Amazon SES vs Google Cloud Messaging: What are the differences?

What is Amazon SES? Bulk and transactional email-sending service. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2.

What is Google Cloud Messaging? Simple and reliable messaging to reach over a billion devices. Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) is a free service that enables developers to send messages between servers and client apps. This includes downstream messages from servers to client apps, and upstream messages from client apps to servers.

Amazon SES belongs to "Transactional Email" category of the tech stack, while Google Cloud Messaging can be primarily classified under "Mobile Push Messaging".

Some of the features offered by Amazon SES are:

• Simple – Amazon SES eliminates the complexity of licensing, installing, and operating a third-party service, or building and maintaining an internally hosted email solution. Sending email through Amazon SES is as simple as using SMTP or calling an API, and Amazon SES makes it easy for you to monitor your sending activity and deliverability statistics.
• Inexpensive – There are no up-front fees or fixed expenses with Amazon SES, and you benefit from the efficiencies of Amazon’s scale. Your only costs are low charges for the number of emails sent and data transfer fees.
• Reliable – Amazon SES runs within Amazon’s proven network infrastructure and datacenters. All outgoing email messages are stored redundantly across multiple servers and datacenters, providing high availability and data durability.

On the other hand, Google Cloud Messaging provides the following key features:

• Versatile Messaging Targets: Distribute messages to your client app in any of three ways — to single devices, to groups of devices, or to devices subscribed to topics.
• Downstream Messaging: For purposes such as alerting users, chat messaging or kicking off background processing before the user opens the client app, GCM provides a reliable and battery-efficient connection between your server and devices.
• Upstream Messaging: Send acknowledgments, chats, and other messages from devices back to your server over GCM’s reliable and battery-efficient connection channel.

"Reliable" is the top reason why over 99 developers like Amazon SES, while over 6 developers mention "Free" as the leading cause for choosing Google Cloud Messaging.

Stripe, PedidosYa, and Docplanner are some of the popular companies that use Amazon SES, whereas Google Cloud Messaging is used by paytm, Ressy Technologies Private Limited, and Life360. Amazon SES has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1283 company stacks & 274 developers stacks; compared to Google Cloud Messaging, which is listed in 18 company stacks and 8 developer stacks.