AWS SES vs AWS Pinpoint

Cagdas Ozbey
TysonWorks
Published in
2 min readMar 22, 2023

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers two services for sending emails: Simple Email Service (SES) and Pinpoint. While both services allow you to send emails, they cater to slightly different use cases and offer different features. Here is a comparison of AWS SES and AWS Pinpoint:

Purpose and focus:

  • AWS SES is primarily focused on providing a simple, cost-effective, and reliable email sending service for both transactional and marketing emails. It is best suited for developers and businesses who need a straightforward way to send emails programmatically from their applications or systems.
  • AWS Pinpoint, on the other hand, is a multi-channel marketing communication service that supports email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging. Its primary focus is on targeted and personalized customer engagement, making it a better choice for businesses that require more sophisticated customer communication strategies.

Features:

  • AWS SES provides features such as content filtering, dedicated IP addresses, feedback loops, and integration with AWS services like Lambda and S3. It also offers email templates, sending authorization, and reputation management.
  • AWS Pinpoint offers additional features such as customer segmentation, campaign management, A/B testing, analytics, and event tracking. These features make it more suitable for advanced marketing campaigns and customer engagement efforts.

Pricing:

  • AWS SES has a simple pricing model that is mainly based on the number of emails sent and the amount of data transferred. It offers a free tier with 62,000 emails per month for customers using Amazon EC2.
  • AWS Pinpoint pricing is slightly more complex, as it depends on the channels used (email, SMS, push notifications) and the number of messages sent. For email, it has a pay-as-you-go model based on the number of emails sent and data transferred. There is a free tier with 62,000 emails per month for customers using Amazon EC2.

Ease of use:

  • AWS SES is developer-focused and requires some programming skills to integrate it into applications, though it provides APIs and SDKs for popular programming languages.
  • AWS Pinpoint provides a user-friendly interface and a RESTful API, making it easier for marketing teams to create and manage campaigns without the need for extensive technical knowledge.

In summary, if your primary need is a reliable and cost-effective email sending service for transactional or marketing emails, AWS SES is the better choice. However, if you require advanced features like customer segmentation, campaign management, and multi-channel support for more sophisticated customer engagement, AWS Pinpoint would be a better fit.

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