/ Compare
Four detailed, evenhanded comparisons — including the rows where the competitor genuinely beats us, because pretending otherwise would waste your time. The goal is to help you pick correctly, not to argue you into a switch.
/ How to read these
Each comparison page is built the same way: a short answer for the impatient, a real account of where the competitor wins, a head-to-head table you can filter by the dimension that matters to you, and an explicit "when to stay with them" section. We'd rather lose a comparison fairly than win one by hiding the trade-offs.
The four providers below are the ones we hear named most often in discovery calls. If you're weighing a different option, the underlying framework still applies — managed infrastructure is a different shape of product than any self-serve API, and the comparison is more about model than features.
/ 01 — vs SendGrid
~61% inbox on shared Essentials vs ~97% target on dedicated, managed.
SendGrid is built for self-serve at every tier — including dedicated IPs sold as an add-on, support gated behind plan tiers, and inbox-placement numbers on shared pools that have lagged the field. The honest reason to move isn't a feature; it's the model.
Read the SendGrid comparison
/ 02 — vs Mailgun
Shared inbox ~71%; Flex doubled to ~$2 per 1K in late 2025.
Mailgun is excellent infrastructure that says so plainly: reputation work is yours, monitoring is yours, the operational burden is yours. If you're leaving because that work keeps falling to engineering, the fix isn't another infrastructure-only API.
Read the Mailgun comparison
/ 03 — vs Amazon SES
$0.10/1K is the sticker. The CloudWatch stack is the rest of the bill.
SES is the cheapest raw delivery layer there is, and it makes you assemble the dashboard, the warming logic, the stream isolation, and the bounce handling on your own. Same low-level control, with the scaffolding included and operated.
Read the Amazon SES comparison
/ 04 — vs Postmark
~$650/mo at 500K vs ~$50 at SES — and you still need a marketing tool.
Postmark is genuinely excellent at transactional email and we won't pretend otherwise. The reasons to move are growth-shaped: per-email cost that climbs with scale, and a transactional-only design that forces a second platform once you need marketing.
Read the Postmark comparison
/ The underlying question
The four providers above each take a defensible position on a fundamental question: who operates your deliverability? SES says you do, and prices accordingly. Mailgun says you do, and gives you good primitives. SendGrid lets you, with help available behind paywalls. Postmark does much of it for you within a transactional-only scope. Managed infrastructure says we do, fully and across both transactional and marketing.
None of these is the wrong answer in absolute terms. They're the right answer for different teams at different stages with different priorities. The comparison pages exist to help you locate yourself honestly — and to tell you, clearly, when you're better off staying with the provider you're already on.
If you're between providers, in a multi-vendor setup, or looking at one we haven't written up, a discovery call gets you a real-world read on the trade-offs without the marketing layer.
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