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Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. Sinch Mailgun

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Amazon SES

    Score5.3 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

    Sinch Mailgun

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AMailgun is a transactional email API service which was owned and supported by Rackspace (acquired in 2012) and then spun off in 2017 as an independent and standalone entity. It is now supported by Sinch since that company's acquisition of Mailgun and Mailjet, through acquiring Pathwire.

    $35

    per month

    Pricing
    Amazon SESSinch Mailgun
    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
    Foundation
    $35
    per month
    Growth
    $80
    per month
    Scale
    $90
    per month
    Flex
    Free
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Amazon SESSinch Mailgun
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Amazon SESSinch Mailgun
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    Chose Amazon SES
    I also use Sendgrid for sending all my transactional emails. It is more expensive than SES, but I feel it is more reliable with a better reputation than SES. I have also used Mailgun, but they are more expensive than SES and deliverability on a shared IP are as bad as SES.
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon SES
    SES is a much lower level technical tool than the other solutions we've used in the past with the exception of Mailgun. We've found SES to actually be much easier to use than Mailgun, although not as powerful. A good way to explain the difference between MailChimp, Constant …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon SES
    Although I like the email template capability with these other services, and one of them is actually a customer, the simplicity, reliability, and cost effectiveness of SES keeps it at the top of the list.
    Not to mention, we use so many other services at AWS, the integration is …
    Incentivized
    Chose Amazon SES
    Amazon SES is bare-bones, insofar as it will not "help" you with the contents of your message. You cannot use variables in the e-mail, it will not automatically track whether or not the recipient opened the mail or not, it will not help with unsubscribe links, and it will not …
    Incentivized
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    Chose Sinch Mailgun
    Mailgun is easy to use and reliable.
    Incentivized
    Chose Sinch Mailgun
    I've tried SES. It had spotty deliverability and AWS has fiddly docs and apis. I tried a few others and while some worked well, they had neither the exposure or maturity to make me confident in using them in a production app. Out of all the products that I have tried that offer …
    Incentivized
    Chose Sinch Mailgun
    Mailgun was cheaper and easier to set up. No question!
    Incentivized
    Chose Sinch Mailgun
    Easier to use and also has the 10, 000 free emails/month. Sometimes I don't need more than 10,000 emails/month.
    Incentivized
    Chose Sinch Mailgun
    I previously selected mailgun because of a PHP framework called Laravel. Since I was using that framework, and they had ready examples with mailgun and how to set things up, I went with the flow. It was really easy. Later when I started deploying my services, I was introduced …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    11 Answers
    75%
    Would buy again
    9 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    75%
    Delivers good value for the price
    9 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    11 Answers
    83%
    Happy with the feature set
    10 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    7 Answers
    80%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    8 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    11 Answers
    82%
    Implementation went as expected
    9 Answers
    User Ratings
    Amazon SESSinch Mailgun
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.9
    (21 ratings)
    8.4
    (28 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.3
    (8 ratings)
    7.4
    (7 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Amazon SESSinch Mailgun
    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
    Read full review
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    Mailgun's pay-as-you-go pricing structure is fantastic, especially if you don't need to send that much email. The pricing, including the free tier, is much more generous than what you can get with some pricier providers, like SendGrid. I mainly just use Mailgun as an SMTP server for web services, and the service has been set-up-and-forget, which is great because I never even have to log onto the Mailgun website and do any work. Mailing list support also looks great for rolling-your-own and not relying on more expensive mailing list services.
    Incentivized
    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
    Read full review
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    • Its SMTP is very easy to use and it integrates easy with all CMS and frameworks.
    • It allows you to have a record of the incoming/outgoing emails and get useful statistics about them.
    • Thanks to their 5000 free emails per month, it is a very good option to startups and small companies.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    • No built-in templating features (This was a bit sad after coming from Mandrill which excelled at this)
    • Dashboard UI (although easy to use) is a bit dated in appearance
    • Logs are cumbersome compared to Mandrill
    • Setting up TLD (top level domain) names (things like .online or .church) that are not common require an email to tech support (this is annoying)
    • Sometimes can be slow in delivery
    • Shared IP addresses can be SPAM filtered or delayed (requires an email to support to have a new one assigned - Note: this can be mitigated by buying a dedicated one for a monthly fee)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    The time for the initial setup is very quick, since you can start sending (thus developing) from their sandbox in no time. The actual configuration involves, as usual, some DNS changes that may require time but are well explained and documented. Once everything is set up, there are a lot of monitoring tools that you can use to optimize your lists.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    There have been a few minor outages through the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. These small outages are to be expected in any kind of a SaaS product, but Mailgun handles them very well. We designed our software to just retry sending after a while if there is an outage. As far as I know, we have never had to do more than a few retry cycles. This is all automated on our end, so we rarely even notice. Our customers have never noticed any mail sending outages.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    The API and the deliverability of emails is excellent. Their API is very responsive and performs perfectly fine. I have no complaints there. Their management interface though (accessed through the web) is pretty slow though. Searching through lists of emails when I'm tracking down a problem for a customer can take 10+ seconds which is annoyingly high for a modern web app.
    Incentivized
    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
    Read full review
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    You can't seem to get ANY support until you shell out hundreds of dollars per month. I even did this when we could not deliver mail with Mailgun, and the response was slow and inadequate. Nor would they refund my money. I'll never be a customer of Mailgun again.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    To be honest, the tools are quite similar and again I dont recommend using them as a standalone products, but they power the work we do via CRMs and our marketing campaigns. Mailgun integrates slightly better which it is why it is the preferred choice for our agency, as it integrations options seem to be better
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    Over the past six years, Mailgun has scaled with our growth very easily. We haven't had to make any code changes to handle our larger volume today, and their pricing has scaled naturally with our growth. As far as I know, there is nothing we will need to do in order to grow 10-fold. Mailgun just handles the load really well.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Sinch (formerly CLX Communications)
    • By not investing in our mail server, we have saved huge amount of money and time. For configuration and installation of an email server on Linux-based server, we would have to hire a network administrator.
    • If email delivery is an issue in a hosting provider, another solution is to switch the hosting. Fortunately with Mailgun, we didn't need to try different hosts and experiment which one works best for emails. We can stick to our existing web hosting provider and would not need to change it just for the sake of improving email deliverability.
    • The pricing of Mailgun is very cheap and straightforward. First 10K emails are free every month and that's a big advantage for our organization because our volume of emails is rarely more than 10K per month.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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