Resend

Overview

Resend was founded with a clear thesis: sending email from your application should not feel like wrestling with legacy infrastructure. Built by the same team that created the React Email framework, Resend offers a transactional email API that prioritizes developer experience above everything else. The dashboard is minimal and purposeful, the SDK is typed end-to-end, and sending your first email takes about five minutes.

The platform focuses exclusively on transactional email — password resets, order confirmations, welcome messages, and other event-triggered sends. It does not try to be a marketing platform, and that focus is both its greatest strength and its most notable limitation.

Developer Experience

Resend's developer experience is among the best in the industry. The TypeScript SDK feels native, with full type inference for API responses, error handling that uses discriminated unions, and first-class support for React Email components. You can write your email as a React component, pass it directly to the resend.emails.send() method, and Resend handles the rendering server-side.

The API is RESTful and consistent. Documentation is excellent, with runnable code examples in multiple languages and a clear changelog. Webhooks are well-designed with typed event payloads, and the dashboard provides delivery logs with enough detail to debug issues quickly.

Where Resend stands apart is the tight integration with React Email. You get a component library for common email patterns (buttons, sections, headings), a local preview server, and the confidence that your templates will render correctly across email clients. For teams already building in React, this is a natural fit.

Best For

Resend is purpose-built for developers who need reliable transactional email delivery and want a modern, well-typed API to work with. It is an excellent choice for startups and SaaS companies that are building their transactional email layer from scratch and want to use React components for templates.

If you need marketing automation, drip campaigns, segmentation, or a visual builder, Resend is not the right tool — and it does not pretend to be. It is laser-focused on the transactional use case and excels there.

Verdict

Resend has earned its reputation as the go-to transactional email API for modern development teams. The developer experience is exceptional, the React Email integration is a genuine differentiator, and the delivery reliability is strong. The free tier is generous enough for side projects and early-stage products.

The limitation is scope: if you need anything beyond transactional email, you will need another tool in your stack. But for what it does, Resend does it better than almost anyone else.