Mailgun vs Amazon SES
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Mailgun and Amazon SES.
Quick Verdict
3.7/5
Mailgun
0 reviews
4.0/5
Amazon SES
0 reviews
Amazon SES is rated higher (4.0 vs 3.7). 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. 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 Email API for developers — by Sinch |  Amazon SES Cheapest bulk email API — $0.10 per 1,000 emails | |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Rating | 3.7 (0 reviews) | 4.0 (0 reviews)✓ |
| Pricing model | freemium | pay-as-you-go |
| Starting price | Free tier available | Free tier available |
| Best for | Developers and SaaS teams sending transactional email from applications who also need inbound email parsing, validation, and deliverability tooling | Engineering teams on AWS sending transactional or bulk email at volume who want the lowest per-email cost and can own deliverability operations. |
| Features | ||
| IPv6 | ||
| DDoS protection | ||
| Automated backups | ||
| Snapshots | ||
| Managed option | ||
| Bare metal | ||
| GPU available | ||
| S3-compatible | ||
| Hourly billing | ||
| Free tier | ||
| Tags | ||
| Tags | free tierapi access | free tierapi accessus datacentereu datacenterapac datacenter |
| Visit Mailgun → | Visit Amazon SES → | |
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
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
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