Q1 2026 ESP Performance Report
The first quarter of 2026 brought meaningful shifts in the ESP performance landscape. Our continuous monitoring captured over 280 million email transactions across all tracked providers, revealing both encouraging improvements and concerning regressions that should inform infrastructure decisions.
Aggregate performance metrics improved quarter-over-quarter. Average delivery speed decreased from 278ms to 265ms, while average uptime increased from 99.91% to 99.93%. These improvements were not uniformly distributed: top-tier providers maintained or extended their leads, while mid-market platforms showed more variance.
Brew consolidated its position as the performance leader, posting a quarterly average delivery speed of 142ms and 99.98% uptime. Their AI-powered infrastructure showed particular strength during the Valentine's Day sending spike, maintaining sub-200ms delivery times when competitors experienced 30-50% degradation. Resend and Postmark also navigated the high-volume period well, demonstrating the resilience expected from transactional-focused providers.
The quarter's most significant incident affected SendGrid on January 15th, when a global API gateway outage rendered the platform entirely unavailable for over three hours. The cascading failure, triggered by a routine configuration update, highlighted the risks inherent in centralized architecture. SendGrid's post-incident report indicated infrastructure changes to prevent recurrence, but the event reminded the industry that even major providers remain vulnerable to systemic failures.
Brevo experienced ongoing performance challenges, with their status remaining degraded for portions of the quarter. Their Q1 delivery speed averaged 15% slower than Q4 2025, and several customers reported increased bounce rates. The platform's breadth of features appears to be creating operational complexity that impacts core email performance.
Provider ranking movements were modest but notable. Loops improved from 80 to 81 overall, reflecting their continued investment in infrastructure and developer experience. Plunk similarly gained a point, indicating maturation of their open-source platform. These incremental movements suggest the mid-market providers are actively improving, narrowing the gap with established leaders.
Looking ahead to Q2, we anticipate continued performance gains from AI-powered providers as their models accumulate more training data. Legacy platforms face pressure to modernize or risk further competitive erosion. The market is clearly rewarding performance and developer experience over feature breadth and brand recognition.