Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. Sinch Mailgun

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon SES
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Amazon 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
Sinch Mailgun
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Mailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.
$35
per month
Pricing
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Sinch Mailgun
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
Foundation
$35
per month
Growth
$80
per month
Scale
$90
per month
Flex
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon SESSinch Mailgun
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Sinch Mailgun
Considered Both Products
Amazon SES
Chose Amazon SES
They have fix cost and not pay per use model like Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and moreover selecting best suited plan is also difficult as per our organisation use case.
Chose Amazon SES
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a product you know will be there long term, without changing hands or drastic changes in pricing or feature set.
Chose Amazon SES
Amazon Simple Email Service is much better in terms of customization and has fair pricing.
Chose Amazon SES
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. …
Chose Amazon SES
We have not used any other alternatives.
Chose Amazon SES
We have used a dozen services. They are almost all more expensive. Some force you to wait one week to approve/deny your account if they suspect that the email database is not legal. I have very important clients with legal databases that were rejected by other companies and …
Chose Amazon SES
We really thought of using Mail Chimp, and have used it before in the past, but the advantage of Amazon Simple Email Service is that we were using AWS infrastructure for these web applications. We had the instances running in EC2, our database was an RDS and Logs Cloudwatch, so …
Chose Amazon SES
Although I like the email template capability with these other services, and one of them is actually a customer, the simplicity, reliability, and cost effectiveness of SES keeps it at the top of the list.
Not to mention, we use so many other services at AWS, the integration is …
Chose Amazon SES
I haven't used others in this space.
Chose Amazon SES
I'd recommend SendGrid and Mailchimp to most smaller business that can't dedicate engineers solely to their email pipeline. The price/value ration is fair and the tools are fairly flexible for the intended use cases. It's often a good idea to start to start there and only pivot …
Chose Amazon SES
The process of setting up Amazon was really easy and straightforward compared to Mandrill. And right now Mandrill is an add-on in MailChimp, so no longer a real alternative.
Chose Amazon SES
I also use Sendgrid for sending all my transactional emails. It is more expensive than SES, but I feel it is more reliable with a better reputation than SES. I have also used Mailgun, but they are more expensive than SES and deliverability on a shared IP are as bad as SES.
Chose Amazon SES
In terms of ease of use, Gmail is the best. But, SES is preferred because there is no rate limit and it is so inexpensive. If you want list management, image embed capability, and easy setup, SES is not for you. You need to be technically sound and have a thorough understanding …
Chose Amazon SES
Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Chose Amazon SES
I've selected Amazon SES due to two factors. First of all, the price is really competitive. I haven't seen a better price and if you did, please send me an email. The second factor was that I do not need all those functions to track the subscriptions, sales, reports because I …
Chose Amazon SES
SES is a much lower level technical tool than the other solutions we've used in the past with the exception of Mailgun. We've found SES to actually be much easier to use than Mailgun, although not as powerful. A good way to explain the difference between Mailchimp, Constant …
Chose Amazon SES
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 …
Sinch Mailgun
Chose Sinch Mailgun
All three solution we evaluated are compatible and integrated in Google Cloud Platform (the cloud solution we use). We went for Sinch Mailgun since we already used Sinch to handle SMSs, and they are from the same Company.
Chose Sinch Mailgun
I am in Email marketing space over 8 years. And Sinch Mailgun was far most the worst experience I got. Not suggested.
Chose Sinch Mailgun
To be honest, the tools are quite similar and again I dont recommend using them as a standalone products, but they power the work we do via CRMs and our marketing campaigns. Mailgun integrates slightly better which it is why it is the preferred choice for our agency, as it …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
We chose Mailgun over SendGrid and Postmark because we really like their API. We have stuck with them because they have never given us any reason to switch. Their reliability is superb and their API remains excellent. SendGrid and Postmark are both good in their own rites, …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
They have a great free tier for up to some amount of emails a month. Looks attractive when you are a new startup, but once you have customers and they go down, not so much.
Chose Sinch Mailgun
Mailgun is easy to use and reliable.
Chose Sinch Mailgun
MailGun is more expensive than SparkPost and about the same price-wise as SendGrid. MailGun had a notably easy set-up process, since they are the first SMTP service we signed up with, and their support has been very helpful in identifying deliverability issues, providing …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
I chose Mailgun because I work in the healthcare space, and they were the only company I could find that was decent, not over the top expensive, and would sign a BAA.
