If you are building a SaaS, you need to send emails to users. It is generally not a good idea for you to build out SMTP rails from first principles, which is where the concept of an "email service provider" comes in.

This is a distinct product + infrastructure from "email providers" writ large like Mailchimp or Substack or Klaviyo. Those companies provide email marketing service. (Notably, two providers listed below — Mailchimp and Brevo — provide both email marketing and transactional email services, but we are only listing their transactional email services here.)

I have no relationship with any of the organizations listed besides being an active customer of four of them (Postmark, SendGrid, Mailgun, and SES), and do not receive an affiliate cut from any of the services mentioned. I have personally integrated with each provider listed below, and have used them to power Buttondown, a newsletter service that sends millions of emails every month.

So uh, does that mean I shouldn't just go with SES?

Well, yes and no. SES is certainly the best-priced option for most use cases, but the developer experience is... not great. The admin tooling is on par with the rest of AWS's dashboard, which is to say it is an acquired taste. If you're sending less than 100k emails/month, I'd personally recommend using another provider whose tooling is more user-friendly; the $10 you save per month is not worth the time you'll spend having to wire up all the things you need.

What's the deal with this 'dedicated IP' thing?

Let's pretend that every single email in the world has a "quality score" associated with it. The higher that quality score, the more likely it is to be delivered to the inbox and avoid the spam folder. One of the many, many factors that goes into that quality score is the IP address that the email is sent from. IP addresses that have been associated with low-quality emails in the past are more likely to be associated with low-quality emails in the future, and so a 'low quality' IP address is going to hurt your quality score.

All ESPs have two options for sending email: shared IP where you're sending mail from a pool of IPs that are shared with other customers, and dedicated IP where you're sending mail from one or more IP addresses that is only used by you.

You might read those two paragraphs as "okay, so I want a dedicated IP no matter what." But that's not necessarily the case. If you're sending a small volume of email, you're probably better off using a shared IP; an IP address with low or spiky volume is going to be associated with low quality.

Do all shared IPs have the same reputation?

Bluntly – no. Some shared IPs are better than others. ESPs have one main lever to keep their shared IPs in good standing with the email providers: they can kick off customers who are sending volume that is driving down their IP address's quality score. The absolute best shared IPs are ones that are the most stringent about kicking off customers who are sending low-quality email. In my (anecdotal, unscientific) experience, Postmark has the best shared IPs and AWS has the worst.

(Again, this only really applies if you're sending a small volume of email. These particulars are less important if your sending volume warrants a dedicated IP.)

I'm sending more than a million emails every month.

You're likely in a position to negotiate a better deal than sticker rate for your volume!

I thought Postmark can only be used for transactional stuff?

That was true in the past, but they've since changed their policy. You can now use Postmark for marketing emails.

You've got a couple options for open source email services:

Okay, fine. Use Postmark. I think their interface is the best.

If there's any providers we've missed, please 

Gee, it sure is awfully nice of you to compile this resource and keep it up to date. What can I ever do to thank you?

Tell your friends about Buttondown, the best way to add email subscriptions to your newsletter.

Email service providers comparison

These answers may be insufficient to get you to go from "using a free tool" to "paying for a tool", but if you 

 interested in the cottage industry of alternatives to Google Analytics, this page is for you.

Fathom is the best alternative to Google Analytics for most people. Fathom, Plausible, and Pirsch are all really solid choices and the difference between them is negligible; Fathom wins out due to slightly more advanced filtering features and its publicly consumable API.

I have personally used every single one of these tools listed, and built integrations with most of them. In addition, I've used (and bemoaned) Google Analytics through its many iterations, and am intimately familiar with its shortcomings and advantages.

(While Buttondown, the newsletter tool I built, 

 connect with some of these tools, I do not use affiliate links or receive any compensation for recommending any tool listed here. I have no angle except to save you time clicking through a bunch of pricing pages.)

, which on paper looks like a great option for existing Cloudflare users. However, at the time of this writing Cloudflare Web Analytics is missing two huge pieces of functionality:

There are a number of adjacent services that don't quite fit into this comparison, but are worth mentioning:

 is also an interesting option: it's open source, roughly at feature parity with the options listed above, and has a novel "Pay when ready" model that appears to be more akin to patronage than a traditional SaaS subscription.

Posthog is a great tool, but it's not really a Google Analytics alternative. Posthog is a product analytics tool, more focused on competing with Amplitude or Mixpanel than Google Analytics. If you're looking for a product analytics tool, Posthog is a great choice, but it's not a good fit for most people looking for a Google Analytics alternative.

 is a little more involved and enterprise-focused than the drop-and-browse solutions outlined above that are at parity with one another. It is for sure privacy-compliant and has a lot of features, but focuses more on intranet use cases and data privacy 

A comparison of the best Google Analytics alternatives

Google Analytics alternatives

Because nobody has time to copy-paste the same thing over and over again.

Social media scheduling tools

If you've got a static website and want to be able to collect information from visitors and readers without having to maintain an entire backend, you're probably looking for what the industry has started to call a "static form endpoint." These are services that allow you to create a form on your website, and then send the submissions to a third-party endpoint. While these services aren't perfect long-term solutions, they're 

They're also, uh, kind of all the same. It turns out there's very little difference between these services, and they're all pretty good. I've used all of them, and I've built integrations with all of them. So as part of that work, we've compiled a list of every single static form endpoint, and normalized the prices so you can best comparison-shop.

A comparison of the best static form endpoints

Comparison guides

We shopped around so you don't have to.

Email service providers comparison

Google Analytics alternatives

Social media scheduling tools

Static form endpoints