Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. Twilio SendGrid

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
Twilio SendGrid
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns provides users with segmentation, campaign editing, and deliverability. According to the vendor, Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns is trusted by over 80,000 customers globally, including Airbnb, Spotify and Uber. Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns aims to help users by providing: MORE EFFICIENT EMAIL BUILDING The campaign building process is free from frustrating, rigid step-by-step wizards that slow users down. The vendor says…
$15
per month
Pricing
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Twilio SendGrid
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
Basic
$15
per month
Advanced
$60
per month
Free
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon SESTwilio SendGrid
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)Twilio SendGrid
Features
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Twilio SendGrid
Email & Online Marketing
Comparison of Email & Online Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
-
Ratings
Twilio SendGrid
7.1
Ratings
11% below category average
WYSIWYG email editor00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Dynamic content00 Ratings6.80 Ratings
Ability to test dynamic content00 Ratings5.60 Ratings
Landing pages00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
A/B testing00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Mobile optimization00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Email deliverability reporting00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
List management00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Triggered drip sequences00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
-
Ratings
Twilio SendGrid
7.6
Ratings
1% below category average
Dashboards00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Standard reports00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Custom reports00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Pre-Send Testing
Comparison of Pre-Send Testing features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
-
Ratings
Twilio SendGrid
8.1
Ratings
1% above category average
URL Validation00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Link Tracking00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Image Validation00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Inbox Display00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Email Accessibility Tools00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Spelling and Grammar Check00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Spam Testing00 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Email Previews00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Twilio SendGrid
Small Businesses
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
VerticalResponse
VerticalResponse
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
VerticalResponse
VerticalResponse
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

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Score 9.4 out of 10
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User Ratings
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Twilio SendGrid
Likelihood to Recommend
7.9
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(0 ratings)
3.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Twilio SendGrid
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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I think Sendgrid is a great tool for sending out emails of all types. I've primarily used it for transactional emails as we've had other solutions for marketing emails, but I'm sure it would do just a good job - there is a "Marketing" section within the app you can use. Sendgrid integrates really easily with the development frameworks I've used, such as Laravel and Lumen; I've also integrated it with Moodle with ease.
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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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  • Drag and drop email designer for transactional emails - super nice even though I do code, it's much quicker and easier to implement without code.
  • Very simple implementation. Only a few lines of code need to be added in our backend and boom we were up and running in less than a day.
  • Listening to customer feedback. They regularly send emails about new features and ask for feedback to improve their software.
  • Some of the cheapest and best dedicated IPs.
  • Easy integration and setup between marketing and transactional emails. Super helpful to have everything in one place.
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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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  • Actually viewing previous emails dispatched. SendGrid does not have this feature - although it provides numbers on emails dispatched within 3 days for the cheapest plan.
  • The service asks you to pay more (although a minimal amount) to have visibility on email activity upto 30 days in the past.
  • The API doesn't allow an export of a report of email activity over a period of time. It can be quite frustrating at times to be limited in this way.
  • Their customer support isn't the best. Certainly some room for improvement there.
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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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It has the potential to be really cool. However, it feels as if it was created by developers for developers (and I work with developers, yet even for me the instrument was somewhat not easy to use - just read SendGrid's help manuals...) However, if you are into data and your way of thinking is more mathematical rather than lyrical, you'll enjoy this instrument
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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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Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.
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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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Twilio SendGrid is generally economical and thus can give better ROI compared to competitors and in a short period of time. Twilio SendGrid can be used for mass email campaigns and thus any marketer would prefer that for mass email marketing compared to say Outreach because Outreach is more of a sales tool and suitable for sending lesser emails.
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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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  • Switching to Sendgrid has saved us over $3000/year compared to using other platforms.
  • Sendgrid has saved us time as the process for creating email campaigns is so easy.
  • Because of the time and financial savings, we have been able to spend more time/money on creating more appropriate marketing strategies which, in turn, has generated more revenue.
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