Amazon SES alternative

Drowning in dev bottlenecks on Amazon SES? Waypoint takes a more collaborative approach to email APIs.

This article compares Waypoint vs Amazon SES (Simple Email Service).

High level comparison

Both Waypoint and Amazon SES help teams send reliable emails at scale — they just take different approaches.

Amazon SES is built for flexible, low-level functionality aimed at developers. Waypoint is built for collaboration and ease of use, aimed at product teams.

Amazon SES runs on AWS, and customers include Netflix, Reddit, Grab, and Amazon itself. In fact, Waypoint is a customer too — we send through Amazon SES on AWS infrastructure. Your emails ride on the exact same email infrastructure either way.

You can use Amazon SES directly, but it’s worth weighing the rough edges against the ease-of-use and collaboration you get with Waypoint.

Why software teams choose Waypoint over Amazon SES

1. A dynamic template builder

On Amazon SES, every email template is created and managed in code — you can’t even view templates from the SES dashboard. That means anyone who isn’t a developer has to flag down a developer for every tweak, which becomes a bottleneck quickly.

Waypoint has a dynamic template builder built specifically for designing data-rich templates visually. Designers and PMs can build and edit templates while developers focus on wiring up the data.

Waypoint template builder vs template building on Amazon SES (code)

Viewing templates on Waypoint vs templates on Amazon SES (read-only list without a preview).

2. Observability that actually helps

Amazon SES has a logging tool (Virtual Deliverability Manager), but it’s bare-bones. The data is limited, and using it for real debugging or monitoring is painful.

Waypoint gives you full observability out of the box — a complete email preview, raw HTML, and the template data passed in from the API.

Full email logs on Waypoint vs basic logs on Amazon SES.

Waypoint also lets you pivot by contact to see every email sent to a single person.

Viewing emails by contacts on Waypoint. Not available on Amazon SES.

3. Power without the complexity

Amazon SES is highly flexible, but it comes with a steep learning curve. Even seasoned developers tend to find AWS cumbersome to integrate.

Waypoint pairs a simple API with a dashboard for builders and configuration, so teams can get set up and ship quickly.

For example, adding an unsubscribe link with a managed unsubscribe page is just an option on the API call plus a few settings in the dashboard. See unsubscribe groups for details.

Set up managed unsubscribes on Waypoint with a single line of code.

4. Reasonable pricing

Amazon SES is the cheapest way to send emails at scale — hard to beat on raw cost alone. But with Waypoint’s simple pricing, teams usually find the engineering time savings make up the difference. And since Waypoint runs on Amazon SES, you still get the same deliverability.

5. Real human support

Reach out and you’ll usually end up talking to one of our founders. Direct, human support is standard for every customer. On Amazon SES, support is reserved for large or enterprise accounts.

Why software teams might consider Amazon SES over Waypoint

Cost and flexibility. For better or worse, almost anything on Amazon SES can be customized in code. SES also has some features Waypoint doesn’t — depending on your team, some of these may be dealbreakers:

• Inbound email parsing
• Advanced contact segmentation
• Advanced permissions
• Attachments
• SMTP relays
• Single Sign On (SSO)

Many of these are on Waypoint’s roadmap, and we’re building fast.

Conclusion

Try both — they each have a free sandboxed trial. There’s plenty of overlap, but each platform has its own personality and priorities.

We’re biased, but if your team is looking to cut down on the dev bottlenecks around building and sending emails, Waypoint is worth a try.