Amazon SES vs Mailgun
Both are alternatives to SendGrid. Here's how they stack up — verified facts, no spin.
Also searched as Mailgun vs Amazon SES — same comparison, one verdict.
Amazon SES
TOP PICKRoughly $0.10 per thousand — the price floor for this category.
SES is deliberately unglamorous: an API and an SMTP endpoint, priced at around $0.10 per thousand emails, which is a fraction of every managed competitor. There is no campaign builder and the interface is AWS-plain. What you get is Amazon's deliverability infrastructure at close to cost, and for transactional mail — resets, receipts, alerts — that is the entire requirement. The friction is the sandbox: new accounts are limited until you request production access and explain your sending practices, which is a deliberate anti-spam gate rather than an obstacle.
Mailgun
The established competitor — strong on validation and routing.
Mailgun is SendGrid's long-standing rival with a comparable feature set and reputation, plus two things it does distinctly well: email address validation before you send, and inbound routing that parses received mail into your application. Proprietary and hosted, priced per volume with a small free allowance. Listed for the same reason as Render on the Heroku page — many teams comparing this category are choosing between managed vendors, and the honest comparison includes the obvious alternative rather than assuming everyone will self-host.
Side by side
| Amazon SES | Mailgun | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty Score | 30 | 31 |
| Open source | No | No |
| Self-hostable | No | No |
| Local-first | No | No |
| License | Proprietary (hosted service) | Proprietary (hosted service) |
| Pricing | About $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Checked 2026-08-05. | Volume-based with a small free allowance; paid tiers from about $15/month. Checked 2026-08-05. |
Amazon SES is Macrostack's recommended SendGrid alternative, so it's our pick here.
Amazon SES
Strengths
- +Cheapest credible option by a wide margin
- +Amazon's deliverability infrastructure at near cost
- +Scales to enormous volume without renegotiation
- +Free from EC2 within generous limits
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary and hosted; deepens AWS dependency
- −No campaign builder or marketing tooling
- −Sandbox approval required before production sending
- −You configure DKIM, SPF and DMARC yourself
Mailgun
Strengths
- +Strong deliverability record over many years
- +Address validation catches bad addresses before you send
- +Genuinely good inbound routing and parsing
- +Detailed logs and analytics
Trade-offs
- −Proprietary and hosted
- −More expensive than SES for straightforward transactional mail
- −Pricing tiers are harder to read than they should be
- −Support quality varies by plan
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-08-05. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.