Overview

Amazon SES

Stacks10.0K

Followers6.0K

Votes328

Twilio SendGrid

Stacks10.8K

Followers5.7K

Votes720

Mandrill

Stacks4.4K

Followers1.6K

Votes926

Amazon SES vs Mandrill vs SendGrid: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the realm of email marketing services, there are key differences between Amazon SES, Mandrill, and SendGrid. Understanding these differences can help businesses make an informed decision on which service to choose.

Pricing Structure: Amazon SES offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where you only pay for the emails you send without any monthly subscription fees. Mandrill, on the other hand, charges a monthly fee based on the number of emails sent. SendGrid provides a flexible pricing structure that includes both pay-as-you-go and monthly subscription options, catering to a wide range of users.
Deliverability: Each service has its own deliverability rates, with Amazon SES boasting high deliverability due to its integration with the Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Mandrill also has a good reputation for deliverability, especially for transactional emails. SendGrid, known for its dedicated IP addresses, offers personalized deliverability support to improve overall email delivery rates.
Email Building and Design: Mandrill and SendGrid provide more robust email building and design tools compared to Amazon SES. With features like drag-and-drop editors, pre-built email templates, and A/B testing, Mandrill and SendGrid offer more advanced options for creating visually appealing emails.
API Integration: Amazon SES, Mandrill, and SendGrid all provide APIs for seamless integration with various platforms and applications. However, SendGrid's API is especially popular for its ease of use and extensive documentation, making it a preferred choice for developers looking to integrate email services quickly and efficiently.
Compliance and Security: When it comes to compliance and security standards, Amazon SES and SendGrid both adhere to stringent regulations to ensure data privacy and protection. Mandrill, now a part of Mailchimp, benefits from Mailchimp's robust compliance protocols and security measures, providing users with a secure environment for sending emails.

In Summary, the key differences between Amazon SES, Mandrill, and SendGrid lie in their pricing structures, deliverability rates, email building tools, API integrations, and compliance/security measures.

Advice on Amazon SES, Twilio SendGrid, Mandrill

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.

48.2k views48.2k

Comments

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.

88.5k views88.5k

Comments

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	Twilio SendGrid	Mandrill
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.	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.	Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.
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.	Open Tracking;Click Tracking;Unsubscribe Tracking;SMTP Relay;SMTP API;Web API;DKIM;SPF;Reputation Monitoring;ISP Monitoring;Domain Level Load Balancing;ISP Deliverability Outreach;Return Path Certified Partner;Support via Phone, Chat, Email, Online Support Portal	Inbound Email- Set up inboxes for Mandrill to control. When they receive email, we’ll make an API call to your app with all the relevant information, so you don’t have to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes.;Webhooks Support- Create custom event notifications, keep track of new signups and unsubscribes in real-time, get a notice of every spam complaint so you can flag them in your database.;Rules Engine- Modify the content of email coming through Mandrill without having to involve developers. For example, you could tell Mandrill to take any email coming from confirmation@yourdomain.com, give it a new template, and add Google Analytics tracking.;Advanced Tagging and Reports- Generate custom reports based on the stats that matter to you. Add campaign tags like “confirmation email” and “mailing list,” and combine them with data Mandrill automatically tracks. Tagging allows you to graph sets of data like “bounce rate for confirmation emails to Gmail addresses.”;Meaningful Metrics- Observe trends and monitor delivery to see if you’re on track or if you need to make adjustments. Search by recipient or domain, sort sent email by bounces or rejections, and track opens and clicks.;Status Updates- Troubleshoot from wherever you are, and send status messages to recipients from Mandrill;Mobile Access- Your transactional email is generated at all hours. Mandrill is the only service with a mobile app, so you can monitor your performance even when you’re away from your desk.
Statistics
Stacks 10.0K	Stacks 10.8K	Stacks 4.4K
Followers 6.0K	Followers 5.7K	Followers 1.6K
Votes 328	Votes 720	Votes 926
Pros & Cons
Pros 102 Reliable 97 Cheap 57 Integrates with other aws services 52 Easy setup 18 Trackable	Pros 190 Easy setup 137 Cheap and simple 107 Easy email integration! 86 Reliable 58 Well-documented Cons 3 Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific 1 Shared IP blacklist removal takes months 0 Shares IP blacklist removal	Pros 189 Simple installation 141 Great api 123 Generous free allowance to get you started 114 Cheap and simple 99 Trackable Cons 1 Really hard to pull analytics out via api
Integrations
No integrations available	Microsoft Azure Twilio Rackspace Cloud Servers Heroku Parse Google Compute Engine Google App Engine CloudBees Red Hat OpenShift Keen	Parse sendwithus

What are some alternatives to Amazon SES, Twilio SendGrid, Mandrill?

Mailgun

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

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

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 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

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

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

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.