Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Amazon SES vs Postmark: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is Postmark? Email delivery for web apps - done right. Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing transactional email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.
Amazon SES and Postmark can be categorized as "Transactional Email" tools.
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, Postmark provides the following key features:
- Create a new virtual server- Instant access to our infrastructure, no waiting required. Create as many servers as you want, for each of your web applications and environments.
- Drop code into your app- Swap in our SMTP endpoint, or get started with our APIs using one of our send API libraries for Ruby, Rails, .NET, Python, PHP, and more.
- Send emails and track delivery- A beautiful interface to monitor volume, bounces, spam complaints, and send activity. View full email content to troubleshoot issues.
"Reliable" is the primary reason why developers consider Amazon SES over the competitors, whereas "Simple" was stated as the key factor in picking Postmark.
Netflix, Medium, and Stripe are some of the popular companies that use Amazon SES, whereas Postmark is used by Swat.io, Docplanner, and Walls.io. Amazon SES has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1291 company stacks & 284 developers stacks; compared to Postmark, which is listed in 67 company stacks and 15 developer stacks.
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.
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.
While building our authentication system, we originally picked Mailgun. However, emails took minutes to arrive and some of them didn't get delivered - or got delivered to spam.
We started looking for a new provider, and settled on Postmark. We love that they track time-to-inbox, it makes me feel they really care about going above and beyond to provide a good service.
Pros of Amazon SES
- Reliable102
- Cheap96
- Integrates with other aws services57
- Easy setup52
- Trackable18
- Easy rails setup2
Pros of Postmark
- Simple18
- Great analytics10
- Email, done right8
- Easy setup5
- Heroku Add-on5
- Can review sent messages2
- Very inexpensive1
- Exceptional support1
- Pay per message1
- Great support1
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Amazon SES
Cons of Postmark
- No 24x7 support1
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is Amazon SES?
What is Postmark?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Amazon SES?
What tools integrate with Postmark?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+22
+39