Overview

Amazon SES

Stacks9.9K

Followers6.0K

Votes328

Mandrill

Stacks4.4K

Followers1.6K

Votes926

Amazon SES vs Mandrill: What are the differences?

Introduction

Amazon SES and Mandrill are both email service providers that offer reliable and scalable email delivery solutions for businesses. However, they have some key differences that set them apart. In this article, we will explore the main differences between Amazon SES and Mandrill.

Pricing Model: One of the main differences between Amazon SES and Mandrill is their pricing model. Amazon SES offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where you only pay for the emails you send. On the other hand, Mandrill offers a subscription-based pricing model, where you pay a monthly fee based on the number of emails you plan to send.
Email Volume Limits: Another important difference between Amazon SES and Mandrill is their email volume limits. Amazon SES has a default sending limit of 10,000 emails per 24-hour period for accounts in the production mode. However, you can request an increased limit if needed. In contrast, Mandrill has different pricing tiers that offer varying monthly email volume limits, ranging from 500,000 to 15 million emails.
Email Templates: Amazon SES and Mandrill also differ in their email template capabilities. Amazon SES provides a basic template functionality that allows you to create and customize email templates with simple HTML and placeholders. On the other hand, Mandrill offers a more advanced template system that includes conditional logic, merge tags, and dynamic content.
Transactional vs. Marketing Emails: Amazon SES primarily focuses on transactional email delivery, such as order confirmations and password resets. While you can send marketing emails through Amazon SES, they have strict guidelines and policies to prevent misuse. In contrast, Mandrill is specifically designed for marketing email delivery, offering features like email tracking, A/B testing, and integration with marketing automation tools.
Third-Party Integration: Both Amazon SES and Mandrill offer extensive third-party integration options. However, Mandrill has a larger ecosystem of integrations, including popular platforms like MailChimp, WordPress, and Shopify. Amazon SES also provides integration capabilities with various services, but it may require more manual setup and configuration.
Email Deliverability Tools and Support: When it comes to email deliverability tools and support, Mandrill has a more robust set of features. It provides detailed delivery reports, bounce tracking, and dedicated IP options. Mandrill also offers a higher level of customer support, including live chat and phone support. Amazon SES, on the other hand, provides basic delivery and bounce notifications but may require additional third-party tools for more in-depth analytics and monitoring.

In summary, Amazon SES and Mandrill differ in their pricing models, email volume limits, email template capabilities, focus on transactional or marketing emails, third-party integrations, and email deliverability tools and support. These differences make them suitable for different use cases and business needs.

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Advice on Amazon SES, Mandrill

Slawomir

Head of Product at Coresender

Oct 15, 2020

Decided

Of course we chose Coresender to send our own transactional emails :) So I thought I'll let you know how we use it.

We set up separate sending accounts for all company needs, eg. transactional emails, monitoring alerts, time to inbox. We even configured our office printers to send emails through Coresender.
We have a real-time and extremely usable view into what emails go through each account, so each time anybody reports an email not arriving we're able to assist them in a few seconds
We utilize our message timeline feature, so we can learn eg. if people are clicking on password reset links
We always know how many of our onboarding emails are being opened which helps us improve them
Finally, we have full controll over our suppressions lists, so we can add (and remove!) from them whenever necessary.

To sum up, at Coresender we're eating our own dogfood and it helps us stay connected to the product and understand our customers better.

88.5k views88.5k

Comments

Imelda

Engineer at pounce3 Project Management

Dec 9, 2020

Decided

We did a quick test on the reliability of these three common email services, sending a few emails an hour at random intervals.

Unfortunately, none of them had 100% availability over the 30 day test. I don't understand why this is so hard?

Mailgun performed the best with the most reliability and fastest response times. Mandrill was notably bad.

30.9k views30.9k

Comments

Klaus

Jan 22, 2020

Needs advice

For transactional emails, notifications, reminders, etc, I want to make it so writers/designers can set up the emails and maintain them, and then dynamically insert fields, that I then replace when actually sending the mail from code.

I think the ability to use a basic layout template across individual email templates would make things a lot easier (think header, footer, standard typography, etc).

What is best for this? Why would you prefer Mailgun, SendGrid, Mandrill or something else?

101k views101k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Amazon SES	Mandrill
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.	Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.
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.;Scalable – Amazon SES is based on the scalable technology used by Amazon web sites around the world to send billions of messages a year.;Designed for use with other Amazon Web Services – You can track your bounces and complaints in Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), and you can set up Easy DKIM or verify any domain you administer via Amazon Route 53 with a few clicks of your mouse. There is also a free usage tier for emails originating from Amazon EC2 and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.	Inbound Email- Set up inboxes for Mandrill to control. When they receive email, we’ll make an API call to your app with all the relevant information, so you don’t have to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes.;Webhooks Support- Create custom event notifications, keep track of new signups and unsubscribes in real-time, get a notice of every spam complaint so you can flag them in your database.;Rules Engine- Modify the content of email coming through Mandrill without having to involve developers. For example, you could tell Mandrill to take any email coming from confirmation@yourdomain.com, give it a new template, and add Google Analytics tracking.;Advanced Tagging and Reports- Generate custom reports based on the stats that matter to you. Add campaign tags like “confirmation email” and “mailing list,” and combine them with data Mandrill automatically tracks. Tagging allows you to graph sets of data like “bounce rate for confirmation emails to Gmail addresses.”;Meaningful Metrics- Observe trends and monitor delivery to see if you’re on track or if you need to make adjustments. Search by recipient or domain, sort sent email by bounces or rejections, and track opens and clicks.;Status Updates- Troubleshoot from wherever you are, and send status messages to recipients from Mandrill;Mobile Access- Your transactional email is generated at all hours. Mandrill is the only service with a mobile app, so you can monitor your performance even when you’re away from your desk.
Statistics
Stacks 9.9K	Stacks 4.4K
Followers 6.0K	Followers 1.6K
Votes 328	Votes 926
Pros & Cons
Pros 102 Reliable 97 Cheap 57 Integrates with other aws services 52 Easy setup 18 Trackable	Pros 189 Simple installation 141 Great api 123 Generous free allowance to get you started 114 Cheap and simple 99 Trackable Cons 1 Really hard to pull analytics out via api
Integrations
No integrations available	Parse sendwithus

What are some alternatives to Amazon SES, Mandrill?

Twilio SendGrid

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Mailgun

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sendwithus

Send email from your app with a simple API call, Sendwithus manages the rest. Templates, testing, data management, segments, and analytics are all accessible through a friendly dashboard.

Postmark

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Mailjet

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SparkPost

SparkPost is the world’s #1 email delivery provider. We empower companies with actionable, real-time data to send relevant email to their customers which increases engagement and both top and bottom line revenue.

Mailtrap

We offer one platform that covers all email-related needs in one place: testing, sending, and in-depth tracking to control how email infrastructure works and performs.

Apostle.io

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Nodemailer

It is a single module with zero dependencies – code is easily auditable. The email delivery is Secure using TLS/STARTTLS. You can use HTML content, as well as plain text alternative.