26 march 2024, 09:33
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Amazon Simple Email Service, aka Amazon SES, is a cloud-based email service provider known for its reliability and versatility. But there’s a catch: it’s affordable at low sending volumes but becomes expensive once you reach high volumes.
There are many Amazon SES alternatives that allow you to send emails seamlessly and affordably. We’ll introduce you to these alternatives, including their features, pros and cons, pricing, and more.
Factors for choosing a suitable Amazon SES alternative
Before introducing you to the Amazon SES alternatives, let’s examine the main factors to consider if you want to choose an alternative email service provider (ESP).
Functionality
The first thing to consider is the key feature list of your desired Amazon SES alternative. Does it support automated emails? Does it provide A/B testing tools? How many emails can you send daily? Does it use shared IP pools or dedicated addresses? These are the kinds of questions to ask.
The features you look for depend on your email campaign strategies. For instance, if you want to send automated transactional emails to your customers, look for a platform that lets you create and reuse email templates. If you’re sending a massive volume of emails, you’ll likely need a dedicated IP address to control your sending reputation. Look for the features relevant to your business and ensure your desired Amazon SES alternative has these features before making your final decision.
Reliability
You need a platform that lets you reliably send emails to your customers. Your email service should have great uptime, excellent deliverability rates, and robust infrastructure that guarantees speedy delivery.
An unreliable email service can cause many problems. Customers might not see their emails delivered and end up confused. Emails could arrive slowly, frustrating your addressees. There’s no trade-off for reliability when choosing an Amazon SES alternative.
You can check existing customer reviews to evaluate the reliability of an email service. If many customers complain about the platform’s dependability, it’s a signal to look at other alternatives.
Pricing
Pricing is critical when choosing an Amazon SES alternative. You should choose something you can afford in the long term to avoid problems. Most email service providers showcase prices on their website, so it shouldn’t be difficult to estimate what you’ll pay based on your usage.
The final cost usually depends on your chosen features and email volume. Consider your usage level and calculate what you can afford to pay for an email service. Look at platforms that fit within your budget to avoid any future issues.
Scalability
Every business strives for growth, and your email service should be able to accommodate this need. It should handle increasing email volumes without sacrificing quality and performance.
If you’re a high-growth company, look for an email service that makes it simple to upgrade your plan and increase sending limits. It should have a robust infrastructure to handle your growing demands.
A scalable Amazon SES alternative should be able to keep customers happy as their email list grows.
User-friendliness
An ideal email service should have an intuitive interface that is easy to navigate. Sending emails to customers is already tricky enough. You don’t need an email service that complicates things further with its interface.
The interface should be responsive and intuitive, with features neatly arranged across the dashboard. You should be able to find relevant features at any time, and getting familiar with the platform's interface shouldn’t take too much time and effort.
Third-party integrations
Your email service should have third-party integrations to provide extra functionality. For example, you could connect it to your e-commerce software to send automated messages based on customer actions. You can connect it to an external CRM to manage customer relationships via email. Any worthwhile Amazon SES alternative should have an extensive library of third-party integrations for users.
The best Amazon SES alternatives
UniOne
UniOne is one of the most optimal Amazon SES alternatives for businesses. It offers the perfect blend of affordability, security, reliability, and speed for your customer emails.
Features
UniOne lets you send automated transactional or marketing emails without stress. You just need to integrate your website or app once using Web API or SMTP connection. The service boasts a 99.8% deliverability rate and stellar email delivery speed. A dedicated IP address may be purchased separately if you need one for your brand. The support team is available 24/7 to lend a helping hand to your email needs.
Pricing
Prices start from $6 monthly for 10,000 emails, and you can pay an extra $0.75 for every additional 1,000 emails. With UniOne, you can pay $850 monthly for 3 million emails, which is quite a bargain.
A dedicated IP address costs $20 for the initial setup plus a recurring $40 monthly fee. Most other Amazon SES alternatives charge above $50 monthly for the same service.
Ease of use
UniOne offers a clear, intuitive dashboard that any non-specialist can navigate. You can quickly sift through different features, checking your email statistics, delivery rates, click-throughs and more in real-time. The platform has detailed technical documentation to help you understand every aspect of using it to send emails.
Mailgun
Mailgun is a transactional email platform that allows businesses to interact with their customers seamlessly. Thousands of companies worldwide trust Mailgun to send critical emails to their users.
Features
Mailgun offers robust infrastructure to reliably and securely send emails. It has email servers across the globe to deliver messages on time. You can use a shared or dedicated IP address to send emails, giving you greater control over your sending reputation.
This platform has extensive analytics and reporting capabilities. You can view vital metrics from a single dashboard, such as bounce rate, open rate, conversion rate, deliverability, etc. Mailgun has built a solid reputation with email clients across the globe, so your messages will likely land in customers’ inboxes and not spam folders.
