Email Love Builder vs Taxi for Email, for teams that design in Figma.

When Taxi launched in 2012, email design systems were new, and hand-coding one was the only way to build it. Taxi showed that marketers building from a governed system works better than designing every email from scratch. We built Email Love Builder on the same idea.

In Taxi, marketers assemble campaigns from the master template without code, and developers or an agency build and maintain that template in Taxi Syntax. If your designers maintain the email design system in Figma, their designs are coded again in Taxi Syntax, so the same design system is maintained twice: once in Figma for designers and once in Taxi for production.

In Email Love Builder, designers and marketers each work in their own tool. Designers keep building and maintaining the email design system in Figma. Marketers build campaigns in a drag-and-drop editor from those same components, without opening Figma, and locked states decide what they can change. Each component in the editor is mapped to its Figma component and re-synced when it changes, so nobody spends time rebuilding the design system inside the editor, and there is no second version to keep matched.

In Taxi, changes to the design system need someone who can work in Taxi Syntax, usually a developer or an agency. A new module, a spacing change, or a rebrand is coded there. Day-to-day campaign building is self-serve for marketers.

In Email Love Builder, a designer updates the source component in Figma and re-syncs it. Nobody re-codes it, and the templates stay matched to the design system.

If you have a strong email development team, no dedicated designer, and a master template that rarely changes, Taxi’s code-based approach can work well for you.

Say your brand changes the primary button from a 6px corner radius to 12px. In Taxi, the button lives in the master template’s Taxi Syntax, so a developer or your agency codes the change, and campaigns pick it up from the master template.

In Email Love Builder, a designer updates the button component in Figma and re-syncs it. Every template that uses the component picks up the new radius. The change is made once.

Taxi has changed owners twice. SparkPost acquired Taxi in May 2021. MessageBird then acquired SparkPost and renamed itself Bird in February 2024. Taxi is still sold under its own name, its docs are live on Bird’s site, and Bird published a Taxi customer story in 2026.

Taxi’s public positioning has changed very little since the acquisitions. As of September 2026 it has no Figma integration, and we could not find AI features. That is not a judgment on the product, but it is worth asking Bird about the roadmap and investment plans before you sign a multi-year contract.

Taxi’s main strength is producing variants. One master template can generate hundreds of on-brand variations, with bulk multi-language and multi-segment generation and built-in Litmus previews across 90+ clients. Publishers and retailers run large programs on it, and Taxi has done this since 2012.

Email Love Builder handles the same work differently. It uses Figma Variants for structured variations, generates every language version automatically from one master design, uses AI to build on-brand emails from a brief with your own components, and previews every email across 90+ email clients. When the design system changes, a designer updates it in Figma.