Chose Sinch Mailgun
Not really a con but I typically choose SendGrid over Mailgun simply because I've been using SendGrid for so long. Overall, SendGrid and Mailgun are both rock solid and very affordable. You could probably flip a coin on which one to use. I would definitely look into SendGrid's …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
Mailgun was selected by the co-founders and original development team. But once I took over as the head of development and marketing we switched over to the competitor, SendGrid. SendGrid was not only cheaper, but gave us a much more robust product with marketing emails, ads, a …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
Amongst the various transactional email vendors (Mandrill by MailChimp, SendGrid's transactional email product, Mailjet, etc.) they are all relatively similar. Mailgun stands out in that it has one of the more generous free tiers and therefore is a strong choice for small …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
I've tried SES. It had spotty deliverability and AWS has fiddly docs and apis. I tried a few others and while some worked well, they had neither the exposure or maturity to make me confident in using them in a production app. Out of all the products that I have tried that offer …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
Mailgun was cheaper and easier to set up. No question!
Chose Sinch Mailgun
We used SendGrid previously and thought MailGun seemed a bit cheaper without sacrificing quality.
Chose Sinch Mailgun
MailerLite, MailChimp and SilverPop
Chose Sinch Mailgun
I used Mailgun first, and after they weren't able to fix my problems or offer any support I switched to Postmark with lower bounce rates, higher delivery rates with more detailed reporting. Setup is more of a to-do but it's well worth it once you start seeing your bounce rate …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
As I mentioned before, even when you do try to validate an email address client side, you have options (see above) BUT and that is the big but, those are mostly a regex solution, but it's not enough. mailgun addresses that exact issue and also looks at the domains, their rules, …
Chose Sinch Mailgun
We went with Mailgun because they had fantastic APIs and libraries (Ruby in our case) and because their pricing was among the best of all services that we evaluated.
Chose Sinch Mailgun
I previously selected mailgun because of a PHP framework called Laravel. Since I was using that framework, and they had ready examples with mailgun and how to set things up, I went with the flow. It was really easy. Later when I started deploying my services, I was introduced …
Best Alternatives
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Sinch Mailgun
Small Businesses
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 8.4 out of 10
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 8.4 out of 10
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Sinch Mailgun
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.5
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(0 ratings)
7.4
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Sinch Mailgun
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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Even with the list of negatives, Mailgun is still a great solution for how easy it is to work with and how ubiquitous it is to find examples and libraries out there on the internet. The company has great support and are usually quick to address and fix things. I do think they have some room for improvement with the lack of templates and the outdated UI log handling/filtering.
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Pros
  • 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.
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  • Its SMTP is very easy to use and it integrates easy with all CMS and frameworks.
  • It allows you to have a record of the incoming/outgoing emails and get useful statistics about them.
  • Thanks to their 5000 free emails per month, it is a very good option to startups and small companies.
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Cons
  • 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.
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  • Mailgun is used by spammers, and sometimes your assigned mail server will get blacklisted because of other users on it.
  • If you end up with a mail server that is blacklisted, your mail will go nowhere. And, below the $300 and up pricing tiers, there is no one at Mailgun to help you get this problem resolved. You are just stuck.
  • In other words, Mailgun is unreliable as a mission-critical service. I would strongly recommend using a service with better processes in place.
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Usability
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.
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The time for the initial setup is very quick, since you can start sending (thus developing) from their sandbox in no time. The actual configuration involves, as usual, some DNS changes that may require time but are well explained and documented. Once everything is set up, there are a lot of monitoring tools that you can use to optimize your lists.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.
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Support Rating
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.
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MailGun's support staff is both friendly and helpful. They were very instrumental early on with helping out during the setup process by answering questions, providing documentation on best sending practices, detailing information about the advantages of sending from a dedicated IP rather than an IP pool, and helping us to remove ourselves from blacklists.
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Alternatives Considered
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.
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Not really a con but I typically choose SendGrid over Mailgun simply because I've been using SendGrid for so long. Overall, SendGrid and Mailgun are both rock solid and very affordable. You could probably flip a coin on which one to use. I would definitely look into SendGrid's Accelerate Program too.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.
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Return on Investment
  • Amazon Simple Email Service has improved delivery rates and eliminated delivery issues everywhere we have impelmented it.
  • We have been able to enforce stricter security within our application environments because we are using Amazon Simple Email Service instead of handling email transmissions natively.
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  • ROI great for client campaigns
  • Great for getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time
  • A valuable part of our tech stack as a lead gen agency
  • Ease of use when plugging it into other tools (speed to implement)
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ScreenShots