Amazon SESvsSendinblue

Overview

Amazon SES and Sendinblue (now rebranded as Brevo in 2023) serve overlapping but distinct markets. Amazon SES is email transport infrastructure — an API that delivers email for applications. Sendinblue/Brevo is a full digital marketing platform that bundles email marketing, transactional email, SMS campaigns, chat, landing pages, CRM, and marketing automation into a single subscription.

The rebranding from Sendinblue to Brevo in May 2023 did not change the product architecture or pricing significantly — both names refer to the same platform and you may find it under either name in documentation, integrations, and comparisons. This guide uses Sendinblue throughout for search consistency.

For transactional email — application-triggered messages like password resets, order confirmations, and account alerts — both platforms work. SES handles it via API at $0.10/1,000 emails. Sendinblue handles it via SMTP relay or API with transactional email included in its platform pricing. The key question is whether you need only transactional email (SES wins on cost and simplicity for this use case alone) or whether you also need marketing campaigns, automation sequences, SMS, CRM, and a unified platform for your marketing operations (Sendinblue wins on breadth).

Feature Comparison

Area	Amazon SES	Sendinblue (Brevo)
Transactional email	Yes — primary use case	Yes — included in all plans
Marketing campaigns	None	Yes — email campaigns, scheduling, templates
Marketing automation	None	Yes — on Business plan ($65/month)
SMS marketing	None	Yes — SMS campaigns available add-on
CRM	None	Basic CRM included in platform
Chat/live chat	None	Yes — Sendinblue Conversations feature
Landing pages	None	Yes — on Business plan
Free plan	62,000 emails/month from EC2	300 emails/day (9,000/month), unlimited contacts
Email designer	None	Yes — drag-and-drop + HTML editor
A/B testing	None	Yes — Business plan
Contact management	None	Yes — unlimited contacts on all plans
Cost per 1,000 emails	$0.10	Free up to 9k/month; then $25/month for 20k

Sendinblue's free plan is genuinely competitive for early-stage businesses: unlimited contacts, 300 emails/day, marketing campaigns, and transactional email all included at no cost. This is a more complete free offering than Amazon SES for non-AWS businesses, since SES's free 62,000 emails/month requires hosting on EC2.

The unlimited contacts feature of Sendinblue is worth specific attention. Most email platforms (Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign) price by contact count, which creates a cost escalation as lists grow. Sendinblue prices by email volume rather than contact count — you can have a list of 100,000 contacts and pay based on how many emails you send per month, not how many contacts you store. For businesses with large lists where a significant portion of contacts receive email infrequently, this model is materially cheaper than contact-based pricing.

Pricing Comparison

Amazon SES: $0.10/1,000 emails outside AWS. Free 62,000 emails/month from EC2. No marketing tools, no contact management, no analytics platform included. A business sending 100,000 emails/month pays $10/month in SES fees plus the cost of building or subscribing to a separate marketing automation platform.

Sendinblue: Free plan for 9,000 emails/month to unlimited contacts. Starter $25/month for 20,000 emails/month (higher volume add-ons available). Business $65/month for 20,000 emails/month base with automation, A/B testing, multi-user access, and landing pages. Enterprise pricing for custom volume. At 100,000 emails/month on a Business plan, expect approximately $100-150/month — verify current pricing at brevo.com as volume tiers may have changed.

The cost comparison for a business sending 50,000 emails/month: SES costs $5/month in sending fees. Sendinblue Starter covers this at $25/month (depending on volume tier). The $20/month difference buys contact management, campaign creation tools, analytics, and a marketing UI. For businesses that would otherwise pay $99-299/month for separate marketing automation, consolidating onto Sendinblue creates savings while SES alone would require additional spend.

Best For

Choose Amazon SES if:

• Your email use case is transactional only — application-triggered messages with no marketing campaign requirement.
• You are on AWS and want email infrastructure that integrates with Lambda, SQS, SNS, and consolidated AWS billing.
• Cost per email is a primary optimization target and you have engineering capacity to manage the configuration and monitoring layer.
• You need flexibility to build a custom marketing or notification platform where SES provides the transport and your application provides the logic.

Choose Sendinblue if:

• You need both transactional email and marketing campaigns in a single platform without managing two separate services.
• Volume-based pricing (paying per email sent rather than per contact stored) matches your list characteristics — large list, variable sending frequency.
• Marketing automation, SMS campaigns, A/B testing, and landing pages are capabilities you need alongside email sending.
• Your team includes non-technical marketers who need a visual campaign creation interface rather than API access.

Verdict

Winner: Tie

Amazon SES and Sendinblue win on different dimensions that reflect genuine trade-offs. SES wins on cost and AWS integration for engineering-first teams with transactional-only email needs. Sendinblue wins on platform breadth and volume-based pricing for businesses that need marketing automation, SMS, and transactional email in one place without paying separately for each capability.

For Stackforge readers: if you are a developer building a SaaS product and need only transactional email, SES at $0.10/1,000 emails is the right infrastructure choice. If you are a solopreneur or small marketing team that needs email campaigns, automation, and transactional sending from a single affordable platform, Sendinblue's free plan or Starter tier is one of the most cost-competitive all-in-one options in the market.