Amazon SES

Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is an API and SMTP interface for sending and receiving email at scale, part of AWS, used to power transactional email (receipts, password resets, notifications) and, by developers willing to build their own tooling, bulk marketing sends. It handles deliverability infrastructure (reputation management, bounce and complaint handling, DKIM/SPF/DMARC support) without providing any user-facing campaign interface. The distinguishing commercial fact is price per message: the Essentials plan runs from 0.16 US dollars per 1,000 emails down to 0.11 at volume, with no fixed monthly fee, while a simpler à la carte rate of roughly 0.10 US dollars per 1,000 emails also exists; either way it is an order of magnitude cheaper per email than Campaign Monitor, Zoho Campaigns or any marketing-platform competitor. That price difference is the whole point and the whole limitation: SES sells raw sending capacity, and every list management, template, segmentation and campaign-scheduling feature that a marketing platform bundles in has to be built or bought separately. Buyers are engineering teams sending transactional email at volume, or teams building a custom email product on top of AWS infrastructure, not marketers looking for a campaign tool. The trade-off is explicit: SES is not a peer of Campaign Monitor or Zoho Campaigns to be compared on a feature grid; it is the infrastructure layer a company would use instead of, or underneath, a marketing platform, and choosing it means accepting engineering ownership of everything a marketing tool would otherwise provide.

• 

  Amazon SESvs

  

  SendGrid

  SendGrid: If you want transactional email infrastructure with more built-in developer tooling and templates

• 

  Amazon SESvs

  

  Campaign Monitor

  Campaign Monitor: If you need a full marketing campaign UI rather than raw sending infrastructure

• 

  Amazon SESvs

  

  Zoho Campaigns

  Zoho Campaigns: If you want campaign management bundled in rather than building it yourself