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Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. SMTP Email Relay Solutions

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    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

    SMTP Email Relay Solutions

    Score9 out of 10
    N/ASMTP Email Relay Solutions is a transactional email service formerly from SharpSpring and now a J2 Global company.

    $25

    per month

    Pricing
    Amazon SESSMTP Email Relay Solutions
    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
    ESSENTIAL
    $25
    per month
    STARTER
    $80
    per month
    GROWTH
    $300
    per month
    BUSINESS
    $500
    per month
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Amazon SESSMTP Email Relay Solutions
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Amazon SESSMTP Email Relay Solutions
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Ziff Davis Inc
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    13 Answers
    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
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    13 Answers
    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
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    Amazon SESSMTP Email Relay Solutions
    Small Businesses
    Postmark
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Postmark
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Postmark
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Postmark
    Score7.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Amazon SESSMTP Email Relay Solutions
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (23 ratings)
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    Usability
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.3
    (8 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Amazon SESSMTP Email Relay Solutions
    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
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    Ziff Davis Inc
    SMTP Email Relay Solutions is a great service if you are in a field where sending out bulk information, such as monthly statements to clients, invoices, or any back-to-back emails that would normally get flagged for "spam" is required.
    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
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    Ziff Davis Inc
    • It allows us to send email through the secure email gateway.
    • We are able to track and scan all email communications
    • It provides a way for legacy and current applications to send out notification and mass email communications.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Ziff Davis Inc
    • As with any technology on a server, we sometimes see issues with downtime related to network changes or firewall updates.
    • It can be a challenge to work with some of our older applications when the TLS feature is used.
    • I wish there was a more direct way to reliably use SMTP for mass email sends without the fear of being blacklisted.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Ziff Davis Inc
    I have yet to encounter any hiccups with their services. I send a large volume of emails monthly and have yet to experience any delay in my work.
    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
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    Ziff Davis Inc
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Ziff Davis Inc
    Office 365 does use secure non-standard ports for SMTP connectivity causing a problem with older programs. SMTP Email Delivery from Exchange solves this problem by giving the network admin full control over ports and specific program connections. While we do use both Office 365 and the SMTP Email Delivery we find that a mix is needed in order to meet all expectations for our end users. The majority of our SMTP communications, for users, go through Office 365 while the majority of our applications and servers do go through the SMTP Email Delivery service.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Ziff Davis Inc
    • It's the easiest way to send mail out. No worries about complex configurations.
    • It can be finicky when used in a hybrid Office 365 environment to get the proper pathways secured and working.
    • I wish there were a better way to send out mass emails, on-site, without our domain or server IP being blacklisted.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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