Best for
Best for engineering teams already running on AWS that want high-volume email billed per message and are willing to build the surrounding tooling themselves.
- Freelancers
- Small and mid-sized
- Enterprise
Email Marketing Comparison
Amazon SES vs. listmonk
At a glance
At a glance
Best for
Best for teams that want to send newsletters at scale on their own servers, without a per-contact bill.
Cataleo does not name a winner. Both statements come from the vendors themselves.
Full Comparison
| Criterion | Amazon SES | listmonk |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $0.10 / 1,000 emails À la carte sending is $0.10 per 1,000 emails with no monthly fee. The tiered plans are Essentials at $0.16 per 1,000 and no fixed fee, Pro at $105 per month per account and region plus $0.22 per 1,000, and Enterprise at $500 per month plus $0.23 per 1,000. Rates fall above 10 million and again above 100 million emails. Attachment data is charged at $0.12 per GB. | Free and open source, self-hosted There is no licence fee. The server and the email sending provider are your own, and the project offers no hosted service. |
| Free trial | New AWS customers receive up to $200 in AWS Free Tier credits, usable over six months | Not stated |
| Commercial use | Not stated | Yes, AGPL v3 |
| API | Yes, the SES v2 API and an SMTP interface, called from the AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI | Yes, a REST API across subscribers, lists, campaigns, media, templates, transactional email, bounces and imports, with SDKs and granular API tokens |
| Hosting | Cloud (SaaS), run as an AWS service per region | Self-hosted on your own infrastructure, as a single binary or through Docker, with PostgreSQL |
| Campaign types | Marketing, transactional and newsletter sending through the console, the SMTP interface or the SES v2 API, plus inbound receiving that can store mail in Amazon S3, publish it to Amazon SNS or trigger AWS Lambda | Newsletters and email campaigns, plus transactional messages through the API. Messenger webhooks send SMS, WhatsApp or FCM notifications through providers you supply |
| Automation and journeys | No journey builder. Sending is driven by your own application or by other AWS services, and received mail can trigger Lambda functions, which is how autoresponders and unsubscribe systems are built on it. | No, listmonk is a one-way mailing list manager with no journey or drip builder; sequenced sends are driven from outside through the API |
| Segmentation and personalisation | Per-recipient personalisation through template replacement data, with SendBulkEmail taking up to 50 destination objects per call, each carrying its own values and falling back to defaults where none are supplied | Yes, subscribers are queried and segmented with SQL expressions, across single and double opt-in lists |
| Templates and editor | Stored templates created through the API, up to 20,000 per region and 500 KB each, or inline templates supplied with the request; both substitute placeholder tags in the subject, HTML and text parts. There is no drag-and-drop builder. | Yes, a visual drag-and-drop builder, a WYSIWYG editor, Markdown, syntax-highlighted raw HTML or plain text, with Go templating and 100+ functions in subject lines and content |
| Deliverability and testing | Easy DKIM authentication, bounce and complaint notifications through Amazon SNS, rendering failure notifications, and event publishing to CloudWatch or Amazon Data Firehose. Virtual Deliverability Manager is priced separately, from $0.02 to $0.07 per 1,000 emails, with global deliverability at $1,250 per month. IPs can be shared, managed dedicated, or brought from your own range at $24.95 per month per IP. | Multi-threaded, multi-SMTP sending queues with throughput and sliding-window rate limiting, bounce processing, and analytics for campaign performance, bounces and top links. The sending provider is your own |
| Ecommerce and CRM data | No ecommerce or CRM connectors. SES keeps one contact list per AWS account, with up to 20 topics, a subscription status per topic and a free-form attributes field on each contact; contacts are imported from an Amazon S3 object in CSV or JSON, up to one million per import job. Order and customer data stay in your own systems and travel with the send request. | No built-in ecommerce or CRM data; external systems connect through the REST API and webhooks |
| Integrations and API | Yes, the SES v2 API and an SMTP interface, called from the AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI, with IAM for access control and CloudTrail for API call logging. Integrates with S3, SNS, Lambda, CloudWatch, Data Firehose, KMS, Route 53 and Elastic Beanstalk. | Yes, extensive API coverage for all features with SDKs, granular API tokens, messenger webhooks and a media library on an S3-compatible backend |
| Deployment | more entries Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based | On-premise |
| Support | Email helpdesk, Phone, Chat, 24/7, Community forum | Not stated |
| Onboarding | Documentation and knowledge base | Documentation and knowledge base |
| Company size | Freelancers, Small and mid-sized, Enterprise | Not stated |
| Integrations | more entries Amazon S3, Amazon SNS, AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Data Firehose, AWS KMS, AWS IAM, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Route 53, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2 | PostgreSQL, SMTP, Docker, Amazon S3 |
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Adds a column to the table, from the tools in this category.
Row where the values differ The small markers point at the lower number, the longer list or the stated feature. They describe the data, they are not a verdict.
