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Amazon WorkMail vs HCL Notes comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon WorkMail
Ranking in Email Applications
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Email (2nd)
HCL Notes
Ranking in Email Applications
8th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Email Applications category, the mindshare of Amazon WorkMail is 9.5%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HCL Notes is 3.5%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Email Applications
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Olayemi - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides free messages and helps to keep customers updated
The solution is quite low-level and lacks some advanced features. For example, it doesn't provide tracking capabilities, such as knowing how many users opened an email, which is crucial for email marketing. You would need to integrate these analytics with other tools to get them. I need to know if there has been a bounce and how customers interacted with the email. I would only suggest that Amazon WorkMail relax the rules for using Amazon SES in production. When you create an account, it starts in Sandbox mode, which means you can't use it in production right away. You must go through a process, message Amazon, and request to move it to production. Since Amazon is a big company, I feel customers shouldn't need this permission to use the service in production.
Herad Howell - PeerSpot reviewer
Secure communications that prompts responses with room for improved user interface
I primarily value HCL Notes for its security features. The software's secure communication is particularly useful when dealing with professional entities. It ensures that business is conducted smoothly, allowing me to use my organization's email confidently, as opposed to my personal Gmail, which might not prompt responses from some entities.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Amazon SES is very easy to configure."
"Amazon SES can handle a high volume of emails, making it suitable for organizations with large email lists or that need to send a large number of emails on a regular basis."
"It is highly available and scalable. It is also highly reliable. I don't lose any of the messages or emails. If there is an issue where the email sent operation failed, Amazon as a platform ensures that the send operation is retried, and the email reaches its destination. This way, it is highly reliable."
"It is very stable. I haven't faced any issues."
"We use the tool for transactional emails and marketing."
"The product is very user-friendly."
"The best feature is that Amazon SES provides verified email messages."
"The most valuable feature of the Amazon WorkMail for me is the SMC server. It makes my work much easier, especially since I often work with Spring Boot. There are many built-in APIs in Spring Boot that help with messaging. What I appreciate about it is that it simplifies the process. I don't need to write much code; I define the credentials in my properties or environment variables. The Java Message API, an internal API from Spring Boot, does most of the work. I set up the properties and connected them to the SMC server, and I can send emails."
"The most valuable feature is the access that it provides to documents. This offers us an easy way to make changes."
"The security and performance of the solution are good even though our platform is variable, except for the mail services."
"Its security is absolutely stratospheric. In an application, you can lock down to field-level security. For example, I could log in and see a field in an HR database with salaries. When you log in, you see exactly the same database, but the field with the salary just isn't there. So, you can literally have field-level security on it, and you can also have secure encryption. For example, I could give you that database allowing you to see the salary, but a calculation that shows how much they get per month in another field is encrypted. So, you won't be able to see that because you don't have the encryption key. You can implement high-level security very simply."
"The software's secure communication is particularly useful when dealing with professional entities."
"The solution provides great security."
"HCL Notes has fantastic built-in security. The email and personal communication components are excellent, but they are some applications provided by HCL that Notes previously provided when it was under IBM and Lotus. Everyone wants email, so that's just part of the product. However, more savvy users can build their own solutions for managing information, and that's the great thing about it."
"HCL Notes is stable most of the time."
"It is one of the best products in the world for workflow applications. It works very well for workflows or decisional processes where a task needs to be first approved by someone. After that, the task moves to the next or final stage where another person approves it with some notes or attached documents."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the support. It's just that customer support, though good, takes time to resolve issues."
"There is room for improvement in the scalability."
"The product should improve technical support."
"When we first set up an email on Amazon SES, they had to verify it, which was not fast enough."
"WorkMail is not available in all the regions."
"I would like to see detailed reports on email success and failure rates."
"It would be ideal to have detailed data and reporting on email opens, clicks, bounces, and other metrics, as well as integration with other business intelligence tools."
"The only issue is the price, which is far too expensive."
