Amazon SES vs AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Amazon SES

If you are looking for a no fuss, functional email delivery engine at a very low cost, Amazon SES is great. But, there is a learning curve, the documentation is often dense and many times, you yearn for a simple GUI, while setting up your interface. SES has barebones analytics - virtually none. It also does not do list management. Mapping bounces to SNS is not very intuitive either. If you are sending embedded images, you need to load them from external servers.

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Anindya Chatterjee

CEO

Saleswah CRMInformation Technology and Services, 11-50 employees

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AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Elastic Beanstalk is a great fit for a product that's already open to using Amazon Web Services, but has a team that does not want to work with environment setup. Furthermore, it's really only a fit for situations where the configuration needed from the team fits within a stack that Elastic Beanstalk offers. Even if you're interested in using one of the stacks they do support, you have more ability to modify configurations if you're handling all the setup and configuration on your own.

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Joshua Dickson

Director of Engineering

NorthOutComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Amazon SES

—

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

7.8

Ease of building user interfaces

—

7.7

Scalability

—

9.5

Platform management overhead

—

6.4

Workflow engine capability

—

7.3

Platform access control

—

8.3

Services-enabled integration

—

8.4

Development environment creation

—

8.2

Development environment replication

—

7.7

Issue monitoring and notification

—

7.3

Issue recovery

—

6.8

Upgrades and platform fixes

—

8.5

Pros

Amazon SES is a simple service that's not bloated with unnecessary features.
It's fast and reliable. You can literally send thousands of emails without any issue.
10 cents for 1000 emails? The price is just simply amazing!

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Arnas Kazlauskas

IT Customer Support Specialist

Hostinger InternationalInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

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Removes tedious, error-prone work from team focus for server configuration and environment setup.
AWS creates new stacks when underlying software requires security updates, or frameworks release new versions.
Greatly improves speed-to-production for many applications.
Free resource on top of AWS; it costs nothing additional to use Elastic Beanstalk over the cost of the underlying instances and resources.

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Joshua Dickson

Director of Engineering

NorthOutComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Cons

You cannot send embedded images (Base64 encoded) in your emails. This is a pretty big gotcha. So if you want to send images along, it's best to store them externally.
Virtually zero analytics on your emails. It is up to you to implement open detection, click detection etc.
Has no email list storage. That's up to you.

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Justin Schroeder

Full Stack Developer

Journey Group, Inc.Marketing and Advertising, 11-50 employees

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Documentation was either lacking or too complicated for a beginner
The act of removing an instance took me several days to be sure it was actually removed and I wouldn't get billed for it
Billing information and estimates are hard to follow

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

No score

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AWS Elastic Beanstalk1.0

Based on 1 answer

My particular use case did not justify the upkeep of Elastic Beanstalk

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Usability

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AWS Elastic Beanstalk8.0

Based on 1 answer

Great CLI and a growing group of people supplying tutorial information on how to make use of the system

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Support

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AWS Elastic Beanstalk9.0

Based on 1 answer

Great self help documentation covers most issues

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Implementation

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AWS Elastic Beanstalk7.0

Based on 1 answer

Spend some time investigating how to make the most use of Beanstalk before diving too deep. Take it in small chunks and learn as much as possible!

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Alternatives Considered

Amazon SES is bare-bones, insofar as it will not "help" you with the contents of your message. You cannot use variables in the e-mail, it will not automatically track whether or not the recipient opened the mail or not, it will not help with unsubscribe links, and it will not generate and manage web-based copies of the e-mail. That said, it gives the developer full control of the messages.Pricing, again, is the killer feature here. SES is cheaper than every single e-mail delivery provider I have ever encountered.

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D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr.

Owner and CEO

Delcoe Communications, Inc.Computer Software, 1-10 employees

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AWS is much more focused on scalability, but Heroku was much easier to get things up and running as a beginner. For simple hosting, I would stick to something like Heroku or Netlify. That said, Elastic Beanstalk is meant for more performant functions requiring large scaling and I would definitely consider it for this type of task.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Information Technology and Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

All positive things. The fact that we can send tens of thousands of e-mails per month for less than $5 is incredible. Find a better price for something even remotely as high-quality as SES.
SES provides a set-and-forget way of handling e-mail. Drop in the credentials, and your developers will never have to mess with it again.

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D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr.

Owner and CEO

Delcoe Communications, Inc.Computer Software, 1-10 employees

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We have a cloud based application, and it solves the problem of computing something which requires heavy resources and not having a large device of your own.
Also it is possible to access the machine from anywhere and start working on it.
The main benefit it gives us is being able to have a very small ops team for the number of services running.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology and Services Company, 201-500 employees

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