TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. Cheetah Digital vs. Mapp Digital

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Amazon SES

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/AAmazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is an outbound-only email-sending service useful for marketing and transactional email, relying on the infrastructure of Amazon. Amazon SES provides the requisite statistics and built-in notifications for bounces, complaints, and deliveries for optimization of campaigns. Emails are sent via SMTP or the Amazon SES API. Amazon's pricing is per usage, presently at $.10 per thousand sends. The service is free for users of Amazon EC2 (up to 62,000 messages),…

    $0.10

    for emails after the first 1,000

    Cheetah Digital

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ADesigned for high-volume, cross-channel campaigns, Cheetah Digital is used by marketers to deliver highly personalized, contextual communications across various channels including email, SMS, push, mobile wallet, direct mail, and social.N/A

    Mapp Digital

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/ABuilt by marketers for marketers, Mapp is a family of software and customer-centric services including a sophisticated data management platform; tools that optimise email, mobile, app, social and web marketing; and campaign management and strategy consulting. Mapp Digital was created by the combination of BlueHornet and the digital-marketing related applications business purchased from Teradata Corporation in July 2016. Other components include Argyle Social, Epoxy (a mobile push app), and…N/A
    Pricing
    Amazon SESCheetah DigitalMapp Digital
    Editions & Modules
    Sending Emails from an Application Hosted in Amazon EC2
    $0.10 ($0.12)
    for every 1,000 emails after 62,000 (for each GB of storage)
    Sending Emails from Another Email Client or Software Package
    $0.10 ($0.12)
    for every 1,000 emails (for each GB of storage)
    Receiving Email
    $0.10
    for emails after the first 1,000
    Sending Emails from an Application Hosted in Amazon EC2
    Free
    for first 62,000 emails
    Receiving Email
    Free
    for the first 1,000 emails
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Amazon SESCheetah DigitalMapp Digital
    Free Trial
    NoNoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details———
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Amazon SESCheetah DigitalMapp Digital
    Considered Multiple Products
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Zeta Global
    No answer on this topic
    Mapp Digital
    Chose Mapp Digital
    As an email marketer for 12 years, I have significant experience using numerous ESPs. If you need true enterprise capabilities or full-service, I don't think BlueHornet is up to the task. If you are a SMB with more basic needs and a budget, BlueHornet can be a good choice. I …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    13 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    13 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    13 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    9 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Amazon SESCheetah DigitalMapp Digital
    Email & Online Marketing
    Comparison of Email & Online Marketing features of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and Cheetah Digital and Mapp Digital
    Feature
    Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
    -
    Ratings
    Cheetah Digital
    -
    Ratings
    Mapp Digital
    8.1
    5 Ratings
    1% above category average
    WYSIWYG email editor00 Ratings00 Ratings7.85 Ratings
    Dynamic content00 Ratings00 Ratings8.44 Ratings
    Ability to test dynamic content00 Ratings00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
    Landing pages00 Ratings00 Ratings8.54 Ratings
    A/B testing00 Ratings00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
    Mobile optimization00 Ratings00 Ratings7.45 Ratings
    Email deliverability reporting00 Ratings00 Ratings8.85 Ratings
    List management00 Ratings00 Ratings8.55 Ratings
    Triggered drip sequences00 Ratings00 Ratings6.95 Ratings
    Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and Cheetah Digital and Mapp Digital
    Feature
    Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
    -
    Ratings
    Cheetah Digital
    -
    Ratings
    Mapp Digital
    8.1
    5 Ratings
    6% above category average
    Dashboards00 Ratings00 Ratings8.35 Ratings
    Standard reports00 Ratings00 Ratings8.35 Ratings
    Custom reports00 Ratings00 Ratings7.85 Ratings
    Pre-Send Testing
    Comparison of Pre-Send Testing features of Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and Cheetah Digital and Mapp Digital
    Feature
    Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
    -
    Ratings
    Cheetah Digital
    -
    Ratings
    Mapp Digital
    8.2
    4 Ratings
    1% above category average
    URL Validation00 Ratings00 Ratings9.03 Ratings
    Link Tracking00 Ratings00 Ratings7.83 Ratings
    Image Validation00 Ratings00 Ratings7.84 Ratings
    Inbox Display00 Ratings00 Ratings8.14 Ratings
    Email Accessibility Tools00 Ratings00 Ratings8.34 Ratings
    Spelling and Grammar Check00 Ratings00 Ratings7.84 Ratings
    Spam Testing00 Ratings00 Ratings8.34 Ratings
    Email Previews00 Ratings00 Ratings8.64 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Amazon SESCheetah DigitalMapp Digital
    Small Businesses
    Postmark
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Listrak
    Score10 out of 10
    Mad Mimi
    Score10 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Postmark
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Sailthru
    Score5.3 out of 10
    Campaign Monitor by Marigold
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Listrak
    Score10 out of 10
    Emma by Marigold
    Score8.5 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Amazon SESCheetah DigitalMapp Digital
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (23 ratings)
    8.0
    (13 ratings)
