as Waypoint is intentionally only focused on transactional emails.

High level comparison

SendGrid is the juggernaut in the email API space. It's a popular and well established email delivery service that has been around since 2009.

Waypoint is the upstart in the space with similar email API offerings but with new approaches to collaboration and observability.

Why software teams choose Waypoint over SendGrid

A more powerful dynamic template builder

While SendGrid has a dynamic email template builder, it can fall flat when working with data-rich transactional email templates.This is because SendGrid (and other marketing tools) repurposes it’s marketing email template builder that is geared for little to no dynamic data for their transactional emails.

Waypoint, on the other hand, is designed specificially for data rich transactional emails. This means a block-based template builder that is powerful enough to handle liquid templating, conditional hiding, loops, test data scenarios, reusable layouts, and more - all visually and without any code. It's approach to designing also enables a more WYSIWYG experience. Compare the builders below:

Screenshot of Waypoint's powerful template builder for data-rich emails (top) vs SendGrid's template builder (bottom).

The difference is even more pronounced when doing more advanced templating. In the example below, Waypoint has a way to visually build loops and conditionals while SendGrid requires Handlebar templating code and HTML.

Screenshot of Waypoint’s template builder visually editing a template with a 'loop' block (top) vs having to use custom HTML and Handlebar templating on SendGrid (bottom).

High deliverability, even on lower paid tiers

SendGrid (and most other email API platforms) put free and lower paid tier accounts on shared IP pools. This means that if a spammer joins a free plan, there is risk that they can ruin the reputation of other platforms in the shared IP pool. This causes IP addresses to get blacklisted and emails landing in spam instead of inboxes.

Waypoint takes a different path by not offering a free plan at all. This level of curation helps ensure that those that pay for even the lowest starter plan on Waypoint have high deliverability rates.

Less expensive at scale

Waypoint has simple straightforward pricing and is similar in price to SendGrid’s paid plans at the lower volumes and less expensive at higher volumes. Price comparison examples (at the time of publishing this article):

Emails per month	Waypoint	SendGrid email API
10,000	$20	$19.95
300,000	$250	$249
1,000,000	$437	$602

Per month price comparision

Less expensive for teams

As soon as you have more than one teammate with workspace access, SendGrid requires their pro plan starting at $89.95/mo. Waypoint is designed for collaboration so teams can invite up to five teammates on the starter plan.

Better logging

Another key difference is Waypoint’s capabilities for observability. Unlike other platforms where transactional emails are secondary, Waypoint provides a full log of the entire email content, raw HTML, template data, metadata, and event timeline for each email. SendGrid only provides metadata and the event timeline (see below). This is especially helpful for debugging and monitoring emails.

Waypoint also keeps these logs for 14 days as a standard (and up to 3 months for 'pro' plans) while SendGrid has log retention for 3-7 days (with extra charges for extensions).

Screenshot of Waypoint (top) vs SendGrid (bottom) logs on a single email.

Additionally, unlike SendGrid, Waypoint allows for drilling down to logs on the individual contact level to see a full timeline of events per contact.

Unmatched, real human support

Waypoint is dedicated to incredible customer support and most often, you’ll be talking directly to one of our founders. Great support for each of our customers comes standard. A dedicated account manager on SendGrid is thousands of dollars per month.

Why teams might consider SendGrid over Waypoint

Having said all of the above, you may be wondering why your team might consider SendGrid? The main advantage of SendGrid is that it’s been a platform that has been evolving over the past decade.

This means SendGrid has certain functionality that Waypoint doesn't have (which may or may not be a a dealbreaker for your team):

• Webhooks
• Inbound email parsing
• Email rendering testing across clients
• Sub user management (credit limits on users)
• Advanced contact segmentation
• SMTP relays
• Single Sign On (SSO)

However, we’ll add that many of these advanced features are on Waypoint’s roadmap and we’re building fast.

Conclusion

We encourage you to give both products a try for yourself to see which one may be the best fit for your team. While both products have many overlapping features, each service has it's own personality and priorities.

However, we think you'll love Waypoint for transactional emails, especially when collaborating with a growing team. Our customers believe so as well:

"Waypoint team and support surpassed our expectations, ensuring a seamless transition from SendGrid. Their liquid templating simplified the conversion of our existing emails, and since migrating, their service has been flawless. Our emails no longer end up in spam folders, leading to an impressive increase in our onboarding conversion rates. Waypoint's fast and reliable deliverability has taken our account verification success from below 50% to nearly 100%.”

– Dallin Dyer (CTO of Dree.com)