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Email Marketing · head to head

Amazon SES vs Sailthru

Amazon SES logo

Amazon SES

Email Marketing

Raw transactional email infrastructure priced per thousand messages, with no campaign UI at all

From
On request
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite
Sailthru logo

Sailthru

Email Marketing

Retail and publisher email personalisation, now one product inside the Marigold portfolio

From
On request
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Each has a real cost: Amazon SES there is no campaign UI, template editor, list management or scheduling interface at all, so any marketer-facing use case requires building or buying a separate application on top of the raw API.; Sailthru the product sits in a portfolio with several overlapping platforms under one owner, so roadmap investment is a portfolio decision rather than a product decision and is worth asking about in writing.
  • They diverge on capability: Amazon SES covers Send and receive API, Sailthru covers Interest profiles.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 1 September 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Amazon SES and Sailthru actually diverge.

Attributes where Amazon SES and Sailthru differ
AttributeAmazon SESSailthru
Pricing modelPer 1,000 emails sent, tiered by volume, no campaign features includedquote
PlatformsWebWeb, REST API

Identical on both: starting price (On request), free tier (No), user rating (Not yet rated), category (Email Marketing).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in Amazon SES

  • Send and receive API
  • Deliverability infrastructure
  • Bounce and complaint handling
  • Mail Manager
  • Configuration sets
  • Dedicated IP options

Only in Sailthru

  • Interest profiles
  • Personalisation engine
  • Prediction Manager
  • Site personalisation
  • Zephyr templating
  • Lifecycle optimiser

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

Amazon SES

  • An engineering team sending transactional email (receipts, password resets, alerts) at a volume where per-message cost dominates the decisionnot Sailthru
  • A company building its own email product or newsletter tool on AWS and wanting to own the campaign layer itselfnot Sailthru
  • A business already deep in AWS infrastructure wanting to avoid adding a separate marketing-platform vendor for pure transactional sendingnot Sailthru
  • A high-volume sender for whom SES's per-thousand rate is materially cheaper than a marketing platform's equivalent volume pricingnot Sailthru

Sailthru

  • A publisher sending a personalised daily newsletter assembled per reader from a content cataloguenot Amazon SES
  • A retailer that wants email and on-site recommendations driven by the same affinity modelnot Amazon SES
  • High-cadence sending where per-recipient content assembly matters more than journey branchingnot Amazon SES
  • Teams that want churn and lifetime value scores available as native campaign conditions rather than imported fieldsnot Amazon SES

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

Amazon SES

  • There is no campaign UI, template editor, list management or scheduling interface at all, so any marketer-facing use case requires building or buying a separate application on top of the raw API.
  • Deliverability and sender reputation management are the sender's responsibility to configure correctly; a mistake in DKIM, SPF or DMARC setup has no support layer catching it before it affects deliverability.
  • New accounts start in a sandbox with strict sending limits and must request production access from AWS, adding a manual approval step some competitors do not require.
  • Inbound email processing via Mail Manager is priced and configured separately from outbound sending, so a bidirectional email use case is really two separate services to set up.
  • Comparing its per-message price directly against Campaign Monitor or Zoho Campaigns is misleading, since those prices include a full marketing platform that SES does not provide at any price.

Sailthru

  • The product sits in a portfolio with several overlapping platforms under one owner, so roadmap investment is a portfolio decision rather than a product decision and is worth asking about in writing.
  • Pricing counts stored profiles, so retained inactive readers keep costing money long after they stopped opening anything.
  • On-site personalisation requires a developer to implement the JavaScript and maintain the content feed, which puts the highest-value feature behind engineering time.
  • Zephyr is a proprietary templating language, so template maintenance skills are scarce compared with the Liquid syntax used by most competitors.
  • It is built for high-cadence content and retail sending, and B2B lifecycle programmes with long sales cycles sit poorly on the model.

Pricing, plan by plan

Amazon SES

On request
  • Essentials$undefined/month
    • $0.16 per 1,000 emails up to 10 million a month
    • $0.14 per 1,000 from 10 to 100 million a month
    • $0.11 per 1,000 above 100 million a month, no fixed monthly fee
  • Pro$undefined/month
    • $0.22 per 1,000 emails up to 10 million a month, scaling down at volume
    • $105 fixed monthly fee per account per region
    • Higher sending limits and support options
  • Enterprise$undefined/month
    • $0.23 per 1,000 emails up to 10 million a month, scaling down at volume
    • $500 fixed monthly fee per account per region
    • Highest support tier and sending limits

Sailthru

On request
  • Sailthru$undefined/year
    • Priced on stored profiles and send volume
    • Site personalisation and prediction features licensed by module
    • Annual contract through Marigold

Which should you pick?

Choose Amazon SES if

  • You need send and receive api.
  • You also want deliverability infrastructure.
Amazon SES review

Choose Sailthru if

  • You need interest profiles.
  • You work on Web, REST API.
  • You also want personalisation engine.
Sailthru review

Questions people ask

Is Amazon SES or Sailthru better?
Neither clearly leads. Amazon SES starts at On request and Sailthru at On request, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Amazon SES or Sailthru?
Amazon SES starts at On request and Sailthru at On request.
Does Amazon SES or Sailthru run on more platforms?
Amazon SES runs on Web. Sailthru runs on Web, REST API.
What is Amazon SES best used for?
Amazon SES is most often used for an engineering team sending transactional email (receipts, password resets, alerts) at a volume where per-message cost dominates the decision, a company building its own email product or newsletter tool on aws and wanting to own the campaign layer itself, a business already deep in aws infrastructure wanting to avoid adding a separate marketing-platform vendor for pure transactional sending, a high-volume sender for whom ses's per-thousand rate is materially cheaper than a marketing platform's equivalent volume pricing. Of those, an engineering team sending transactional email (receipts, password resets, alerts) at a volume where per-message cost dominates the decision and a company building its own email product or newsletter tool on aws and wanting to own the campaign layer itself are not what Sailthru is typically brought in for.
What can Amazon SES do that Sailthru cannot?
Amazon SES covers Send and receive API, Deliverability infrastructure, Bounce and complaint handling, Mail Manager. Sailthru covers Interest profiles, Personalisation engine, Prediction Manager, Site personalisation.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

Amazon SES: Can I use SES for marketing campaigns like Campaign Monitor?

Technically yes via the API, but there is no campaign UI, segmentation tool or template editor; you would need to build or buy that layer separately.

Sailthru: Who owns Sailthru now?

Marigold, formerly CM Group, which also owns Campaign Monitor, Emma, Selligent, Liveclicker and Cheetah Digital.

Amazon SES: Is there a free tier?

New AWS customers can access AWS Free Tier credits usable against SES for a limited period, but there is no permanent free sending allowance.

Sailthru: Does that affect the roadmap?

It can. Overlapping products in one portfolio compete for investment, so ask which platform is the strategic one for your segment before signing multi-year.

Amazon SES: Why is it so much cheaper per email than a marketing platform?

Because it sells only the sending infrastructure; the price excludes every campaign management feature a marketing platform bundles into its per-email cost.

Sailthru: Is it worth it just for newsletters?

For personalised daily newsletters at publisher scale it remains one of the strongest options. For simple broadcast sending it is heavily over-specified.

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