    8.0
    (13 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.6
    (3 ratings)
    7.8
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    4.0
    (1 ratings)
    1.9
    (4 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.3
    (8 ratings)
    6.8
    (3 ratings)
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.0
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    3.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Amazon SESCheetah DigitalMapp Digital
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Amazon AWS
    Amazon Simple Email Service comes with the bundle of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and it also offers a limited number of emails per month for free. One who has a technical background and wants to send custom emails with custom domains in a professional way can go with Amazon Simple Email Service. If you have no technical background or tech team, it might not be useful for you.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zeta Global
    I think CheetahMail, being one of the main ESPs in the market, is a quality choice. However, I would suggest that it's really only valuable for a bit larger of an organization, generally having staff of 100+ and revenues in tens of millions -- this is mainly to justify the amount of investment required, so may be cost-prohibitive to some. You also need to make sure that you understand the entire "level of support" you will gain through your specific contract.... the key is understanding what types of resources are within your organization (who's doing the coding? who comes up with the next campaign? What's the overall strategy?) Depending on these questions and resources, may help determine your final needs from a services point of view. CheetahMail can provide a wealth of various services specific to needs (and changes over time as your business changes), but a clear understanding of what you have before you bring them on will really help getting up and running quickly. Also be sure to truly understand the costs for the initial integrations, setups, IP senders, etc.
    Read full review
    Mapp Digital
    During our use of MAPP Digital, it is deserving to say that the product helped us to overcome the main challenges we faced in our business at the time. As a preliminary user I have struggled much with hosting manual campaigns on remarketing etc. But with the Mapp digital software hosting marketing campaigns became a complete automated process with supervision. This feature offered by Mapp made a huge decrease in my daily workload and I'm more than grateful for it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Amazon AWS
    • As compare to other vendors that I have integrated response is very quick.
    • You can verify both domain or email to send out the emails from.
    • While setup you can easily configure it with your domain with few clicks like adding CNAME, DKIM records
    • Easy to use with or without access key and secret key within aws servers. You can directly map permissions to servers to go without credentials using boto3.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zeta Global
    • Internal management - This is a great web-based tool that allows our users to see what emails go to whom.
    • Organization - Many layers of organization for templates since there are many types of remarketing emails that we send out.
    • Historical Records - CheetahMail sends us the raw text files of all email actions so we can upload them to our database.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Mapp Digital
    • BlueHornet's WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface for creating emails is easier to use than many platforms. Users appreciate this. BlueHornet makes it super simple to create a version specific for mobile devices.
    • I am a big fan of the custom data segmentation tools built into BlueHornet. They are powerful and easy to use. Many other ESPs, including a number of the top rated ones, do not have such powerful, easy to use segmentation tools. This matters. It helps a user send more relevant emails.
    • BlueHornet makes sharing to social networks simple. In this day and age, forwarding to a friend is dead. Sharing to social networks is essential. Having this be easy to do is very important.
    Read full review
    Cons
    Amazon AWS
    • While the service limits are one of the main points that keep the delivery metrics so reliable, it can be stressful to get a new implementation out the door quickly.
    • If you're looking for a point-and-click style email delivery tool, this is not the right type of product for you. Amazon Simple Email Service is for a developer-centric approach to implementation into existing applications, processes, and services.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zeta Global
    • The organization of CheetahMail could at times be better, as you create more and more mailings, they just pile up in a long list. It would be useful to be able to create folders to store specific mailings in. (ex. editorial, newsletters, marketing, etc.)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Mapp Digital
    • It would be nice to see the API's functionality introduced into the web client.
    • The reporting tools for transactional messages is different than the rest of the system. This promotes difficulty with getting accurate reporting in the web client, outside of an API call.
    • The custom fields are different for transactional messages, which introduces times when human error may flub the fields because they aren't contiguous throughout the product.
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Zeta Global
    As I have begun exploring competitors, I've come to realize that every competitor offers so much more functionality and integration than CheetahMail does. When we first signed our contract, CheetahMail was much more innovative and at the forefront of email. Since being bought out by Experian, we've seen a huge decline in service and innovation. They have laid off much of their staff and moved their account representatives to Costa Rica. They also heavily rely on on third parties which you will have to pay large amounts of money for while other Email Service Providers have integrated new technologies into their platform. You will get more for your money going to a different email service such as Responsys, Silverpop, Listrak and the like,
