Amazon SES vs Courier
No clear leader: Courier (67.1) and Amazon SES (64.6) are within the 5-point margin; treat as a tie. The attribute-by-attribute breakdown below, with a source and date on every value, is the honest way to compare them.
Capabilities
Feature-by-feature on the axes that matter for communication apis. “-” means undocumented, not absent.
What each one is
The product in its own terms, so the numbers below have context.
Amazon SES
A cloud email service that handles high-volume email sending and receiving through APIs, SMTP, or AWS SDKs. It offers deliverability tools, dedicated IP management, security features, and compliance controls to help organizations reliably reach customer inboxes.
Courier
A notification platform that consolidates email, SMS, push, and chat delivery across multiple third-party providers, offering centralized routing, templating, automatic failover, and in-app notifications through one API.
Pricing
List pricing as published by each vendor, with the date we read it. Always verify at the source before you buy.
Amazon SES
From $0.02–$0.16 per 1,000 emails depending on plan and volume. Free tier: up to $200 AWS credits for 6 months on new accounts.
- Essentials$0.16 per 1,000 emails
- Auto email validation
- Pro$105/month plus $0.14 per 1,000 emails
- Dedicated IP addresses
- Virtual Deliverability Manager
- Inbox placement testing
- Email validation API
- Enterprise$500/month plus $0.11 per 1,000 emails
- Dedicated IP addresses
- Virtual Deliverability Manager
- Global endpoints
- Annual expert deliverability assessment
- Inbox placement testing
- À la carte$0.02–$0.08 per 1,000 emails (0–100M monthly)
- Volume-based tiered rates
Courier
Free tier with 10,000 sends/month, then $0.005 per send. No per-seat or channel fees.
- DeveloperFree
- 10,000 sends per month
- Journeys & broadcasts
- MCP server, CLI, & SDKs
- SSO via Google, Github
- Email support
- Business$0.005 per send
- All Developer features
- Pay-as-you-go pricing
- AI Translations
- AI Agent node
- Email & chat support
- EnterpriseContact sales
- All Business features
- Volume pricing
- Dedicated Slack channel
- Observability integrations
- Role-based access control
- +2 more
Platform & deployment
Where each product runs and how it can be hosted. A dash means undocumented, not unsupported.
Integrations
What each product connects to. Counts come from the vendor's own integration directory where one exists.
Amazon SES
- Amazon WorkMail
- Amazon Mail Manager
Courier
- Amply
- AWS SES
- Postmark
- Mailgun
- Gmail
- MailerSend
- Mailchimp
- SendGrid
- SMTP
- AWS SNS
- Azure SMS
- MessageMedia
- SMSCentral
- Twilio
- Vonage
- Apple Push Notifications
- Firebase
- Google FCM
- Slack
- Microsoft Teams
- StreamChat
- Segment
- Datadog
- +3 more
Amazon SES or Courier: which one depends on you
A composite score cannot know your constraints. Describe them and both get re-weighted against what you actually need, with the evidence behind every position.
Free to run, no account needed to start. How the evaluation works
Comparison generated from independently-sourced facts. Every value links to its source and retrieval date. See the method.