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Amazon SES vs SendGrid: What are the differences?
Introduction
Amazon SES and SendGrid are both email delivery services that businesses can use to send transactional and marketing emails to their customers. While they serve a similar purpose, there are several key differences between the two.
Pricing: When it comes to pricing, Amazon SES offers a pay-as-you-go model, allowing businesses to only pay for the number of emails they send. On the other hand, SendGrid offers tiered pricing plans based on the volume of emails sent per month, which can be beneficial for businesses with consistent email sending needs.
Deliverability: Deliverability refers to the ability of an email to reach the recipient's inbox without being flagged as spam. Both Amazon SES and SendGrid have robust deliverability rates, but Amazon SES is known for its high deliverability rates and compliance with email industry standards, making it a reliable choice for businesses that prioritize inbox placement.
Email Authentication: Email authentication protocols like DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and SPF (Sender Policy Framework) are essential for preventing email spoofing and ensuring email deliverability. Both Amazon SES and SendGrid support DKIM and SPF, allowing businesses to authenticate their emails and establish trust with recipients.
User Interface: The user interface of an email delivery service plays a crucial role in managing email campaigns effectively. Amazon SES provides a simple and straightforward interface, primarily designed for developers. In contrast, SendGrid offers a more user-friendly and intuitive interface that caters to both developers and non-technical users, making it easier to manage email campaigns for businesses with limited technical expertise.
API Integrations: Integrating an email delivery service with other platforms and applications is crucial for businesses to streamline their email workflows. Amazon SES offers a robust API that allows for seamless integration with various applications and platforms. Similarly, SendGrid also offers a powerful API with extensive documentation and a wide range of available libraries, making it easier for businesses to integrate and automate their email delivery processes.
Additional Features: While both Amazon SES and SendGrid provide core email delivery functionalities, SendGrid offers some additional features that can be beneficial for businesses. These features include advanced email analytics and reporting, email templates with customizable designs, A/B testing capabilities, and email list segmentation options.
In summary, Amazon SES and SendGrid both offer reliable and scalable email delivery services, but differ in terms of pricing models, deliverability rates, user interfaces, API integrations, and additional features offered. Businesses should consider their specific needs and preferences to choose the service that best aligns with their requirements.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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:
- 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).
- Mandrill was created by MailChimp, who have massive experience with email delivery and specifically with emailing beautiful email templates.
- 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.
We chose Postmark as our transactional email service for several reasons:
Laser-focus (at the time) on transactional email - their success/speed/reliability with delivering transactional email is amazing. Note, they have now branched out and offer marketing/broadcast email services too.
Developer-friendly - Awesome docs and resources. Their Rail gem integrates directly with ActionMailer so nearly all of our code worked without changes.
Servers - You can set up "Servers" for different mail streams/workflows to keep things separate and easy to review.
Bootstrapped - Wildbit (who makes Postmark) is bootstrapped just like the Friendliest.app and they offer a service credit to other bootstrapped startups.
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.