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  1. Stackups
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  3. Email Services
  4. Transactional Email
  5. Amazon SES vs SendGrid

Amazon SES vs SendGrid

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Amazon SES
Amazon SES
Stacks9.9K
Followers6.0K
Votes328
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Stacks11.1K
Followers5.7K
Votes720

Amazon SES vs SendGrid: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon SES and SendGrid are both email delivery services that businesses can use to send transactional and marketing emails to their customers. While they serve a similar purpose, there are several key differences between the two.

  1. Pricing: When it comes to pricing, Amazon SES offers a pay-as-you-go model, allowing businesses to only pay for the number of emails they send. On the other hand, SendGrid offers tiered pricing plans based on the volume of emails sent per month, which can be beneficial for businesses with consistent email sending needs.

  2. Deliverability: Deliverability refers to the ability of an email to reach the recipient's inbox without being flagged as spam. Both Amazon SES and SendGrid have robust deliverability rates, but Amazon SES is known for its high deliverability rates and compliance with email industry standards, making it a reliable choice for businesses that prioritize inbox placement.

  3. Email Authentication: Email authentication protocols like DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) are essential for preventing email spoofing and ensuring email deliverability. Both Amazon SES and SendGrid support DKIM and SPF, allowing businesses to authenticate their emails and establish trust with recipients.

  4. User Interface: The user interface of an email delivery service plays a crucial role in managing email campaigns effectively. Amazon SES provides a simple and straightforward interface, primarily designed for developers. In contrast, SendGrid offers a more user-friendly and intuitive interface that caters to both developers and non-technical users, making it easier to manage email campaigns for businesses with limited technical expertise.

  5. API Integrations: Integrating an email delivery service with other platforms and applications is crucial for businesses to streamline their email workflows. Amazon SES offers a robust API that allows for seamless integration with various applications and platforms. Similarly, SendGrid also offers a powerful API with extensive documentation and a wide range of available libraries, making it easier for businesses to integrate and automate their email delivery processes.

  6. Additional Features: While both Amazon SES and SendGrid provide core email delivery functionalities, SendGrid offers some additional features that can be beneficial for businesses. These features include advanced email analytics and reporting, email templates with customizable designs, A/B testing capabilities, and email list segmentation options.

In summary, Amazon SES and SendGrid both offer reliable and scalable email delivery services, but differ in terms of pricing models, deliverability rates, user interfaces, API integrations, and additional features offered. Businesses should consider their specific needs and preferences to choose the service that best aligns with their requirements.

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Advice on Amazon SES, Twilio SendGrid

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.

88.5k views88.5k
Comments
Klaus
Klaus

Jan 22, 2020

Needs advice

For transactional emails, notifications, reminders, etc, I want to make it so writers/designers can set up the emails and maintain them, and then dynamically insert fields, that I then replace when actually sending the mail from code.

I think the ability to use a basic layout template across individual email templates would make things a lot easier (think header, footer, standard typography, etc).

What is best for this? Why would you prefer Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill or something else?

101k views101k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon SES
Amazon SES
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid

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.

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
Statistics
Stacks
9.9K
Stacks
11.1K
Followers
6.0K
Followers
5.7K
Votes
328
Votes
720
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
Integrations
No integrations available
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Twilio
Twilio
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Heroku
Heroku
Parse
Parse
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Google App Engine
Google App Engine
CloudBees
CloudBees
Red Hat OpenShift
Red Hat OpenShift
Keen
Keen

What are some alternatives to Amazon SES, Twilio SendGrid?

Mandrill

Mandrill

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

Mailgun

Mailgun

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

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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