When comparing Amazon SES vs SparkPost, the Slant community recommends Amazon SES for most people. In the question“What are the best transactional email services?” Amazon SES is ranked 6th while SparkPost is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Amazon SES is:
Amazon SES has one of the most competitive pricings on the market with just $0.10 per 1000 emails.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Built for developers
SparkPost supports both SMTP and REST APIs and has client libraries supportings many languages including nodejs, python, php, ruby, go, elixir, and java.
Pro Best Inboxing of any provider by almost 10 points, supported by third party data
SparkPost delivers more messages to the inbox than any other provider, not just to the recipient, to the actual inbox. So while almost every company will claim high 90's on deliverability, Sparkpost is the only one that's been able to demonstrate high 90's on inbox placement as well. This has real revenue impact.
Pro Responsive and helpful support
The support team at SparkPost is extremely responsive to questions and goes above and beyond to solve any challenges and help customers get the most out of their messaging.
Cons
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.
Con Bad customer service
