Ask HN: How does Sendgrid stack up on deliverability vs. SES? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How does Sendgrid stack up on deliverability vs. SES?

4 pointsjoshdotsmith9 comments

I've been a (mostly happy) user of Sendgrid for the last several months. As a startup, one of our big pain points is burn. And with Amazon's new SES, we're looking to spend 20x less on transactional emails than we're currently spending with Sendgrid. This seems like a no-brainer.

But before I make the switch, I'm wondering how SES compares to Sendgrid on deliverability. Sendgrid touts their credentials on getting emails delivered.

So how do they compare?

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Since they announced it today, it is probably a little early to know how it actually performs compared other services.

Of course, though I was hoping to see a breakdown of what one offers over the other in terms of deliverability. Actual performance is obviously asking too much, but I don't understand the ins and outs of deliverability (whitelisting, etc.) as much as others might. SendGrid may well offer certain services that Amazon doesn't that are currently discernible from their documentation.

By the way, I'm still having huge deliverability issues when using Sendgrid. Emails sent to Gmail accounts go straight to spam. I'm still not sure how to resolve that, and am hesitant to blame Sendgrid for the problem. We do, after all, own a 15-year-old domain name.

It's still early to tell, but we believe it is likely that they will struggle with their deliverability. Delivery is as much an art as it is a science, and it takes experience and constant focus to stay on top. I work for JangoSMTP and we often have clients come to us from minimalist services similar to Amazon SES because of their deliverability issues.

(arguably offtopic) What made you choose SendGrid over competing services like AuthSMTP?

I have to admit that I had just done a bunch of searching around to see what people said about solutions like AuthSMTP, and found more praise for SendGrid. It was cheap, easy to set up, and they seem incredibly knowledgable about deliverability.

The concern I had is that SendGrid seemed to simply be "better at Web 2.0" and therefore had more "hip web developers" talking about, whereas the few people I found who tried to do objective deliverability comparisons seemed to always favor AuthSMTP. SendGrid is also much cheaper, which again made me feel it was difficult to trust simpler "Google fight" comparisons.

(sidenote) I really wish users didn't get so critical of people and companies who are, well, critical. Like, I'd really love to see "our opinion of our competitors, no holds barred" right on these websites, so I can try to compare something other than a lot of marketing copy or sketchily done third-party statistics.

Hard to compare as I haven't tried SES. SendGrid works great. Love it.

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