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 and Mailgun are closely matched on ownership (30 vs 31) — this one comes down to pricing and to which trade-offs below you can live with.
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
6 points of comparison, every one read from a verified field. Green marks the side that wins a row outright. A dash means we do not hold that fact — never that it is zero.
| Amazon SES | Mailgun | |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereignty ScoreOur transparent 0–100 composite for data ownership and exit cost. | 30 | 31 |
| Open source | No | No |
| Self-hostable | No | No |
| Local-first data | 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.
Weighing both against staying on SendGrid? Is SendGrid free? What it actually costs →
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
Which one fits you
The trade-offs above, turned into a decision. Find the line that describes your team.
Choose Amazon SES
if cheapest credible option by a wide margin.
Choose Mailgun
if a lower exit cost matters more to you than any single feature, and strong deliverability record over many years.
Neither, yet
if both carry a real cost you should weigh first — proprietary and hosted; deepens AWS dependency, and proprietary and hosted. If either of those is a dealbreaker for your team, the shortlist is wrong rather than the choice.
Amazon SES vs Mailgun — common questions
Is Amazon SES a better fit than Mailgun for transactional & bulk email?
It depends on what you are optimising for, and the honest split is this: Mailgun scores 31 to Amazon SES's 30 on data ownership and exit cost, so it is the safer choice if you care about being able to leave. Amazon SES earns its place on a different axis — cheapest credible option by a wide margin. Neither is a wrong answer for every team; the table above is the actual comparison.
What happens if we want to switch later?
Neither of these is local-first by default, so plan the exit at the point you adopt rather than later. Export what matters on a schedule instead of trusting you can retrieve it on demand — that is the most common way a transactional & bulk email migration turns into a project instead of an afternoon.
Is Mailgun free?
Mailgun: Volume-based with a small free allowance; paid tiers from about $15/month. Checked 2026-08-05.. The other side of this comparison, Amazon SES, is priced as About $0.10 per 1,000 emails. Checked 2026-08-05.. "Free" here means no licence fee — if you self-host it you still pay for the server, and the running cost row above is our honest estimate of that.
Are Amazon SES and Mailgun both alternatives to SendGrid?
Yes — both appear in our SendGrid comparison, which is why they are worth putting side by side. People usually arrive here already having decided to move off SendGrid and now choosing between the two replacements, which is a narrower and much easier question.
Related alternative guides
Facts verified 2026-09-27. Licenses and pricing change — spotted something out of date? That's a correction we want.