    Read full review
    Mapp Digital
    Although BlueHornet offers helpful testing capabilities, the ESP is a bit outdated. There is a lot of room for aesthetics improvement as they are not appealing. The reporting tool is usually broken, and reporting either no, or wrong metrics. If this ESP were to update their design, as well as fix the reporting tool, I think this platform would be much better.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Amazon AWS
    1. Very less cost. 2. Fastest in market. 3. Negligible downtime. 4. Easy to integrate with other systems. 5. Easy to setup with your domain and email.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zeta Global
    CheetahMail has a high learning curve to master and requires a lot of backend work with tech teams to set up. Navigation is not the best and everything that should be automated is still extremely manual.
    Read full review
    Mapp Digital
    There were three tabs used to navigate throughout the system called, "publish," "engage," and, "measure." These three tabs made the site very user friendly and all features easy to find
    Read full review
    Performance
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Zeta Global
    No answers on this topic
    Mapp Digital
    They rolled out new feature requests quite frequently and always kept our team up to speed on what they were changing/adding to the system
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    We did not have the need of contacting Amazon for support. The documentation they provide is of great quality. Examples are easy to follow. One thing to have into consideration is we didn't have the premium support for AWS, so I can't provide details on how good or bad this service is, but in general, the basic support I had was great.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zeta Global
    I've been very satisfied with the support given by Cheetah, they are always asking and looking for areas where they can help you improve upon your business. They are very knowledgeable and are able to quickly find any answer you are looking for.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Mapp Digital
    Sometimes it was hard to get an initial response but after we started CCing more people, it became a lot better!
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Zeta Global
    No answers on this topic
    Mapp Digital
    They made sure to go through anything and everything that we wanted
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Zeta Global
    No answers on this topic
    Mapp Digital
    I wasn't there when they first got it, but when I got there there were only a few people that knew a little bit about it. There was A LOT that we didn't know. Then BlueHornet came and had some workshops and we learned a lot that we didn't even know existed. They were doing a lot of things wrong before BlueHornet came and showed up more about the tool
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Amazon AWS
    Mailchimp has a fixed monthly price, and with the number of emails that we sent, it's pretty expensive. Since our mailings are quite infrequent, using Mailchimp didn't make financial sense for us, even though Mailchimp is a more polished, packaged solution for email marketing. We evaluated other email delivery solutions as well and didn't find anything that matches Amazon SES on reliability and pricing.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zeta Global
    I believe Cheetah DMS is a bit more complete and a lot more complex to use than Mailchimp. Mailchimp was born as a mail marketing service while Cheetah has always worked across the whole online advertising spectrum making it a better solution for clients that need a certain level of service and sophistication.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Mapp Digital
    We were able to thoroughly evaluate the program for Mapp Digital thanks to the free trial's availability. Comparing the two products' graphical user interfaces, it's evident that Mapp Digital comes out on top. Mapp Digital's excellent customer service was another reason for our decision to work with the company.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Amazon AWS
    • SES is still more cost effective than other email services like Mailgun.
    • Unless we have a high-traffic month, staying within the free tier is very nice for our bottom line.
    • Not having to spend time worrying about SES reliability saves us frustration and money.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zeta Global
    • Our efficiency has decreased with CheetaMail actually. Too many service calls to find out why something isn't working as expected, account setup questions, issues with PiP, takes too long to get a simple form built, customer service response time, etc...
    • Reporting is not very streamlined. This has caused us to take our reporting offline and use a method with better visibility.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Mapp Digital
    • BlueHornet has been a good entry-level platform. We have successfully launched scores of clients with limited email marketing experience onto this platform. Because it is easy to use, we have spent minimal effort needing to help these clients with problems.
    • It is easy to migrate clients on or off BlueHornet, depending upon their needs. This is helpful because it allows our clients to be on exactly the right platform. Some platforms make it difficult to migrate off, essentially trapping clients on a platform that no longer meets their needs or business objectives.
    • I wish BlueHornet were keeping pace with technology advancements in the industry. The gap between the biggest ESPs and competitors like BlueHornet seems to be growing.
    Read full review
    ScreenShots