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

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)

SparkPost (discontinued)

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
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 SES	SparkPost (discontinued)
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)	SparkPost (discontinued)
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?	SparkPost (discontinued) Chandra Shekar Kali Email Marketing Specialist Chose SparkPost (discontinued) Mailchimp and sendgrid are giving good services and good customer support 24/7 and ROI is increased with this as transition is very smooth. SparkPost is very expensive and not good as much as we think and they will least worried about your mails, tickets, call and messages. … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SparkPost (discontinued) 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Witt Sparks Chief Technical Officer, Software Developer Chose SparkPost (discontinued) I selected SparkPost based on the following factors: low-cost basic subscription Incentivized Helpful? Samir Shamma Software Engineer II Chose SparkPost (discontinued) NA Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose SparkPost (discontinued) ExactTarget, Marketo CRM. These are completely different types of systems, but their email element is similar. Incentivized Helpful? Rene Enriquez Member of the Technical Staff Chose SparkPost (discontinued) The free version provided by SparkPost is awesome and it lets you use the product and then decide if it fits or not for you, this version doesn't include any trial period which helps to evaluate the product and later make the decision of buying or not. Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)	SparkPost (discontinued)
Small Businesses	Mailjet Score 9.0 out of 10	Twilio SendGrid Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Mailjet Score 9.0 out of 10	Twilio SendGrid Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises	No answers on this topic	Everest (Return Path + 250ok) Score 10.0 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View 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. Incentivized LN Lav Nandan Software Engineer Read full review	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. Incentivized Witt Sparks Chief Technical Officer, Software Developer 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	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 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	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. 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	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. Incentivized Diego Turcios Lara Devops Engineer Read full review	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 Incentivized Verified User Anonymous 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	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. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous 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	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 Incentivized Rene Enriquez Member of the Technical Staff Read full review
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