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Amazon SNS

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Amazon SNS vs SendGrid: What are the differences?

  1. 1. Integration: Amazon SNS allows developers to integrate notification functionality into their applications, while SendGrid focuses on email delivery and transactional email services.
  2. 2. Messaging Channels: Amazon SNS supports multiple messaging channels, including SMS, email, and mobile push notifications, providing a broader range of communication options. In contrast, SendGrid primarily focuses on email delivery and does not offer support for other messaging channels.
  3. 3. Scalability: Amazon SNS is designed to handle high volumes of messages and offers the ability to scale seamlessly as the application's needs grow. SendGrid also supports scalability but may have limitations on message volume and throughput.
  4. 4. API Features: Both Amazon SNS and SendGrid offer comprehensive APIs for integration. However, Amazon SNS provides additional features such as message filtering, payload decryption, and message attributes, allowing for more advanced customization and flexibility in message delivery.
  5. 5. Delivery Speed: Amazon SNS aims for near-real-time message delivery, ensuring quick notification and response times. SendGrid also provides fast delivery, but the speed may depend on various factors, including the recipient's email server's performance.
  6. 6. Pricing Model: Amazon SNS pricing is structured based on the number of messages sent and additional features utilized. In contrast, SendGrid offers different pricing tiers based on the number of emails sent per month, with additional charges for advanced features.

In Summary, Amazon SNS and SendGrid differ in terms of integration capabilities, messaging channels supported, scalability, API features, delivery speed, and pricing model.

Advice on Amazon SNS and Twilio SendGrid

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?

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Replies (4)
Justini Powell
Lead Developer at Watermark Community Church · | 4 upvotes · 87.2K views
Recommends
on
Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

If you need your emails to be sent in a time-sensitive manner, I'd recommend SendGrid. We were using Mailgun and the lag because they aren't "transactional" in nature caused issues for us. SendGrid also has the ability to do dynamic templates and bulk send from their API. I don't know that they have the shared layout ability you mentioned, though.

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Mika Henriksson
Coder at mhenrixon Consulting · | 4 upvotes · 87.1K views
Recommends
on
PostmarkPostmark

The only transactional email service that I've been able to stomach is Postmark! It is by far the easiest (and quickest to get feedback from) service that I have come across. While drowning in attempts to debug Mandril, Mailgun and others I get quick feedback from Postmark in what I need to do.

Postmark for the win!

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Vit Ulicny
Recommends
on
MandrillMandrill

We are using more extensively Mandrill.

It is a ok tool, which gives you the power for emailing with nice set of features.

The templates editing and management is a bit tricky, but this is mostly related to email templates in general, which are hard to create and maintain.

I do not think you can share the parts of the templates. You can have your predefined templates with possibility to insert dynamic content.

They provide a limited possibility to preview and test your templates.

The template editor is text only. For the better editors checkout http://topol.io or https://mosaico.io

Unfortunately, I do not have experience with the other tools and possibilities to manage templates.

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Aric Fedida
Founder, CTO at ASK Technologies Inc · | 1 upvotes · 86.5K views
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Twilio SendGridTwilio SendGrid

At this stage, all of the tools you mentioned do email delivery pretty well. They all support email templates as well. Here are some considerations:

  1. Twilio owns SendGrid. If you're an existing Twilio customer, in my opinion that's a good reason to use SendGrid over the other solutions. The APIs are solid, and Twilio has excellent developer tools that allow you to create interesting automations (which is important for scaling).
  2. Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
  3. Mailgun is a tool on its own. Like the other two, it supports mail templates and is built to be controlled almost exclusively via APIs.

SendGrid and Mandrill have pretty nice WYSIWIG template editors as part of their platform. Not so sure about Mailgun.

So for me the considerations would be: 1. How easy is it for you to integrate with their API? How complete is their API in terms of your own specific needs? 2. Prices: Which one works best for my budget? 3. Am I OK with editing the templates elsewhere (or even by hand), and then pasting the code into Mailgun? Or do I want the comfort of Mandrill or Sendgrid with their WYSIWYG editors?

Personally I'd go with Twilio, simply because it's such a massive ecosystem they are less likely to go bankrupt, and their APIs are rock solid.

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Decisions about Amazon SNS and Twilio SendGrid
Slawomir Pucia
Head of Product at Coresender · | 5 upvotes · 79.9K 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 SNS
Pros of Twilio SendGrid
  • 12
    Low cost
  • 6
    Supports multi subscribers
  • 190
    Easy setup
  • 137
    Cheap and simple
  • 107
    Easy email integration!
  • 86
    Reliable
  • 58
    Well-documented
  • 28
    Generous free allowance to get you started
  • 25
    Trackable
  • 21
    Heroku add-on
  • 15
    Azure add-on
  • 13
    Better support for third party integrations
  • 6
    Simple installation
  • 6
    Free plan
  • 4
    Helpful evangelist staff
  • 4
    Great client libraries
  • 3
    Great support
  • 3
    Better customer support than the competition
  • 3
    Great add-ons
  • 2
    Nice dashboard
  • 2
    Scalable
  • 1
    Web editor for templates
  • 1
    Cool setup
  • 1
    Within integration
  • 1
    Easy set up
  • 1
    Free
  • 1
    Great customer support
  • 1
    Google cloud messaging

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Cons of Amazon SNS
Cons of Twilio SendGrid
    Be the first to leave a con
    • 3
      Google analytics integration is not campaign-specific
    • 1
      Shared IP blacklist removal takes months
    • 0
      Shares IP blacklist removal

    Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

    What is 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.

    What is 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.

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    What companies use Amazon SNS?
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    What tools integrate with Amazon SNS?
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    What are some alternatives to Amazon SNS and Twilio SendGrid?
    Amazon Pinpoint
    Amazon Pinpoint makes it easy to run targeted campaigns to drive user engagement in mobile apps. Amazon Pinpoint helps you understand user behavior, define which users to target, determine which messages to send, schedule the best time to deliver the messages, and then track the results of your campaign.
    Twilio
    Twilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate various communication methods into their software and programs.
    Amazon MQ
    Amazon MQ is a managed message broker service for Apache ActiveMQ that makes it easy to set up and operate message brokers in the cloud.
    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
    Firebase is a cloud service designed to power real-time, collaborative applications. Simply add the Firebase library to your application to gain access to a shared data structure; any changes you make to that data are automatically synchronized with the Firebase cloud and with other clients within milliseconds.
    See all alternatives