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Amazon SES vs SparkPost: What are the differences?

Introduction

This article provides a comparison between Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and SparkPost, outlining their key differences. Both services are popular choices for sending emails, but they have distinct features and functionalities that set them apart.

  1. Pricing and Plans: One significant difference lies in the pricing and plans offered by Amazon SES and SparkPost. Amazon SES provides a pay-as-you-go model, allowing users to only pay for the number of emails sent. In contrast, SparkPost offers both a pay-as-you-go model and subscription plans with various tiers, providing options for different user needs and budgets.

  2. Email Deliverability: Another key difference is in the email deliverability rates. Amazon SES has high deliverability rates due to its infrastructure and reputation as part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem. On the other hand, SparkPost boasts a highly optimized delivery infrastructure, including real-time tracking and adaptive email delivery, ensuring high deliverability rates for users.

  3. API Flexibility: Both Amazon SES and SparkPost offer robust APIs for integration with applications and systems. However, Amazon SES is a part of the AWS suite, offering seamless integration with other AWS services. In comparison, SparkPost provides an extensive range of APIs, libraries, and SDKs, offering flexibility for integration with various platforms and programming languages.

  4. Email Automation Capabilities: Amazon SES provides basic email automation capabilities, enabling users to send transactional, marketing, and event-triggered emails. However, SparkPost excels in email automation with its advanced features like detailed segmentation, personalization, and automation workflows. SparkPost allows for dynamic, personalized content in emails, allowing users to create highly targeted and engaging campaigns.

  5. Team Collaboration: SparkPost has built-in team collaboration features that enable multiple users to work collaboratively on email campaigns and templates. It provides role-based access controls, making it easier for teams to collaborate, review, and approve email content before sending. In contrast, Amazon SES does not provide dedicated team collaboration features, requiring users to rely on external collaboration tools or processes.

  6. Reporting and Analytics: Both Amazon SES and SparkPost offer reporting and analytics features. Amazon SES provides basic email metrics and bounce tracking, allowing users to monitor and analyze email delivery. In comparison, SparkPost offers more detailed reporting, including email engagement metrics like opens, clicks, and conversions. It provides comprehensive analytics to measure campaign performance and make data-driven decisions.

In summary, Amazon SES and SparkPost differ in their pricing models, email deliverability rates, API flexibility, email automation capabilities, team collaboration features, and reporting/analytics capabilities. Understanding these key differences can help users choose the email service provider that aligns with their specific needs and requirements.

Decisions about Amazon SES and SparkPost
Slawomir Pucia
Head of Product at Coresender · | 5 upvotes · 85.3K views

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.

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Pros of Amazon SES
Pros of SparkPost
  • 102
    Reliable
  • 97
    Cheap
  • 57
    Integrates with other aws services
  • 52
    Easy setup
  • 18
    Trackable
  • 2
    Easy rails setup
  • 10
    I could start sending real emails in less than 5 mins
  • 2
    Email don't end up in spam after DNS verification
  • 1
    Flexible, robust API
  • 1
    Very easy to integrate with Laravel

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Cons of Amazon SES
Cons of SparkPost
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 1
      Suspended paid acount without warning or reason
    • 1
      Spam trap reports are suspicious b/c all users opted in
    • 1
      Support won't answer mail (9h so far)
    • 1
      Only free for 100 emails/day
    • 1
      New dedicated ip blacklisted by some clients

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is Amazon SES?

    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 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.

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    What companies use Amazon SES?
    What companies use SparkPost?
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    What tools integrate with Amazon SES?
    What tools integrate with SparkPost?

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    What are some alternatives to Amazon SES and SparkPost?
    Twilio SendGrid
    Twilio SendGrid's cloud-based email infrastructure relieves businesses of the cost and complexity of maintaining custom email systems. Twilio SendGrid provides reliable delivery, scalability & real-time analytics along with flexible API's.
    Mailgun
    Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.
    Mailchimp
    MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, integrate with services you already use, and track your results. It's like your own personal publishing platform.
    Amazon SNS
    Amazon Simple Notification Service makes it simple and cost-effective to push to mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire, and internet connected smart devices, as well as pushing to other distributed services. Besides pushing cloud notifications directly to mobile devices, SNS can also deliver notifications by SMS text message or email, to Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues, or to any HTTP endpoint.
    Mandrill
    Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.
    See all alternatives