| Functionality | 5 <p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">For small ecommerce businesses, Flodesk’s features are just right. The team has clearly chosen to focus on certain things and do them well.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We are concerned that custom fields can only take values of ‘string’ data type, so you can’t validate entries to, say, date or location type fields. Nor can you filter / segment according to the value of custom fields.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: transparent; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">As your needs grow and you want A/B testing, custom dashboards etc, you may outgrow the platform but it is solid for what it is.</span></p> | 4 <p>SendGrid only offers the key set of email marketing features - no other channels (e.g., SMS and Whatsapp) or website-related features (e.g., landing pages, website builder) are available. Automation, reporting and customisation are also quite basic. In our books though, this is enough for SMBs with simple needs.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 10 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent;">Flodesk is one of the user-friendly email marketing platforms we have tested. With a simple interface and just 6 clearly labeled tabs, it's super easy to navigate between designing emails, creating forms and building out workflows. We particularly like its workflow builder, which makes it straightforward even for complete beginners to build an email series without guidance.</span></p> | 8 <p>Mostly due to its limited functionality, key workflows were intuitive and easy to navigate. It was also generally easy to locate key information.</p><p><br></p><p>However, we found a few UX nits:</p><ul><li>There was no way to take bulk actions on contacts e.g. bulk select them and add to list.</li><li>There was only 1 email automation template.</li></ul> |
| Look and feel | 9 <p>Flodesk offers a delightfully pleasant, modern, uncluttered interface that is straightforward to navigate. In addition, page load times were incredibly fast.</p> | 5 <p>We were not so impressed by the slow page loads - even with only 100 contacts, loading times were 3-4 seconds per page, making the platform frustratingly slow at times. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Another thing to note is that the design is not fully responsive, sometimes text escapes containers when browser window is shrunk.</span></p><p><br></p><p>In terms of interface, SendGrid is very plain, but clean.</p> |
| Customisability | 4 <p>There's a classic trade-off between ease of set-up and customisability. No surprises that there is little to customise with Flodesk. That should not be an issue for small businesses looking to grow via email automation. The time may come when you wish to have more control over custom dashboards and analytics but until then we are not concerned.</p> | 4 <p>SendGrid offers good customisability even without code, including the ability to:</p><ul><li>Make basic stylistic changes to client facing assets e.g. emails, signup forms</li><li>Complete basic personalisation for emails with contact information</li><li>Create basic email automation workflows</li></ul><p>However, it's notably lacking in the ability to create custom dashboards and advanced segments (based on custom events, such as website clicks or email interactions).</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 10 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We loved how quickly we could self-serve to create an account with very few clicks (via a Google account) and start creating emails, forms and workflows. Thanks to the 'forever free' tier, there is also no need to enter payment card details to access full functionality for the first 30 days.</span></p> | 7 <p>SendGrid is very easy to set up. We particularly liked how easy it was to locate key features (though note slower loading times).</p><p><br></p><p>It takes around 30 minutes to an hour to complete basic setup, while full customisations (such as integrating with current tools or creating advanced workflows) takes at most 1-3 days. </p> |
| Customer Support | 8 <p>There is no live-chat functionality but our email query was helpfully answered in just 8 minutes. In addition the knowledge base of 'how to' articles is high-quality and easily searchable.</p> | 5 <p>Support is only available through ticket submission in the Help Centre, as there is no live chat option. However, responses are typically provided within a few hours. The Help Centre itself is of high quality, offering detailed explanations and video guides.</p> |
| Integratability | 3 <p>Direct integration is supported only for Instagram and Shopify. The Zapier store has a number of other integrations which may be useful and depending on your needs, you may have to create your own private connection via the Flodesk API.</p> | 4 <p>There were some pre-built integrations with 120 tools - though we note that these were mostly technical and developer focused tools.</p><p><br></p><p>SendGrid was, however, lacking many key integrations - notably, there was no integration with even the most common CRM or e-commerce sites. The only web builder it integrates with is Wordpress.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 9 <p>In testing we could easily export the mailing list, a specific segment, and analytics (such as daily opt-in and visitor activity) to CSV without needing tech support.</p> | 8 <p>There's the capability to self-serve export contacts from any segments/ lists into CSV files. Other exports (such as analytics) are not available directly through the platform.</p><p><br></p><p>A strength, however, is that there is an email API product available to extract any other information.</p> |
