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  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Email Services
  4. Transactional Email
  5. Amazon SES vs Mailgun

Amazon SES vs Mailgun

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon SES
Amazon SES
Stacks9.9K
Followers6.0K
Votes328
Mailgun
Mailgun
Stacks7.8K
Followers4.2K
Votes656

Amazon SES vs Mailgun: What are the differences?

  1. Pricing Model: The key difference between Amazon SES and Mailgun lies in their pricing models. Amazon SES offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are charged based on the number of emails sent and additional features used. On the other hand, Mailgun offers a tiered pricing model, where users can choose from different plans that provide specific email volumes and features. This difference in pricing models allows users to select the most suitable option based on their expected email volume and budget.

  2. Email Deliverability: Another important difference is the email deliverability of both services. Amazon SES leverages the infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is known for its reliability and high deliverability rates. It also provides additional features like dedicated IP addresses and domain reputation management to improve email deliverability. Mailgun also focuses on email deliverability and provides tools like real-time analytics, recipient validation, and automatic IP warm-up to optimize email delivery. However, the underlying infrastructure and deliverability rates may vary between the two services.

  3. API Integration: When it comes to API integration, both Amazon SES and Mailgun offer robust APIs for seamless integration with applications and platforms. However, there might be differences in terms of ease of use and available features. Amazon SES provides a comprehensive API with extensive documentation and SDKs for different programming languages, allowing developers to easily integrate and control email sending. Mailgun also offers a powerful API with features like email parsing, webhooks, and email validation. The choice between the two services may depend on the specific requirements and level of technical expertise of the users.

  4. Email Management Tools: Both Amazon SES and Mailgun provide email management tools to simplify the process of sending and tracking emails. Amazon SES offers features like bounce and complaint handling, email event tracking, and email template management. It also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudWatch, for enhanced email management capabilities. Mailgun offers similar features like bounce and spam complaint handling, advanced email tracking, and customizable email templates. The choice between the two services may depend on the specific requirements and preferred user interface of the users.

  5. Additional Services: Apart from email delivery, Amazon SES and Mailgun also offer additional services that can enhance the overall email experience. Amazon SES provides services like email content filtering, inbound email processing, and email notifications. It also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon SNS and Amazon Lambda, for further automation and customization. Mailgun offers features like email validation, email validation API, and email list management tools. These additional services can complement the core email delivery functionalities and provide added value to users.

  6. Support and Documentation: Support and documentation are important factors to consider when choosing an email delivery service. Amazon SES offers detailed documentation, a knowledge base, and developer forums to assist users in understanding and utilizing the service effectively. It also provides support through the AWS Support Center. Mailgun also provides comprehensive documentation, API references, and guides to help users integrate and troubleshoot the service. Additionally, Mailgun offers support through email and live chat. The level of support and available resources may influence the decision between the two services.

In Summary, Amazon SES and Mailgun differ in their pricing models, email deliverability, API integration, email management tools, additional services, and support/documentation. The choice between these services depends on factors such as budget, desired email deliverability, technical requirements, required features, and level of support needed.

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Advice on Amazon SES, Mailgun

Kevin
Kevin

Jun 29, 2021

Decided

We chose Postmark as our transactional email service for several reasons:

  • Laser-focus (at the time) on transactional email - their success/speed/reliability with delivering transactional email is amazing. Note, they have now branched out and offer marketing/broadcast email services too.

  • Developer-friendly - Awesome docs and resources. Their Rail gem integrates directly with ActionMailer so nearly all of our code worked without changes.

  • Servers - You can set up "Servers" for different mail streams/workflows to keep things separate and easy to review.

  • Bootstrapped - Wildbit (who makes Postmark) is bootstrapped just like the Friendliest.app and they offer a service credit to other bootstrapped startups.

48.3k views48.3k
Comments
Slawomir
Slawomir

Head of Product at Coresender

Oct 15, 2020

Decided

Of course we chose Coresender to send our own transactional emails :) So I thought I'll let you know how we use it.

  • We set up separate sending accounts for all company needs, eg. transactional emails, monitoring alerts, time to inbox. We even configured our office printers to send emails through Coresender.

