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Amazon SES vs Mailgun: What are the differences?
Pricing Model: The key difference between Amazon SES and Mailgun lies in their pricing models. Amazon SES offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, where users are charged based on the number of emails sent and additional features used. On the other hand, Mailgun offers a tiered pricing model, where users can choose from different plans that provide specific email volumes and features. This difference in pricing models allows users to select the most suitable option based on their expected email volume and budget.
Email Deliverability: Another important difference is the email deliverability of both services. Amazon SES leverages the infrastructure of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is known for its reliability and high deliverability rates. It also provides additional features like dedicated IP addresses and domain reputation management to improve email deliverability. Mailgun also focuses on email deliverability and provides tools like real-time analytics, recipient validation, and automatic IP warm-up to optimize email delivery. However, the underlying infrastructure and deliverability rates may vary between the two services.
API Integration: When it comes to API integration, both Amazon SES and Mailgun offer robust APIs for seamless integration with applications and platforms. However, there might be differences in terms of ease of use and available features. Amazon SES provides a comprehensive API with extensive documentation and SDKs for different programming languages, allowing developers to easily integrate and control email sending. Mailgun also offers a powerful API with features like email parsing, webhooks, and email validation. The choice between the two services may depend on the specific requirements and level of technical expertise of the users.
Email Management Tools: Both Amazon SES and Mailgun provide email management tools to simplify the process of sending and tracking emails. Amazon SES offers features like bounce and complaint handling, email event tracking, and email template management. It also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudWatch, for enhanced email management capabilities. Mailgun offers similar features like bounce and spam complaint handling, advanced email tracking, and customizable email templates. The choice between the two services may depend on the specific requirements and preferred user interface of the users.
Additional Services: Apart from email delivery, Amazon SES and Mailgun also offer additional services that can enhance the overall email experience. Amazon SES provides services like email content filtering, inbound email processing, and email notifications. It also integrates with other AWS services, such as Amazon SNS and Amazon Lambda, for further automation and customization. Mailgun offers features like email validation, email validation API, and email list management tools. These additional services can complement the core email delivery functionalities and provide added value to users.
Support and Documentation: Support and documentation are important factors to consider when choosing an email delivery service. Amazon SES offers detailed documentation, a knowledge base, and developer forums to assist users in understanding and utilizing the service effectively. It also provides support through the AWS Support Center. Mailgun also provides comprehensive documentation, API references, and guides to help users integrate and troubleshoot the service. Additionally, Mailgun offers support through email and live chat. The level of support and available resources may influence the decision between the two services.
In Summary, Amazon SES and Mailgun differ in their pricing models, email deliverability, API integration, email management tools, additional services, and support/documentation. The choice between these services depends on factors such as budget, desired email deliverability, technical requirements, required features, and level of support needed.
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.
We did a quick test on the reliability of these three common email services, sending a few emails an hour at random intervals.
Unfortunately, none of them had 100% availability over the 30 day test. I don't understand why this is so hard?
Mailgun performed the best with the most reliability and fastest response times. Mandrill was notably bad.
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.
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.
Pros of Amazon SES
- Reliable102
- Cheap96
- Integrates with other aws services57
- Easy setup52
- Trackable18
- Easy rails setup2
Pros of Mailgun
- Quick email integration178
- Free plan148
- Easy setup91
- Ridiculously reliable67
- Extensive apis53
- Great for parsing inbound emails30
- Nice UI25
- Developer-centric22
- Excellent customer support15
- Heroku Add-on12
- Easy to view logs of sent emails4
- Email mailbox management for developers4
- Great PHP library2
- Great documentation2
- Great customer support, love rackspace2
- Better than sendgrid not ask too many question1
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Cons of Amazon SES
Cons of Mailgun
- Cost2
- No HTTPS tracking links supported2
- Emails go to spam due to blacklisted IP's of mailgun1
- Cannot create multiple api keys1
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