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
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
$0
per month
Pricing
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
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
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.
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
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.
Enables transactional email sending via MailChimp which opens up a ton of communication opportunities via Order Confirmation, Cart Recovery, or other transactional emails.
Monitors sub-accounts send reputation and notifies of high bounce/rejection rates.
Has a very friendly, usable UI and enables smaller companies to dedicate resources to transactional emails without as much setup work as other transactional platforms.
Our system adds a notification when a donor has opened an email; however, we've found inconsistencies with the system where a donor may have opened an email, but Mandrill hasn't sent that notification to our app.
For the scenario above, when we've reached out to their support, the response has been that it is what it is. I'd like to see the supports take be focusing on improving the platform rather than saying it is what it is.
It did the job for us and we were happy with the delivery rates of the email, analytics and customisation available while integrating it within our platform.
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.
We haven't had to use support. The platform uptime is pretty much 100%, and any time we've had an issue, the staff has responded quickly, but honestly, the last time we had to contact Mandrill's support was probably well over a year ago. Once you're up and running, it works.
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.
Sendgrid offers a lot of the same features as Mandrill, but goes a lot further in helping you achieve maximum deliverability for your e-mails. They have a respectable free tier for sending as well as receiving emails, and their paid tiers are very reasonably priced. I don't have as much experience with Mailgun, but they were acquired some-time ago by Rackspace and Rackspace has a reputation for buying companies and not investing additional resources into them. So, at the time of evaluation (a few years ago) their feature sophistication was lagging behind Mandrill and Sengrid.
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.
Mandrill ensured high deliverability for messages sent to marketing leads in our customer funnel. This was incredibly important for making sure we captured leads early and often.
Mandrill was a solid and efficient way to send transactional notification messages to customers using our web-based payment system. With online payments, quick response is key, and Mandrill absolutely delivered.
Mandrill messages meant that our internal team always received notifications about leads, new sales, or problems with our systems in a timely manner. As a small startup, moving quickly was essential and we couldn't afford to miss a beat. Mandrill made sure we didn't.
