Amazon SES vs Mailgun
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Amazon SES and Mailgun.
Quick Verdict
4.0/5
Amazon SES
0 reviews
3.7/5
Mailgun
0 reviews
Amazon SES is rated higher (4.0 vs 3.7). New accounts get up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits with a 6-month free plan; the old 62,000/month EC2 allowance is no longer listed on the pricing page Mailgun is a developer-focused email API service owned by Sinch. Inbound email parsing, email validation API, and detailed analytics. Popular for startups building email features into their apps.
 Amazon SES Cheapest bulk email API — $0.10 per 1,000 emails | Mailgun Email API for developers — by Sinch | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 4.0 (0 reviews)✓ | 3.7 (0 reviews) |
| Pricing model | pay-as-you-go | freemium |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Engineering teams on AWS sending transactional or bulk email at volume who want the lowest per-email cost and can own deliverability operations. | Developers and SaaS teams sending transactional email from applications who also need inbound email parsing, validation, and deliverability tooling |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi accessus datacentereu datacenterapac datacenter | free tierapi access |
| Visit Amazon SES → | Visit Mailgun → | |
Amazon SES
Pros
- + Lowest published per-email rate: $0.10 per 1,000 emails, no plan required
- + Same-region integration with EC2, Lambda, IAM, and CloudWatch
- + Transparent pricing page covering add-ons and plan bands
- + Global Endpoints for multi-region sending resilience
- + Scales to very high volume without provisioning infrastructure
Cons
- - Sandbox start (200 messages/day to verified recipients) with an opaque production-access review
- - No marketing tooling, templates, or dashboards — it is a pipe, not a suite
- - Dedicated IPs, attachments, and deliverability add-ons inflate the real bill
- - Deliverability and IP warm-up are your responsibility
Mailgun
Pros
- + Inbound email parsing on every plan, including Free — the strongest developer-side feature in this category
- + Published four-tier pricing with explicit overage rates ($15/$35/$90 per month tiers)
- + Credit-backed 99.99% availability SLA on API, SMTP, and outbound delivery
- + US or EU (Ireland) sending regions per account, with GDPR/HIPAA/SOC/ISO 27001 compliance paperwork
Cons
- - One day of log retention on Free and Basic — debugging old delivery issues is impossible without exporting logs
- - Chat and phone support only on the $90/month Scale tier; support quality under Sinch ownership draws community criticism
- - Dedicated IPs cost extra below high volumes (third-party listings quote ~$59/IP/month)
- - US operating entity under a Swedish parent — CLOUD Act exposure remains for privacy-sensitive EU buyers
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