Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) vs. Mailtrap

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
Mailtrap
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Mailtrap is a modern email platform for developer and product teams that send emails at scale. It is designed to send emails with a focus on high deliverability rates, fast delivery, and protecting sender reputation. The service includes 24/7 technical support. The benefits of using Mailtrap, as described by the vendor include: High deliverability & fast delivery: 99.99% platform uptime, dedicated IPs, auto warm-up, and throttling. Multi-tenant accounts…
$15
per month
Pricing
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Mailtrap
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
Email API/SMTP Basic
$15
per month
Email Sandbox Basic
$17
per month
Email Sandbox Team
$42
per month
Email API/SMTP Business
$85
per month
Email Sandbox Business
$123
per month
Email Sandbox Enterprise
$498
per month
Email API/MTP Enterprise
$750
per month
Email API/SMTP Custom
By request
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon SESMailtrap
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsEach tier's price mentioned in the table is its starting point - they vary based on the amount of emails per month. Also, Email Sandbox has an annual pricing option.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Mailtrap
Considered Both Products
Amazon SES
Chose Amazon SES
Amazon Simple Email Service is much better in terms of customization and has fair pricing.
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. …
Chose Amazon SES
We have not used any other alternatives.
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 …
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 …
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 …
Chose Amazon SES
I haven't used others in this space.
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
Chose Amazon SES
Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and Amazon Elastic MapReduce
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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.
Mailtrap
Chose Mailtrap
SendGrid is powerful for email delivery, but Mailtrap's dedicated testing environment and focus on development teams made it the clear choice for our needs. Its ability to simulate various email scenarios without affecting real users is unmatched. Plus, their sending is …
Best Alternatives
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Mailtrap
Small Businesses
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mailjet
Mailjet
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Mailtrap
Likelihood to Recommend
7.9
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)Mailtrap
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.
Read full review
As I said, Mailtrap is particularly well-suited for software development teams working on email functionality within their applications. All the automation and intuitive environment helped us create a workflow that's almost set and forget.
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.
Read full review
  • Flexible for engineering teams. Mailtrap works well in environments where multiple developers are responsible for email functionality.
  • We're on the Enterprise plan which allows for customizations for our needs. For example, we had a request not to record email bodies for privacy reasons, and Mailtrap enabled that pretty fast.
  • The user experience is awesome. The platform is easy to use and the support team responds fast and helps us out with any questions.
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.
Read full review
  • Inbox placement analysis - currently, Mailtrap does not offer inbox placement analysis. But their analytics dashboard compensates well for that.
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.
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.
Read full review
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
sendgrid is powerful for email delivery, but Mailtrap's dedicated testing environment and focus on development teams made it the clear choice for our needs. Its ability to simulate various email scenarios without affecting real users is unmatched. Plus, their sending is reliable, regardless of your volume.
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.
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  • Efficiency - Made testing emails faster, so we can launch new features quicker.
  • Reliability - Enhanced the reliability of our email notifications (transactional emails). It really improved our customer satisfaction.
  • Cost-Effective - Avoided the need for multiple tools and saved us money by consolidating our email testing, sending, and management.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Mailtrap Screenshots

Screenshot of a display of specific data, such as Bounce Rate, Open Rate, Spam Rate, and Click Rate.Screenshot of the Mailtrap API, or it can be used by setting Mailtrap as SMTP server in a project, app, or sending service.