"The only improvement that we're planning to do is that all our applications are still designed in the layout and format of Notes version 4, and our plan over the coming years is to modernize their look. One of the things they're developing or considering deploying is a program to automatically upgrade the look and feel of databases. If they deploy that, that will be revolutionary. In other words, we decide on a corporate look and feel for our database and press a button. We've probably got 50 different applications in Notes, and it would just go through the whole lot and upgrade all of them to look the same."
"We had trouble connecting this solution to the database from Microsoft. We have done it, although it can be easier."
"The interface could be more user-friendly. Some additional trainings could be added as well."
"GUI and replication can be improved."
"I love this product. I have used it for many years, and I have been a developer for it. If anything, it can be faster in the client version. The client version is a little bit hard. It is not fast. This is the only problem I see. Otherwise, it is a very good product."
"The loading time can be excessive."
"The performance was terrible because we have a very large database with around three million records, including attachments and scanned comments. It was slow, and integrating new technologies or designs was also slow."
"Web support is very old and needs an upgrade. We can handle a different password for the client to access the mail services, compared to the web services. We need to implement many other components to get access to the web access. There could be a feature to interpret if the web access is available from any end-user equipment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution should improve its price."
"It's very cheap. The cheapest among all the services available."
"WorkMail does require a license, it is, per user."
"I rate the solution's pricing as one out of ten. It is close to being cheap. Sometimes, the tool offers a generous amount of free messages, up to 40,000, which is great for startups like ours. This means that we don't accumulate any costs for some months because we stay within the free usage tier. When we exceed the free allocation, the costs are reasonable, and no hidden charges exist."
"We pay licensing fees on a yearly basis."
"We pay annually for the use of the solution."
"It is far cheaper to license. It is a third of the cost of our Microsoft license for 10 times the amount of usage. Developing applications cost a fraction of anything else. There are two reasons for that. First of all, applications are very fast to build. All the security is already built into the platform, so you don't have to worry about security at all. The other thing is that because fewer people use it than, for example, Microsoft SharePoint, the salary commanded by programmers is slightly lower. So, it is not only faster; you also get cheaper programmers. So, you really win-win-win on it."
"The solution is expensive. There are many components or features which make the price very high."
"It was reasonably priced, but the product itself was not worth the cost."
"The price is reasonable."
"I don't remember how much we paid when we first bought the Domino license, but now, we pay only for the passport. For 30 client licenses, we pay about $1,500 per year, and we don't consider it very expensive for the quality of the product. In our case, we need 30 client licenses. So, we buy 30 client licenses independently of the server. It is very easy for us to choose and maintain this kind of license and get the passport advantage."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Comms Service Provider
8%
University
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
Government
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon WorkMail?
We use the tool for transactional emails and marketing.
What needs improvement with Amazon WorkMail?
Amazon WorkMail's user interface could be more intuitive and user-friendly. Integration with Gmail using both SMTP and POP3 would be beneficial.
What advice do you have for others considering Amazon WorkMail?
Currently, I don't have any advice about using Amazon WorkMail. Since I only use AWS and am unfamiliar with its competitors, I can't recommend it.
What do you like most about HCL Notes?
The security and performance of the solution are good even though our platform is variable, except for the mail services.
What needs improvement with HCL Notes?
We are talking about HCL Notes, and I'm not certain it is easier to manage or has a better interface. HCL Notes had some AI capabilities and support, though it was not very efficient.
What is your primary use case for HCL Notes?
HCL Notes has features similar to what we can get on other products such as Outlook, with everything in one place. We find that Microsoft is more efficient compared to HCL Notes. We have seen some ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon SES
IBM Lotus Notes, Lotus Notes
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Connect2Cloud, Hansgrohe, Sauk County, Blue Water Shipping, FDBR, ibml, Multivac, Aarhus University Hospital, Hendricks Regional Health, Asian Paints, Integra Legal, Sunplus Technology, S¾SS, The Moroccan Ministry of Youth and Sports, Nicrometal, Doncasters Group, Practice Plan, Barr, RACV, Neotechnik, Deutsche Notes User Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon WorkMail vs. HCL Notes and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.