Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. SparkPost (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon SES
Score 5.3 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 (discontinued)
Score 2.8 out of 10
N/A
SparkPost offered real-time analysis of email delivery and customer engagement as well as personalized email templates. The service has been discontinued.
$30
per month
Pricing
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)SparkPost (discontinued)
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 (discontinued)
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 (discontinued)
Best Alternatives
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)SparkPost (discontinued)
Small Businesses
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Twilio SendGrid
Twilio SendGrid
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

Everest (Return Path + 250ok)
Everest (Return Path + 250ok)
Score 10.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)SparkPost (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
7.9
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(0 ratings)
1.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)SparkPost (discontinued)
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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SparkPost is great for automated sending of transactional emails. It appears to be designed for developers—it does not allow the creation and sending of emails from within the SparkPost user interface. If you're building a software system that needs to send emails, SparkPost is a great choice, but it is not a CRM.
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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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  • Email Deliverability
  • Last 10 day insights for reporting on email system health
  • Individually viewing users on the suppression list and quickly take off or put back on.
  • API
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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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  • A horrifying about-face on pricing after guaranteeing a lifetime rate.
  • A steep drop in customer care and customer service quality.
  • Increased prices compared to competitors.
  • Clumsy email templating system.
  • Lack of integration with other messaging systems.
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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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No answers on this topic
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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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
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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I'd say SparkPost is probably the worst option of the three email API products I've used. It has the worst customer service, the fewest features, and costs significantly more than SendGrid, even though SendGrid lets you integrate all of Twilio's other features into a broader set of communications media. In addition, the API and documentation were easy enough to use and integrate, but the templating system has also caused a lot of headaches for us.
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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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  • We used at the first time the free version which worked awesome.
  • We didn't have to spend our time writing all the features that SparkPost has included.
  • The dashboard give us all the information that we need to know regarding the status of the emails that have been sent from the app
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ScreenShots