Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. SparkPost

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon SES
Score 8.5 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
SparkPost
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
The SparkPost Email Delivery Platform is built to help businesses deliver more value. Its features include real-time analysis of email delivery and customer engagement as well as personalized email templates. Users can also pick from any of the numerous APIs to integrate into communication. SparkPost is designed to provide all users need to power businesses for greater growth.
$30
per month
Pricing
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)SparkPost
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
Starter
$30
per month
Premier
$75
per month
Enterprise
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon SESSparkPost
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 Simple Email Service (SES)SparkPost
Considered Both Products
Amazon SES

No answer on this topic

SparkPost
Chose SparkPost
I selected SparkPost based on the following factors:
  • low-cost basic subscription
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)SparkPost
Small Businesses
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.5 out of 10
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Score 7.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.5 out of 10
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Score 7.4 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

Everest (Return Path + 250ok)
Everest (Return Path + 250ok)
Score 7.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)SparkPost
Likelihood to Recommend
7.9
(21 ratings)
1.1
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(8 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)SparkPost
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.
Read full review
SparkPost
Our early experiences with SparkPost were great; we were looking for a low-cost (or no-cost) solution to our email messaging needs, and SparkPost had the best low-cost option: 100,000 messages per month for free, guaranteed for life. Even though our team has experience with other APIs, we chose SparkPost because it felt like the best value. Our experience with it was great. Two years ago, they discontinued their free option but sent the existing users the following message: "When you signed up, we promised that if we ever changed the terms of our 100K free plan, we would continue to honor the original plan for the life of the account. I would like to reaffirm this promise: while this plan is no longer available to new customers, you are grandfathered into this level of free sending volume." The following year, apparently following a change in leadership, they decided to "deprecate" existing free plans, dropping us down from 100,000 messages per month to 500, the lowest of any email API service I'm aware of. No recognition of the broken promise, the reneged guarantee, just a 20% off coupon. This atrocious behavior that reeks of a new culture of squeezing as much money as possible out of its users and has coincided with a steady deterioration of functionality and customer service. At this point, I have no idea why anyone would pay more for a worse service that treats its users so poorly when you could use SendGrid or a similar competitor for a lower price and way more features.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
Read full review
SparkPost
  • Good Documentation
  • Developer focused
  • Supports sub-accounts
  • Good support
  • Integrates with Laravel out of the box
Read full review
Cons
Amazon AWS
  • 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.
Read full review
SparkPost
  • I really like SparkPost, it was really useful to achieve our goals
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.
Read full review
SparkPost
Would give it a zero if I could. Their customer service used to be incredible; fast response times, really hands-on with their users, and a pretty regular feedback process. They sent me an awesome t-shirt that became part of my go-to climbing gear. But for the past year, their response times went way down, their customer service was less helpful and generally a lot more rude, and they haven't asked for customer input once since their leadership change
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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.
Read full review
SparkPost
ExactTarget, Marketo CRM. These are completely different types of systems, but their email element is similar.
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.
Read full review
SparkPost
  • It has helped us with our IP health and making sure that we avoid spam traps
  • Very high deliverability and automatic retrying once they have the event
Read full review
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