We sent few million emails using SES over few weeks, Sendgrid's deliverability was around 12 times better than that of SES.
Don't get me wrong, it might be perfectly fine choice for smaller projects but it is not a solution you would rely for scale. You have to build your own mailservers with warmed up IPs.
My experience with SendGrid is not very good. Slow delivery, random halts on e-mails due to low activity on account, which I was not notified about, the list goes on.
They did update their UI recently which was a good step, but the other issues remain.
I don't think SES originally supported SMTP, which meant it was harder to use and I couldn't relay through a local Postfix server. I think they fixed that, but I had already chosen SendGrid by then and I've been pretty happy with the choice.
I have moved over all of my clients who use transactional email over to SES from Sendgrid and honestly they couldn't be happier.
SES Pricing is amazing and deliverability seems to be good all across. (Not to mention you get around 60k free emails monthly if requests are coming from a AWS server)
I use both in different applications. Overall SES is no-frills but does exactly what it says it will. Deliverability is on par with SendGrid assuming your traffic is legitimate and not spammy.
The main difference is that SES lacks significant tooling. You need to roll your own monitoring, logging and block list maintenance, all of which can be a surprise coming from tools like SendGrid. Once you do all the work though, it’s largely set it and forget it.
UX is huge. Sendgrid is absurdly easy to use, and at least 3 years ago, SES was an impenetrable mass to me. I got my company up and running on Sendgrid in like 20 minutes.
Maybe it's easier nowadays, but at least a few years ago it was a night and day difference.
I don't think we really considered SES, to be honest.
We had to move pretty fast when we made the switch. My coworker tried Mailgun (which didn't verify our domain fast enough), while I tried Sendgrid.
There was also the added bonus that we had a free paid tier from Sendgrid as part of our accalerator program, so we had planned to switch to Sendgrid anyway.
MailGun has better delivery than SES and easier to get setup than SendGrid. I use both MailGun and SendGrid but stopped using SES awhile ago due to delivery issues.
reply