If you are building an app that sends email, you have probably narrowed it down to two options: Amazon SES and SendGrid. Both are solid, both are used by serious products, and both will get your email delivered if you set them up right. The difference is in what you have to build yourself, how it prices at scale, and what happens when something goes wrong. Here is how they compare.
Both SES and SendGrid require the same DNS setup on your sending domain: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. A broken record will get you blocked on both providers, and a clean setup will get you delivered on both. The deliverability difference is not in the provider, it is in how you warm up your IP and how you monitor your sending.
Amazon SES is the raw pipe. It is the cheapest email sending in the market, it scales to very high volume, and it plugs into the rest of your AWS stack (CloudWatch, IAM, S3 for bounces). You get no UI, no templates, no built-in monitoring. You build all of that yourself.
SendGrid is the full platform. It has a nice UI, templates, A/B testing, a free tier, and built-in monitoring. It is easier to use out of the box, but it is more expensive at scale, and you end up using more of the platform than you need for pure transactional sending.
SES is an API. You call it, you get a 200, you move on. There is no dashboard to log into, no templates to manage. If you want monitoring, you wire up CloudWatch or build your own. SendGrid has a dashboard, webhooks, and a larger SDK ecosystem. If you are a solo developer or a small team, SendGrid is easier to use.
SES is $0.10 per 1,000 emails. That is the cheapest price in the market, and it stays cheap as you scale. SendGrid has a free tier (50 emails/day) and then paid plans that start at $15/month for 50,000 emails. At high volume, SES is significantly cheaper.
SES failure modes: sending limit exceeded (you have to request increases), IP reputation (you are responsible for warming up your IP), no built-in monitoring (you have to build it). If you get your setup wrong, you will not know until your email is not arriving.
SendGrid failure modes: shared IP reputation (if you are on a shared IP, your deliverability depends on other users on the same IP), price increases (the free tier is small, and the paid plans get expensive at scale), API changes (the platform is bigger, so there is more that can change).
Pick Amazon SES if you are sending high volume, you are cost-conscious, and you have the engineering to build the tooling. Pick SendGrid if you want a nice UI, you are sending low volume, and you want hand-holding. And because both require the same SPF, DKIM, and DMARC setup on your domain, the setup on your domain is what you can actually control. Check it in 30 seconds.
Whichever provider you pick, the setup on your domain decides the outcome.
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