When comparing Amazon SES vs Mailgun, the Slant community recommends Mailgun for most people. In the question“What are the best transactional email services?” Mailgun is ranked 1st while Amazon SES is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Mailgun is:
Mailgun is included and configured by default in Meteor.js. So for projects which are built using Meteor, it's very easy to integrate Mailgun.
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 Integrates by default with Meteor.js
Mailgun is included and configured by default in Meteor.js. So for projects which are built using Meteor, it's very easy to integrate Mailgun.
Pro Developer-focused
Mailgun has a RESTful API with libraries and code examples in curl, Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, C#, Go.
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 Sub-par support
It has been reported several times that Mailgun's support is not excellent. Most of the time, they require a lot of time to respond to questions or support queries.