  • We have a real-time and extremely usable view into what emails go through each account, so each time anybody reports an email not arriving we're able to assist them in a few seconds

  • We utilize our message timeline feature, so we can learn eg. if people are clicking on password reset links

  • We always know how many of our onboarding emails are being opened which helps us improve them

  • Finally, we have full controll over our suppressions lists, so we can add (and remove!) from them whenever necessary.

To sum up, at Coresender we're eating our own dogfood and it helps us stay connected to the product and understand our customers better.

88.6k views88.6k
Comments
Imelda
Imelda

Engineer at pounce3 Project Management

Dec 9, 2020

Decided

We did a quick test on the reliability of these three common email services, sending a few emails an hour at random intervals.

Unfortunately, none of them had 100% availability over the 30 day test. I don't understand why this is so hard?

Mailgun performed the best with the most reliability and fastest response times. Mandrill was notably bad.

30.9k views30.9k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon SES
Amazon SES
Mailgun
Mailgun

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.

Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.

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.;Scalable – Amazon SES is based on the scalable technology used by Amazon web sites around the world to send billions of messages a year.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – You can track your bounces and complaints in Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and you can set up Easy DKIM or verify any domain you administer via Amazon Route 53 with a few clicks of your mouse. There is also a free usage tier for emails originating from Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.
Optimized Queue;Scheduled Delivery;MIME Assembly;Test Mode;ESP Feedback Handling;Unsubscribe Handling;Spam Complaint Handling;Bounce Handling;HTTP POST to your App;Routing w RegEx Filters;Parsing to UTF-8;Signature Separation;Quoted Reply Separation;Wildcard Domains;Spam Filtering;Live Logs;Message Tagging;Event Webhooks;Open/Click Tracking;Unsubscribe Tracking;Complaint Tracking;Bounce Tracking;Mailing Lists;Template Variables;A/B Testing;Link Performance;Geo Performance;Recipient Level Data;SMTP or HTTP API;Clean IP Addresses;SPF Authentication;DKIM Authentication;SSL/TLS;Scales on Demand
Statistics
Stacks
9.9K
Stacks
7.8K
Followers
6.0K
Followers
4.2K
Votes
328
Votes
656
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 102
    Reliable
  • 97
    Cheap
  • 57
    Integrates with other aws services
  • 52
    Easy setup
  • 18
    Trackable
Pros
  • 178
    Quick email integration
  • 148
    Free plan
  • 91
    Easy setup
  • 67
    Ridiculously reliable
  • 53
    Extensive apis
Cons
  • 2
    Cost
  • 2
    No HTTPS tracking links supported
  • 1
    Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun
  • 1
    Cannot create multiple api keys
Integrations
No integrations available
AppFog
AppFog
Magento
Magento
Ghost
Ghost
Heroku
Heroku
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Sendicate
Sendicate
WordPress
WordPress
cloudControl
cloudControl
Parse
Parse
sendwithus
sendwithus

What are some alternatives to Amazon SES, Mailgun?

Mandrill

Mandrill

Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

Twilio SendGrid

Twilio SendGrid

Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.

sendwithus

sendwithus

Send email from your app with a simple API call, Sendwithus manages the rest. Templates, testing, data management, segments, and analytics are all accessible through a friendly dashboard.

Postmark

Postmark

Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.

Mailjet

Mailjet

Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: scalable, agile and flexible. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.

SparkPost

SparkPost

SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.

Mailtrap

Mailtrap

We offer one platform that covers all email-related needs in one place: testing, sending, and in-depth tracking to control how email infrastructure works and performs.

Apostle.io

Apostle.io

Transactional emails are the forgotten step child of internet marketers. Apostle.io empowers marketers to manage transactional emails themselves, as they would their list based campaigns. Preview, Update, Analyse and Test your transactional email all in one place.

Nodemailer

Nodemailer

It is a single module with zero dependencies – code is easily auditable. The email delivery is Secure using TLS/STARTTLS. You can use HTML content, as well as plain text alternative.

Resend

Resend

It is a modern email sending platform focused on providing the best developer experience. Build, test, and deliver transactional emails at scale.

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