The short version
Key Differences
- Starting price Amazon SES From $0.10 / 1,000 emails listmonk Free and open source, self-hosted
- Deployment Amazon SES Cloud (SaaS), Browser-based listmonk On-premise
- Hosting Amazon SES Cloud (SaaS), run as an AWS service per region listmonk Self-hosted on your own infrastructure, as a single binary or through Docker, with PostgreSQL
- API Amazon SES Yes, the SES v2 API and an SMTP interface, called from the AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI listmonk Yes, a REST API across subscribers, lists, campaigns, media, templates, transactional email, bounces and imports, with SDKs and granular API tokens
- Campaign types Amazon SES Marketing, transactional and newsletter sending through the console, the SMTP interface or the SES v2 API, plus inbound receiving that can store mail in Amazon S3, publish it to Amazon SNS or trigger AWS Lambda listmonk Newsletters and email campaigns, plus transactional messages through the API. Messenger webhooks send SMS, WhatsApp or FCM notifications through providers you supply
Every line is one datapoint from the table above, picked automatically. Nothing here is written text.
The trade-offs
Strengths and Limitations
Amazon SES
Strengths
- Per-message pricing with no seat licence and no monthly fee on the à la carte rate
- SMTP interface and SES v2 API, callable from the AWS SDKs and the CLI
- Inbound mail can land in S3, publish to SNS or trigger Lambda functions
- Up to 20,000 stored templates per region, or inline templates supplied per request
- Shared, managed dedicated or bring-your-own IP addresses
- Sending rates fall at 10 million and 100 million emails per month
Limitations
- No campaign editor, journey builder or drag-and-drop template designer
- The Pro and Enterprise fixed fees are charged per account and per region
- Deliverability tooling is a separately priced add-on, Virtual Deliverability Manager
- Running it in practice means operating SNS, Lambda, CloudWatch and IAM alongside it
- A failed call to a multi-recipient message rejects the whole email, so AWS recommends one recipient per call
- Attachment data is billed separately at $0.12 per GB
listmonk
Strengths
- No licence fee and no per-contact charge, so list growth does not change the bill
- Single binary with PostgreSQL, with a small CPU and memory footprint
- SQL segmentation over subscriber attributes, and Go templating in subject lines and content
- API coverage for all features, plus OIDC single sign-on with roles and permissions
Limitations
- No journey or automation builder; it is a one-way mailing list manager
- You supply, configure and pay for the SMTP sending provider
- SQL segmentation assumes someone on the team writes SQL
- No hosted service from the project, so running and patching the server is your own work
Plans
Pricing
Amazon SES
- À la carte $0.10 Per 1,000 emails sent, with no fixed monthly fee.
- Essentials $0.16 Per 1,000 emails up to 10 million per month and no fixed fee. $0.14 per 1,000 from 10 to 100 million, $0.11 above 100 million.
- Pro $105 Per month per account and region, plus $0.22 per 1,000 emails up to 10 million, $0.17 from 10 to 100 million and $0.12 above.
- Enterprise $500 Per month per account and region, plus $0.23 per 1,000 emails up to 10 million, $0.18 from 10 to 100 million and $0.13 above.
listmonk
- Self-hosted $0 The open source application under AGPL v3. No licence fee; the server and the SMTP provider are your own.
What users say
Review Scores · opens after launch
Amazon SES
- Ease of use
- Not rated yet
- User interface
- Not rated yet
- Onboarding
- Not rated yet
- Support and service
- Not rated yet
- Value for money
- Not rated yet
- Features
- Not rated yet
No reviews yet. Nothing has been published here yet, and no score is shown. How a review is checked before it appears is described below.
listmonk
- Ease of use
- Not rated yet
- User interface
- Not rated yet
- Onboarding
- Not rated yet
- Support and service
- Not rated yet
- Value for money
- Not rated yet
- Features
- Not rated yet
No reviews yet. Nothing has been published here yet, and no score is shown. How a review is checked before it appears is described below.
How we check reviews
Before sending, the author has to confirm three things: that they have used the product themselves, that they work neither for the vendor nor for a competitor, and that nobody is paying them for the review. We also ask whether the vendor invited them to write it. That answer is required, either answer is accepted, and it stays with the review.
Every review is read by a person before it appears. An email address is required and is confirmed: we send a link to it, and a review does not reach us until the author opens that link, so a review has a sender who was reachable at least once rather than being anonymous. Where what somebody writes needs backing, we ask them for evidence that they used the product, and a review that does not get it is not published. We publish positive and negative reviews alike, we pay nothing and offer nothing for a review, and we accept none that was bought or incentivised.
What we cannot do is verify a purchase. There is no shop here and no account, so whether the author really used the tool rests on their own declaration, on whatever we ask them for, and on the plausibility of what they write. We say so rather than implying a check that does not exist.
A vendor cannot buy a review, and cannot have one removed or changed because they dislike it. We remove or edit a review only if it breaks our rules or the law, for example a false statement of fact. Paid placement has no effect on which reviews appear or on any score.
Where this comes from
Where this comes from
Amazon SES https://aws.amazon.com/ses/ · checked against the official source on 2026-09-09
listmonk https://listmonk.app · no check date recorded yet
This table lists factual criteria taken from information the vendors publish themselves. For how we put it together, see the methodology.