When comparing SendGrid vs Amazon SES, the Slant community recommends SendGrid for most people. In the question“What are the best transactional email services?” SendGrid is ranked 5th while Amazon SES is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose SendGrid is:
SendGrid offers amazing analytics and reports. You can check which messages are delivered, which are marked as spam and much more. SendGrid also lets you download the data in order to look through it locally.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Excellent analytics
SendGrid offers amazing analytics and reports. You can check which messages are delivered, which are marked as spam and much more. SendGrid also lets you download the data in order to look through it locally.
Pro Great support for beginners and experienced users
If you are just getting started with email marketing and transactional emails or if you get stuck somewhere, SendGrid includes amazing videos and guides to help you work out any problem you may have. What's more, it also has phone, chat and email support available 24/7.
Pro Both newsletter and transactional emails
Usually when choosing a service to send your application's emails you need two. One to send the newsletter or news and promotions from the marketing team and the other to send you application's automatic emails and messages.
With SendGrid you don't have to choose two because it doubles both as a transactional and marketing platform at once.
Pro Has a free tier
12,000 free e-mails per month.
Pro Easy to use API
The API is very easy to use and very intuitive. On top of that, the documentation for the API is complete and very useful, covering everything you need to know.
Pro Highly cost effective
Amazon SES has one of the most competitive pricings on the market with just $0.10 per 1000 emails.
Pro Barebones service
Amazon SES is created to be a simple service for just sending emails through the API. If you need only to send emails and only that, then Amazon SES should at least be a good contender for your service of choice.
Pro Free tier if using EC2
If you are hosting your web application on Amazon EC2, then the first 62,000 emails each month are free.
Cons
Con Port 2525 is not encrypted
Most cloud providers block ports 25, 465, and 587. Port 2525 is commonly open but SendGrid only allows unencrypted messages via that port.
Note: There are also so some certificate issues (see https://support.sendgrid.com/hc/en-us/articles/200182008-Certificate-verification-failed-for-smtp-sendgrid-net)
Con Poor deliverability of emails
Con Not suitable for people without a technical background
There are some features which are missing by default from SendGrid (sign-up forms or follow-up messages just to name a few). In order to implement those in your emails, you need to know how to program because you have to code them yourself through SendGrid's API.
Con No sandbox/test mode
Does not support test keys that can be used to check integration with SendGrid and that cannot be used to send real e-mail out. It means that either you don't cannot verify that your integration with SendGrid works during development, or you have to use real credentials which should not be shared widely across your team.
Con Can't view contents of sent emails
They do not capture the sent emails. This means you cannot check that the email was sent correctly, and it makes it harder to debug issues that arise.
Con Poor error handling
When email could not be received by the recipient due to some failure on their side, SES just drops it. No error recovery, reporting is not that great either.
Con Too lightweight
Since SES has been stripped down to do only one thing and do it well (send emails), there will be a lot of things missing which you will have to add on your own if you wish to have them.
Things like analytics, template hosting, design tools etc... are missing from SES. Although there are third-party tools that allow you to use Amazon SES's API to send emails with all the above features added.
