Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)

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

Any system that requires transactional email message functionality as an external service. The benefits of a well managed and vetted server to maintain reputation as well as being reliability is well worth the effort needed to integrate towards the API specs

Incentivized

• Amazon Simple Email Service is a much lower cost than most other solutions and truly makes cost a non-factor in most situations where we consider implementing it.
• The API is so well documented that implementing Amazon Simple Email Service in nearly any application or codebase is achievable with basic coding knowledge.

Incentivized

• Mandrill is extremely reliable. We switched from using a platform that was very hit-or-miss, but we never had a single deliverability issue with Mandrill's transactional API. Every email was sent reliably and quickly.
• Mandrill's reporting and debugging features made it easy to ensure that all our messages were getting delivered to the right place in a timely manner. In fact, Mandrill's tools were so robust that we used it as an end-around way of debugging another failing service we were using.
• Mandrill is a very affordable add-on to an existing MailChimp account. Adding an extra layer of reliability was a no-brainer, and made the cost essentially negligible to our organization.

Incentivized

• Even if you do not want to spam, you cant send an email to the unverified users.
• Integration with other services is a bit tricky. To watch the trail, handle bounced emails, save emails on S3 are not straightforward to implement.
• When you want to send a lot of emails (in bulk), it takes a significant amount of time.

Incentivized

• The rate-limit system can be troubling. If you are switching providers and already have a large e-mail volume, you're going to want to transition slowly. The per-hour send limits are initially very low, and if you have any deliverability or complaint hiccups, they will plummet quickly. The Mandrill support staff is very helpful in this area - they will not (and claim that they can not) manipulate send limits for any account at any time for any reason.
• Billing is combined in with a paid MailChimp subscription, which didn't used to be the case.
• No free tier.

Incentivized

Mailchimp does a good job of documenting the service

Incentivized

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

I haven't personally reached out to their support team, but the feedback I've heard from our tech support and engineering teams have been that their response to questions has often been they either are unsure or that Mandrill is what it is. For example, when our customers weren't able to see opens and clicks for all emails sent, and we reached out to their support, the response was it is what it is, and they'll send a notification to our app if they can.

Incentivized

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

So we actually work with clients across all of the platforms listed above, but Mandrill has a huge ease of use bonus in its favor, especially when working with clients who are setting up a Cart Recovery style marketing campaign for the first time or are looking for a bit of a fire-and-forget setup. With more sophisticated clients (on the scale of global ecommerce companies), who have a larger subscriber/customer base and in-house design teams, we find that Mandrill usually isn't enough

Incentivized

• 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

• It helped us to grow our customer database substantially in the last quarter.
• Last week we reached 62% customer engagement in our campaign. This is very good customer engagement for our projects.
• In the last quarter we achieved our target by 135%.

Incentivized