Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. Sinch Mailgun

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

Mailgun's pay-as-you-go pricing structure is fantastic, especially if you don't need to send that much email. The pricing, including the free tier, is much more generous than what you can get with some pricier providers, like SendGrid. I mainly just use Mailgun as an SMTP server for web services, and the service has been set-up-and-forget, which is great because I never even have to log onto the Mailgun website and do any work. Mailing list support also looks great for rolling-your-own and not relying on more expensive mailing list services.

Incentivized

• 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

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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

• No built-in templating features (This was a bit sad after coming from Mandrill which excelled at this)
• Dashboard UI (although easy to use) is a bit dated in appearance
• Logs are cumbersome compared to Mandrill
• Setting up TLD (top level domain) names (things like .online or .church) that are not common require an email to tech support (this is annoying)
• Sometimes can be slow in delivery
• Shared IP addresses can be SPAM filtered or delayed (requires an email to support to have a new one assigned - Note: this can be mitigated by buying a dedicated one for a monthly fee)

Incentivized

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

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

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

You can't seem to get ANY support until you shell out hundreds of dollars per month. I even did this when we could not deliver mail with Mailgun, and the response was slow and inadequate. Nor would they refund my money. I'll never be a customer of Mailgun again.

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

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 integrations options seem to be better

Incentivized

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.

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

• By not investing in our mail server, we have saved huge amount of money and time. For configuration and installation of an email server on Linux-based server, we would have to hire a network administrator.
• If email delivery is an issue in a hosting provider, another solution is to switch the hosting. Fortunately with Mailgun, we didn't need to try different hosts and experiment which one works best for emails. We can stick to our existing web hosting provider and would not need to change it just for the sake of improving email deliverability.
• The pricing of Mailgun is very cheap and straightforward. First 10K emails are free every month and that's a big advantage for our organization because our volume of emails is rarely more than 10K per month.

Incentivized