Pricing
Mailgun has a free plan with limited features. The paid plans are relatively affordable, starting from $35 monthly for 50,000 emails. You can choose the $90 monthly plan for 100,000 emails, or contact Mailgun's sales team to arrange a custom plan based on your email usage.
Ease of use
Mailgun is noticeably easy to set up and use. It has a modern, responsive design that you’ll likely enjoy navigating. This platform scores high in the user-friendliness criterion.
Mailchimp
Mailchimpis perhaps the most popular email service provider worldwide, with over 10 million paying users. However, this popularity still doesn’t mean it is a perfect solution for any type of business.
Features
Mailchimp is renowned for its sophisticated features. It provides powerful tools to manage email lists and reliably send customer messages. You can find well-designed templates to form the foundation of your emails. Otherwise, you can build your templates from scratch if you have the design skills.
This platform allows you to send transactional and marketing emails. Its robust infrastructure ensures high deliverability rates.
Pricing
Mailchimp is a noticeably expensive tool. Pricing starts from $13 monthly for just 5,000 emails and 500 contacts. If you have a large mailing list (50,000+ addresses), you may have to pay thousands of dollars monthly, depending on your selected features. High-volume users can contact Mailchimp’s sales team to arrange a custom plan.
Ease of use
This platform has a steep learning curve to get used to its numerous features. However, the interface is generally responsive and quick to navigate.
Mailtrap
Mailtrap is one of the best Amazon SES alternatives for customer interaction. It reliably delivers customer messages and helps your business run smoothly.
Features
Mailtrap provides an SMTP API that lets businesses send emails seamlessly. It offers sturdy infrastructure to handle a high volume of customer emails. This platform promises a 1-second delivery time and provides dedicated IP addresses to users. You can access well-designed templates to form the foundation of your emails.
Many customers choose Mailtrap for its extensive analytics. You will have access to an interactive dashboard to track a variety of metrics such as open, bounce, and click-through rates.
Pricing
Mailtrap’s pricing ranges from $10 monthly for 10,000 emails to $750 monthly for 1.5 million emails. The most popular plan is the Business plan, which costs $85 monthly for 100,000 emails. Compared to other email service providers, Mailtrap is quite affordable.
Ease of use
Mailtrap has a user-friendly interface that you can navigate seamlessly. You’ll likely become familiarized with the interface shortly after testing it.
SendGrid
SendGrid is one of the most popular email communication platforms worldwide. This platform suits businesses with massive transactional and marketing email operations.
Features
SendGrid offers an email API that allows businesses to deliver customer emails with great uptime and near-instantaneous speed. With SendGrid, you can easily create and deploy email campaigns and choose from a vast library of templates.
This platform has built a rigid infrastructure that handles billions of emails daily, so you can be assured that your emails will be delivered to the intended recipients.
Pricing
SendGrid’s pricing ranges from $20 monthly for 1,000 emails to $450 monthly for 1.3 million emails. The final pricing depends on your chosen features and the volume of your emails. You can contact the sales team for a custom plan if needed.
Ease of use
SendGrid offers an intuitive, user-friendly interface that makes creating and managing email campaigns easy.
Postmark
Postmark is a reliable Amazon SES alternative for customer emails. It offers API libraries you can integrate with and send emails within minutes.
Features
Postmark provides a dependable infrastructure to deliver your emails within seconds. By default, you can see insights about customer emails for the past 45 days or customize the retention period to fit your requirements. This app has ready-made templates that look appealing across different email clients, allowing you to send professional emails easily.
Pricing
Postmark's pricing ranges from $15 monthly for 10,000 emails to $1,000 monthly for 1.9 million emails. If you handle a massive volume of emails, you can contact Postmark's sales team to negotiate a custom plan.
Ease of use
Customers often talk about Postmark being ridiculously easy to use. The platform’s developers and designers put much effort into building a clean interface that anyone can understand without hassles.
Bird (formerly SparkPost)
Bird is another Amazon SES alternative you can adopt to send emails to global customers.
Features
Bird provides APIs that let brands reliably send voluminous emails. This platform claims its infrastructure handles up to 500 million messages per hour with less than 2 seconds of delivery time. Users can access detailed analytics on their customer emails, helping them know when to adjust to improve customer experience. Your Bird dashboard shows 42 real-time metrics about your emails.
Pricing
Bird's monthly pricing starts from $45 for 3,000 contacts and 30,000 emails. The final price depends on your mailing list’s size and email frequency. Of course, you can contact Bird’s sales team to negotiate a custom plan with unlimited contacts and emails.
Ease of use
You can set up Bird and send emails within 10 minutes– that’s how easy the interface is to navigate.
