Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. Microsoft Exchange

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

Microsoft Exchange

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting 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
Microsoft Exchange	Score 9.2 out of 10	N/A	Microsoft Exchange is a secure email / messaging gateway with file archiving and encryption / data loss capability, available as a hosted service (Exchange Online) or installed (Exchange Server).	N/A

Pricing

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

Microsoft Exchange

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

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Amazon SES	Microsoft Exchange
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)	Microsoft Exchange
Considered Both Products	Amazon SES LN Lav Nandan Software Engineer Chose Amazon SES Amazon Simple Email Service is much better in terms of customization and has fair pricing. Incentivized Helpful? Zobia Khan Jr. Devops Engineer Chose Amazon SES Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon SES 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. … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon SES We have not used any other alternatives. Incentivized Helpful? Francisco Mosse Director Chose Amazon SES We have used a dozen services. They are almost all more expensive. Some force you to wait one week to approve/deny your account if they suspect that the email database is not legal. I have very important clients with legal databases that were rejected by other companies and … Incentivized Helpful? Diego Turcios Lara Devops Engineer Chose Amazon SES We really thought of using Mail Chimp, and have used it before in the past, but the advantage of Amazon Simple Email Service is that we were using AWS infrastructure for these web applications. We had the instances running in EC2, our database was an RDS and Logs Cloudwatch, so … Incentivized Helpful? JH Joe Hakooz Owner 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 Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon SES I haven't used others in this space. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon SES I'd recommend SendGrid and Mailchimp to most smaller business that can't dedicate engineers solely to their email pipeline. The price/value ration is fair and the tools are fairly flexible for the intended use cases. It's often a good idea to start to start there and only pivot … Incentivized Helpful? Luis Escoffié Consultor de Marketing Digital Chose Amazon SES The process of setting up Amazon was really easy and straightforward compared to Mandrill. And right now Mandrill is an add-on in MailChimp, so no longer a real alternative. Incentivized Helpful? Dave Stack Member 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 Helpful? Anindya Chatterjee CEO Chose Amazon SES In terms of ease of use, Gmail is the best. But, SES is preferred because there is no rate limit and it is so inexpensive. If you want list management, image embed capability, and easy setup, SES is not for you. You need to be technically sound and have a thorough understanding … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon SES Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce Incentivized Helpful? Arnas Kazlauskas IT Customer Support Specialist Chose Amazon SES I've selected Amazon SES due to two factors. First of all, the price is really competitive. I haven't seen a better price and if you did, please send me an email. The second factor was that I do not need all those functions to track the subscriptions, sales, reports because I … Incentivized Helpful? Justin Schroeder Full Stack Developer 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 Helpful? D. Marshall Lemcoe Jr. Owner and CEO 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 Helpful? RS Ranu Singh Technology Manager Chose Amazon SES They have fix cost and not pay per use model like Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and moreover selecting best suited plan is also difficult as per our organisation use case. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Amazon SES Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is a product you know will be there long term, without changing hands or drastic changes in pricing or feature set. Incentivized Helpful?	Microsoft Exchange Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange We have not tried other Email server products yet, but we are about to make this step in the near future. We are definitely going to try several Linux-based Email Server solutions so that we can choose the one that better suits our needs. Have some time to do this, as our … Incentivized Helpful? Sachin Vinay Network Administrator Chose Microsoft Exchange We had a Zimbra on-premise server earlier and were pretty satisfied with it. But when compared with the advanced features of the Microsoft Exchange server, we could easily justify our purchase team to go for this since we already have O365 apps. Incentivized Helpful? Hasan ALTAY Senior Accountant Chose Microsoft Exchange Microsoft Exchange Product The best cloud-based enterprise-grade archiving platform with a host of features that enable files to be securely archived and retrieved with advanced search options. This tool is very easy to use and has a User-friendly interface. It is a highly … Incentivized Helpful? Emily Bickel System Administrator Chose Microsoft Exchange Both items are used by me on a daily basis. Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint don't seem to have a lot in common to me. When working with the Exchange platform, it's all about scheduling events in the calendar and sending emails. I was able to find the most crucial … Incentivized Helpful? Kelly Peterson System Administrator Chose Microsoft Exchange Most of the 365 subscriptions include desktop and cloud versions of Microsoft programs. These "traditional" software may be installed on a desktop computer and used offline without any problems, as long as you have a working Internet connection. Because so many firms still … Incentivized Helpful? Gerardo Varillas Product Manager Chose Microsoft Exchange 1) The cost per user is almost the same (around $3 USD more than Google Workspace) but the Office tools that Microsoft includes are the best in the market. The end-users are really adapted to them and the other tools like Google Sheets and Google Documents are really bad. 2) … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange Given all businesses I have worked for used Windows OS and Microsoft applications, it makes sense to stick with Microsoft Exchange. It's a given that if you use Microsoft applications you should use Microsoft Exchange. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange Microsoft Exchange is used by several companies worldwide due to its versatility and competitive rates which includes Office 365 (depending on the license purchased), it stacks up against other vendors e.g., Google. MS Exchange provides shared mailboxes which are not available … Incentivized Helpful? Claire Adams System Engineer Chose Microsoft Exchange In comparison to Amazon SES, Microsoft Exchange was significantly more flexible and customizable. Amazon SES seems more complicated from an administrative standpoint. It became more difficult for us to consider migrating to a new platform since our workers were more comfortable … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange It has better ease of integration with the servers and company data. It has a relatively better cost compared to all the tools available. The privacy features and capabilities are something best in class. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange Office 365 is not recommended for shared use so we are using Microsoft Exchange. This helps to have access to multiple users and easy access to emails and calendars to provide support round the clock. Incentivized Helpful? Teri Horton-Sandlin Training Coordinator/Accreditation Manager Chose Microsoft Exchange I am not really sure as I did not choose to go to Microsoft Exchange. Incentivized Helpful? AK Alex Kranz Senior System Administrator Chose Microsoft Exchange Microsoft Exchange offered far more flexibility and customization than Google Workspace. From an administration perspective, it seemed easier to work with Exchange than with Gsuite/Google Workspace. Our employees were more familiar with Microsoft and their comfort level made … Incentivized Helpful? NP Nimesh Patel Data scientists Chose Microsoft Exchange Easy to use, keeping calendar as an inbuilt feature and other AI tools which are missing on other companies features. Incentivized Helpful? EH Eddie Hicks Enrollment Specialist Chose Microsoft Exchange I myself am a front-end user of both products. I don't really see too much of a comparison between Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint. When using the Exchange platform it is more about calendar appointments and email communication. Using share Point I was able to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange Microsoft is more sturdy and feature-packed than GSuite. Especially with the Office integrations, even though the UI doesn't stand up against them, it offers way better features and is just more convenient to use for what we require at our organization. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange Office 365 is pure ease. You get excellent compatibility with the entire Microsoft Office suite, as well as affordable access to Microsoft Office applications. All of this is supported by Microsoft's extremely dependable cloud. It's a great option for small businesses that … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange We use Zimbra for some specific tasks in our company. Microsoft has superiority over Zimbra in terms of the graphical user interface. I like the Microsoft exchange interface as it is more futuristic. Also, Microsoft exchange has a better user experience. Zimbra mail can be … Incentivized Helpful? Andrea Bardone Senior Consultant Chose Microsoft Exchange It gives the impression of being a more professional and more robust tool. Despite the large amount of data, it always manages them at its best, without performance problems. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange Google workspace has excellent spam filtering, but poor customizability without resorting to third-party software or hacks/workarounds. Microsoft 365 has its own problems. We are currently using both Microsoft Exchange and Exchange Online (Microsoft 365) to handle mailbox … Incentivized Helpful? VR Vishal Ranjan Senior Storage Administrator Chose Microsoft Exchange We found the Microsoft Exchange to be more robust and loaded with features which made our life easy and our ability to communicate and provide\get updates more efficient. Microsoft Exchange provided more advanced security features which were what our organization was looking … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange It provides me enhanced security over Gmail and is easy to navigate all around the console but its cost can be made less cheap as compared to Gmail. Incentivized Helpful? Donald Mascola IT Services Manager Chose Microsoft Exchange Simply put, would never use anything but Microsoft Exchange. Never considered any other applications. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange Microsoft Exchange is the go-to software if you are going with the Microsoft stack as your main infrastructure provider. It made the most sense going with Microsoft to use Outlook with Exchange, as it would provide the most seamless experience when paired with Defender or most … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft Exchange We acquired Microsoft Exchange because they offered us a super package with a good discount, and this favored the change. We also made the decision because, as a work tool, it offers us a wide range of options to work in a team and with other areas. This opens up the … Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

