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  1. Stackups
  2. Utilities
  3. Email Services
  4. Transactional Email
  5. Amazon SNS vs Postmark

Amazon SNS vs Postmark

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Postmark
Postmark
Stacks351
Followers184
Votes52
Amazon SNS
Amazon SNS
Stacks1.4K
Followers1.2K
Votes18

Amazon SNS vs Postmark: What are the differences?

Introduction

This document outlines the key differences between Amazon SNS and Postmark, two popular messaging services. Please find the specific differences described below.

  1. Scalability: Amazon SNS offers high scalability as it can handle large volumes of messages and notifications in real-time, making it suitable for applications with rapidly growing user bases. On the other hand, while Postmark also supports high volumes of messages, it may have certain limitations in terms of scalability compared to Amazon SNS.

  2. Message Types: Amazon SNS supports multiple messaging options including SMS, email, and push notifications, making it versatile for various communication needs. Postmark, however, focuses primarily on email delivery, with advanced features tailored specifically for transactional email sending. Hence, Amazon SNS offers a wider range of message types compared to Postmark.

  3. Pricing: Amazon SNS follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are charged based on the number of messages sent and delivered. Postmark, on the other hand, uses a subscription-based pricing model with different plans based on the number of emails sent per month. Therefore, the pricing structure differs between the two services.

  4. Infrastructure Management: With Amazon SNS, users have to manage and scale their own infrastructure since it operates as a fully managed service, providing more control and flexibility but requiring additional effort. On the other hand, Postmark handles the infrastructure and scaling for users, allowing them to focus more on email delivery and content creation.

  5. Delivery Optimization: Both Amazon SNS and Postmark employ different optimization techniques for ensuring high email deliverability rates. Amazon SNS optimizes message delivery through various notification protocols and supports platform-specific delivery features. Postmark, being specifically focused on email delivery, offers advanced features such as bounce and spam filtering, as well as automatic retry mechanisms.

  6. Integration Ecosystem: Amazon SNS integrates seamlessly with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) products, enabling easy integration with various AWS services, such as AWS Lambda for serverless processing. Although Postmark offers integrations with popular developer tools and frameworks, it does not have the extensive integration ecosystem offered by Amazon SNS within the AWS infrastructure.

In summary, Amazon SNS provides scalability, supports multiple messaging types, follows a pay-as-you-go pricing model, requires users to manage their infrastructure, optimizes message delivery, and has extensive integration within the AWS ecosystem. Postmark, on the other hand, focuses on email delivery, utilizes a subscription-based pricing model, handles infrastructure management for users, offers advanced email delivery features, and provides integrations with popular developer tools and frameworks.

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Advice on Postmark, Amazon SNS

Manish
Manish

Lead Consultant at Knoldus Software LLp

Oct 24, 2020

Needs adviceonAmazon SNSAmazon SNSAmazon PinpointAmazon Pinpoint

Instead of Amazon SNS, which is currently being used to send outbound push notification and including SMS, we want to build the 2 Way SMS using Amazon Pinpoint. Just want to know about Pinpoint and any outstanding issues if we drop SNS since it does not support 2 Way and use Pinpoint for both incoming and outgoing flow.

248k views248k
Comments
Slawomir
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.

88.6k views88.6k
Comments
Ben
Ben

May 18, 2020

Decided

While building our authentication system, we originally picked Mailgun. However, emails took minutes to arrive and some of them didn't get delivered - or got delivered to spam.

We started looking for a new provider, and settled on Postmark. We love that they track time-to-inbox, it makes me feel they really care about going above and beyond to provide a good service.

62.8k views62.8k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Postmark
Postmark
Amazon SNS
Amazon SNS

Postmark removes the headaches of delivering and parsing email for webapps with minimal setup time and zero maintenance.

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.

Create a new virtual server- Instant access to our infrastructure, no waiting required. Create as many servers as you want, for each of your web applications and environments.;Drop code into your app- Swap in our SMTP endpoint, or get started with our APIs using one of our send API libraries for Ruby, Rails, .NET, Python, PHP, and more.;Send emails and track delivery- A beautiful interface to monitor volume, bounces, spam complaints, and send activity. View full email content to troubleshoot issues.;Parse replies & other inbound email- Let Postmark automatically convert email replies into simple JSON documents and send them into to your application for processing.
In most cases, developers can get started with Amazon SNS by using just three APIs: CreateTopic, Subscribe, and Publish. Additional APIs are available, which provide more advanced functionality.;With SNS you can publish a message once, and deliver it one or more times. So you can choose to direct unique messages to individual Apple, Google or Amazon devices, or broadcast deliveries to many mobile devices with a single publish request.;SNS allows you to group multiple recipients using topics. A topic is an “access point” for allowing recipients to dynamically subscribe for identical copies of the same notification. One topic can support deliveries to multiple endpoint types -- for example, you can group together iOS, Android and SMS recipients. When you publish once to a topic, SNS delivers appropriately formatted copies of your message to each subscriber.;Amazon SNS allows applications and end-users on different devices to receive notifications via Mobile Push notification (Apple, Google and Kindle Fire Devices), HTTP/HTTPS, Email/Email-JSON, SMS or Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queues.;Amazon SNS provides access control mechanisms to ensure that topics and messages are secured against unauthorized access
Statistics
Stacks
351
Stacks
1.4K
Followers
184
Followers
1.2K
Votes
52
Votes
18
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 18
    Simple
  • 10
    Great analytics
  • 8
    Email, done right
  • 5
    Heroku Add-on
  • 5
    Easy setup
Cons
  • 1
    No 24x7 support
Pros
  • 12
    Low cost
  • 6
    Supports multi subscribers

What are some alternatives to Postmark, Amazon SNS?

Mandrill

Mandrill

Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

Twilio SendGrid

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

Mailgun is a set of powerful APIs that allow you to send, receive, track and store email effortlessly.

Amazon SES

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.

OneSignal

OneSignal

OneSignal is a high volume push notification service for websites and mobile applications. OneSignal supports all major native and mobile platforms by providing dedicated SDKs for each platform, a RESTful server API, and a dashboard.

sendwithus

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.

Urban Airship

Urban Airship

We’ve built the smartest, most aware, precise, easy-to-use, scalable, secure and powerful push messaging platform on the planet. Our Push messaging platform leverages all that is unique about mobile as a channel, and that lights the spark to create meaningful and valuable mobile experiences. We help put your app in front of your users at the right time, and in the right place to drive usage and brand engagement.

Google Cloud Messaging

Google Cloud Messaging

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.

Firebase Cloud Messaging

Firebase Cloud Messaging

It is a cross-platform messaging solution that lets you reliably deliver messages at no cost. You can notify a client app that new email or other data is available to sync. You can send notification messages to drive user re-engagement and retention. For use cases such as instant messaging, a message can transfer a payload of up to 4KB to a client app.

Mailjet

Mailjet

Mailjet is a real-time Cloud Emailing platform: scalable, agile and flexible. Our unique algorithm boosts your deliverability and our platform provides in-depth insight so you can optimize more than ever.

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