Amazon SES vs MailChimp: What are the differences?

Amazon SES: Bulk and transactional email-sending service. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2; MailChimp: Easy email newsletters. MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It's like your own personal publishing platform.

Amazon SES can be classified as a tool in the "Transactional Email" category, while MailChimp is grouped under "Email Marketing".

Some of the features offered by Amazon SES are:

• Simple – Amazon SES eliminates the complexity of licensing, installing, and operating a third-party service, or building and maintaining an internally hosted email solution. Sending email through Amazon SES is as simple as using SMTP or calling an API, and Amazon SES makes it easy for you to monitor your sending activity and deliverability statistics.
• Inexpensive – There are no up-front fees or fixed expenses with Amazon SES, and you benefit from the efficiencies of Amazon’s scale. Your only costs are low charges for the number of emails sent and data transfer fees.
• Reliable – Amazon SES runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. All outgoing email messages are stored redundantly across multiple servers and datacenters, providing high availability and data durability.

On the other hand, MailChimp provides the following key features:

• Facebook Integration
• AutoConnect Templates
• Full Featured API

"Reliable", "Cheap" and "Integrates with other aws services" are the key factors why developers consider Amazon SES; whereas "Smooth setup & ui", "Mailing list" and "Robust e-mail creation" are the primary reasons why MailChimp is favored.

According to the StackShare community, MailChimp has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1666 company stacks & 670 developers stacks; compared to Amazon SES, which is listed in 1293 company stacks and 284 developer stacks.