Sendgrid vs. Amazon SES: The Difference

Keeping track of which email service to use can be hard, let alone figuring out which one to focus on. Amazon SES vs Sendgrid: What are they and how are they different? In this article, we’ll dive into the differences between these email marketing tools. There are significant differences you should be aware of in terms of pricing, features, and support to make a well-informed decision that best fits your business needs.

Sendgrid Overview

Sendgrid is an email marketing and transactional email platform for small and large businesses. It was founded in 2009 by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins. The company is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The current CEO is Sameer Dholakia. The company claims to have over 80 thousand paying customers globally and sends over 100 billion emails every month. Sendgrid is backed by a cloud-based SMTP ( Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) provider, which acts as an email delivery engine and allows users to send email without the cost and complexity of maintaining email servers.

Sendgrid Pricing & Plans

Sendgrid pricing is available for the Email API Plans and Marketing Campaign Plans.

1. Email API Plans

An Email API is an API ( Application Programming Interface) that allows applications to access the Email Service Provider’s platform for generating and sending transactional emails, manipulating templates, moving and editing folders, building drafts, etc. A transactional email is sent to an individual following a commercial transaction or upon a specific action performed by the individual, such as registration for your services or a password reset request.

2. Free Plan

Sendgrid offers a free plan to customers who want to try using the interface. The free plan includes the following features:

• APIs, SMTP Relay, and Webhooks.
• Delivery Optimization Tools.
• Dynamic Template Editor.
• Insightful Analytics.
• Ticket Support.
• Deliverability Insights.
• 100 emails per day.

3. Essentials Plan

The Essentials plan starts at USD 14.95 per month. It offers Guaranteed Response Times on Ticket & Chat Support plus all the features offered in the Free plan. The actual amount you will pay every month depends on the number of emails you want to send every month. At USD 14.95 per month, you get zero emails.

4. Pro Plan

The Pro plan starts at USD 89.95 per month. You don’t get any free emails at this price, but It offers the following features:

• APIs, SMTP Relay, and Webhooks.
• Delivery Optimization Tools.
• Dynamic Templates + Testing.
• Insightful Analytics.
• Guaranteed Response Times on Ticket, Chat, & Phone Support.
• Deliverability Insights.
• 2,500 Email Validations.
• Dedicated IP Included.
• Subuser Management.
• Single Sign-On (SSO).

The actual amount you spend on this plan depends on the number of emails you want to send every month.

5. Premier Plan

This is a custom plan with custom pricing. It includes the following features in addition to those available under the Pro plan :

• 5,000 Email Validations
• Segment your sending, assign permissions and credit limits, and view separate statistics programmatically or in the UI.

6. Marketing Campaign Plans

A marketing campaign allows you to send promotional emails to your target audience. Sendgrid offers marketing email plans to promote your business.

7. Free Plan

The Sendgrid Free Marketing Plan comes with the following features:

• Design & Code Editors. ( Allows you to create emails using HTML code, drag & drop editing, or a mix of both).
• Segmentation.
• A/B Testing & Actionable Insights.
• 3 Email Testing Credits.
• 1 Signup Form.
• Ticket Support.
• 1 Teammate.
• Automation.

8. Basic Plan

The Basic plan starts at 15 USD per month. The actual price depends on the number of contacts and the number of emails you choose. The Basic Marketing Campaign Plan comes with the following features:

• Design & Code Editors.
• Segmentation.
• A/B Testing & Actionable Insights.
• 10 Email Testing Credits.
• 5 Signup Forms.
• Ticket & Chat Support.
• 1 Teammate.
• No automation.

9. Advanced Plan

The Advanced plan starts at 60 USD per month. The actual price depends on the number of contacts you want to send emails to and the number of emails you want to send every month. It comes with the following features:

• Design & Code Editors.
• Segmentation.
• A/B Testing & Actionable Insights.
• 60 Email Testing Credits.
• 15 Signup Forms.
• Guaranteed Response Times on Ticket, Chat, & Phone Support.
• 1,000 Teammates.
• Automation.
• Dedicated IP Included.

Amazon SES Overview

SES stands for Simple Email Service. Like Sendgrid, Amazon SES is also an Email Marketing and Transactional Email platform. Amazon SES is an email service that enables developers to send emails from any application. It is possible to configure Amazon SES to support different email use cases, such as transactional emails, marketing emails, and mass communication emails. Amazon SES is a part of Amazon Web Services, launched in July 2002. The cloud computing services were launched in March 2006.

Amazon SES Features

Amazon SES offers the following features to users and developers:

• Multiple options to configure email sending. Developers can configure email using Amazon SES Console, SMTP Interface, and Amazon SES API.
• Flexible Deployment Options include Shared IP addresses, Dedicated IP addresses, and Owned IP addresses.
• Sender Identity Management and Security. Amazon SES supports all industry-standard authentication mechanisms like DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. Authentication demonstrates to the ISP that you own the email address used for sending the email.
• Sending Statistics. Amazon SES includes a statistics report in the Amazon SES Console, which provides data about the number of emails sent, emails delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complaints, rejected, etc. You can use the global suppression list to remove bounced emails from the sending lists.
• Reputation Dashboard. Amazon SES includes a Reputation dashboard that allows you to track issues that can impact the delivery of your emails. It includes a set of tools that you can use to manage your sender’s reputation.
• Deliverability Dashboard. This dashboard helps you understand and remediate issues relating to the deliverability of your emails, such as attempting to email users who have unsubscribed from the list.
• Email Receiving. Amazon SES facilitates complete control over receiving emails. It allows you to accept or reject email based on an email address, IP address, and the sender’s domain. It provides additional tools for managing received emails.
• Mailbox Simulator. The mailbox simulator makes it easy to test how your application handles bounces or complaints. It can simulate successful deliveries, hard bounces, out-of-office responses, or feedback.

Amazon SES Pricing.

One of the good things about Amazon SES is that it is a Pay as you Go service. It doesn’t require subscriptions or contract negotiations, or minimum charges.

1. For Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud users.

Amazon does not charge for sending the first 62,000 emails from an application hosted on Amazon EC2. It charges USD 0.1 for every 1000 emails you send after that. It charges USD 0.12 for every GigaByte of attachment you send in your emails. It also includes the charges for using EC2, as applicable.

2. For Non-Amazon EC2 Users.

USD 0.10 for every 1000 emails sent and multiples thereof. There is a charge of USD 0.12 per GigaByte of attachments used in the emails.

3. For Receiving Emails.

Zero USD for the first 1000 emails and 0.1 USD for every 1000 emails received after the first 1000. You also pay USD 0.09 for every 1000 email chunks received. An incoming email chunk refers to 256 kilobytes (KB) of incoming data.

Final Words

Both Amazon SES and Sendgrid are Email Delivery platforms meant for developers. End-users may not find them very user-friendly. Both the platforms offer excellent features and are suitable for organizations that can hire professionals to manage their Email delivery engines. Amazon SES may be a more reasonable option in terms of price as it is a Pay as you Go service, and the charges are quite low. It would be best to hire someone with experience with both platforms to manage the task, as the person would bring real-world experience working with both platforms to your organization.

Also, check how to use videos in email marketing in an effective way.