Email Love Builder vs Taxi for Email.
Same idea, different source of truth.

In 2012, “email design system” was a radical idea and hand-coding it was the only way to build one. Taxi deserves the credit for proving that marketers assembling from a governed system beats everyone designing freehand. We built Email Love Builder on the same conviction.

What changed is where design systems live. Over the last decade your brand’s components, tokens, and layouts moved into Figma, and your email system is almost certainly designed there before anyone re-codes it into Taxi Syntax. Which means the Taxi model now involves maintaining the same design system twice: once in Figma for designers, once in Taxi for production.

Email Love Builder removes the second copy. The plugin syncs your Figma components, Auto Layout and Variants intact, into MJML-backed production components. Design it once. Ship from the original.

In Taxi, evolving the design system is developer or agency work. A new module, a spacing change, a rebrand: it goes into a queue, gets hand-coded in Taxi Syntax, and marketers wait. Day-to-day campaign assembly is genuinely self-serve, and reviewers like that part, but the system itself only moves at the speed of the developers who own it. The public review base is thin (a single G2 review as of September 2026), which makes diligence harder; it praises the assembly workflow and flags glitches as module variants multiply.

In Email Love Builder, a designer edits the component in Figma and the change syncs. No ticket, no re-code, no drift between the brand and the emails.

The honest flip side: if you have a strong email dev team, no real design resource, and a master template that rarely changes, the code-owned model can suit you fine. That is Taxi’s home turf.

Ownership diligence, because buyers ask and the history is confusing: SparkPost acquired Taxi in May 2021. MessageBird then acquired SparkPost and rebranded itself Bird in February 2024. Taxi is still sold under its own name with live docs at Bird, and Bird published a Taxi customer story as recently as 2026.

It is fair to note that Taxi’s public positioning has changed very little since the acquisition years, and there is no Figma story, no AI story, and no published pricing. None of that is a verdict on the product. It is a set of questions to ask Bird directly about roadmap and investment before you commit to a multi-year contract.

And no, Taxi is not owned by Sinch. Sinch owns Mailgun, Mailjet, and Email on Acid. The two get mixed up constantly.

Taxi’s enduring strength is the variant factory: one master template producing hundreds of on-brand variations, with bulk multi-language and multi-segment generation and embedded Litmus previews across 90+ clients. Publishers and retailers have run enormous programs on it. If that is your exact shape of scale, Taxi has proven it longer than anyone.

Email Love Builder covers the same ground a different way: Figma Variants for structured variations, one master design with every language variant generated automatically, AI that generates on-brand emails from a brief using your own components, and previews across 90+ clients. And when the design system itself needs to change between campaigns, you are not waiting on a developer.