Microsoft Exchange

Secure Email Gateway

Comparison of Secure Email Gateway features of Product A and Product B
	Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) - Ratings	Microsoft Exchange 8.1 Ratings 3% below category average
Anti-malware	00 Ratings	8.10 Ratings
Customizability	00 Ratings	7.90 Ratings
Data Loss Protection	00 Ratings	8.60 Ratings
Threat Detection	00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Sandboxing	00 Ratings	7.40 Ratings
End-to-End Encryption	00 Ratings	8.30 Ratings
Management Tools	00 Ratings	8.40 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)	Microsoft Exchange
Small Businesses	Mailjet Score 9.0 out of 10	Zoho Mail Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Mailjet Score 9.0 out of 10	Avanan Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises	No answers on this topic	Avanan Score 9.4 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)	Microsoft Exchange
Likelihood to Recommend	7.9 (0 ratings)	8.8 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Availability	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Performance	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	8.3 (0 ratings)	9.9 (0 ratings)
Implementation Rating	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Configurability	- (0 ratings)	7.0 (0 ratings)
Ease of integration	- (0 ratings)	5.0 (0 ratings)
Product Scalability	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale	- (0 ratings)	5.0 (0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)	Microsoft Exchange
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. Incentivized LN Lav Nandan Software Engineer Read full review	For our clients, the switch to an entirely independent (parallel processing) Microsoft Exchange Server was a lifesaver because previous software versions frequently crashed. The clever viva add-on informs me of any things that are still uncompleted in my large email to-do lists. Migrating to Office 365 has never been easier because to the meticulous preparation that has gone into it. Web applications will load more quickly. Incentivized Kelly Peterson System Administrator Read full review
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. Incentivized RS Ranu Singh Technology Manager Read full review	An in-built calendar to manage your daily work schedule. Let's you create events, invite a particular group of people, accept invitations, and remind you of your upcoming meetings and tasks. I also like the daily emails we get from Exchange that ask you to set aside time for yourself or your other hobbies to take a short break from monotonous work. The email categorization feature is pretty good, especially the sort/search filtering option to navigate through your emails, which can also go through your deleted emails. It has an excellent spam-filtering feature which greatly reduces the chance of malware and spam. I have hardly seen spam emails get through their filter. On the other hand, it also recognizes emails from external organizations that may be spam, but are important work emails. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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. Incentivized Apurv Doshi Senior Solutions Architect Read full review	The two main factors for the better reliability & Uptime of internally hosted Exchange Server depends on Exchange Server configuration and the level of investment the organization is willing to provide for hosting the Exchange Server On-Premise Environment. As the data is stored in the organization’s hardware, any disaster may lead to the loss of email and servers. Losing data might affect business continuity and rebuilding it can be costly. Security remains a major concern. Security of data loss is main concern. To ensure that, organization needs to configure networks, systems and Exchange platform against possible threats. Hardware and license costs are high. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	Email and calendars in a business setting are requirements. And Microsoft continues to be the standard of business applications. Microsoft 365 makes Microsoft Exchange easy to use. Everything is in the cloud. Let Microsoft take care of the hardware, the software, and the security. You just enable your business users with the functionality they need. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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. Incentivized RS Ranu Singh Technology Manager Read full review	Microsoft Exchange has come a long way over the years and has nowhere near the technical overhead required for support as it did back in 2003/2007 and prior. The integrations with Teams, Defender, Sharepoint, Copilot and many other products make it a solid and well-rounded tool used for many day-to-day tasks. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Reliability and Availability	No answers on this topic	Exchange is setup with multiple servers behind load balancers to provide high availability. Incentivized Jerry Robinson Chief Technology Officer/Director of IS Read full review
Performance	No answers on this topic	I would say it's the best email product I've experienced. Incentivized Jerry Robinson Chief Technology Officer/Director of IS Read full review
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. Incentivized Diego Turcios Lara Devops Engineer Read full review	We have a good enterprise agreement with Microsoft which affords us quick phone support. I have found the support staff knowledgeable and prompt with a solution when required. At times it may be difficult to schedule a call back, this is mainly due to our need for calls early in the morning which happens to be during a shift change at Microsoft support. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Implementation Rating	No answers on this topic	Implementation/conversion can be quite complex and, unless you have certified Exchange administrators in-house, you should strongly consider a 3rd party consultant for this implementation. Incentivized Jerry Robinson Chief Technology Officer/Director of IS Read full review
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Microsoft Exchange Product The best cloud-based enterprise-grade archiving platform with a host of features that enable files to be securely archived and retrieved with advanced search options. This tool is very easy to use and has a User-friendly interface. It is a highly reliable platform that allows all employees to automatically store their data without any limitations. It offers a cost-effective solution with customized policy management. We are happy that the customer support team is always fast and concerned, and the product's uninterrupted service experience. It is very good that it stores data in real-time without losing it, even in the event of a disaster. The cost-effective solution and integration with other tools are seamless. Incentivized Hasan ALTAY Senior Accountant Read full review
Scalability	No answers on this topic	The only time Exchange has failed us is when we did something to cause the failure. Incentivized Jerry Robinson Chief Technology Officer/Director of IS Read full review
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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	After testing I found Exchange very good at removing/quarantining malware. The Global Address List is great for finding the correct person within the organization to deal with. The Clutter feature is terrible. Sometimes putting important emails into that folder for no discernible reason. Incentivized Andrew Buckle Senior Infrastructure Analyst Read full review
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