Mailchimp vs Resend
Both are marketing tools. Here is what separates them.
What Mailchimp is
Mailchimp is an email marketing platform for holding a contact list, sending campaigns to it and automating the follow up. Audience tooling covers segmentation, tags, customer profiles, behavioural targeting, predictive demographics and sign up forms, and the product also includes landing pages, webhooks, a Content Studio for creative assets and generative AI copy tools. Four marketing tiers are sold: Free, Essentials, Standard and Premium. What separates them is less the feature list than the sending allowance, which is set as a multiple of the contact count: 10 times on Essentials, 12 on Standard and 15 on Premium. Seats and audiences follow the same ladder, from 1 seat and 1 audience on Free, to 3 and 3 on Essentials, 5 and 5 on Standard, and unlimited on Premium. The Free plan caps the audience at 250 contacts and sending at 500 emails a month or 250 a day, and it pauses sending once either limit is passed. Paid plans behave differently. Exceeding a contact or send limit triggers an overage charge instead of a pause, so a fast growing list raises the bill rather than stopping the sending, which is worth understanding before it happens. Essentials limits automation to flows of up to 4 steps, which covers a welcome sequence and not much more. Standard supports up to 200 automation flows and adds custom coded templates, dynamic content and custom reports. Premium adds multivariate testing, predictive segmentation, phone and priority support, a dedicated onboarding specialist and migration services. SMS marketing is available on paid plans only. Optimisation features include A/B testing, send time optimisation and a subject line helper, and more than 300 integrations are listed. Audiences above 200,000 contacts need a custom quote from the sales team. For anyone who mails infrequently there is a credit based Pay As You Go option instead of a subscription, and qualified nonprofit organisations get a 15 percent discount. The pricing page can be switched between sixteen currencies, including GBP, EUR, AUD, CAD, INR and ZAR. Transactional email is priced separately, in blocks, where one block is a credit for 25,000 emails. The rate falls with volume, from 20 USD per block for 1 to 20 blocks down to 10 USD per block at 161 blocks and above. Unused credits do not carry from one month to the next, so buying ahead of demand wastes money. Verifying a sending domain earns up to 500 free sends, and a dedicated IP is a 29.95 USD monthly add on.
What Resend is
Resend is a service for building, testing and sending email from an application. It covers transactional messages, the ones triggered by something a user does, and marketing campaigns, which it calls Broadcasts. It is built for developers: sending anything at all requires a Resend API key and a domain you have verified yourself. The free plan covers 3,000 emails a month across three verified domains, along with 10,000 automation runs. Pro is $20 a month for 50,000 emails and ten domains. Scale is $90 a month for 100,000 emails and up to a thousand domains. Emails past the allowance cost $0.90 per thousand on Pro and Scale, and automation runs past the free allowance cost $0.0015 each. Scale customers sending more than 3,000 emails a day can add a dedicated IP for $30 a month. Enterprise terms are set to fit. Most of what the dashboard does is also reachable through the API. Broadcasts can be created and sent in one request, and cancelled again while scheduled or queued. Webhooks can be created, retrieved, listed and deleted programmatically, and every email webhook and GET email endpoint returns the Message-ID. Contacts import from a single CSV upload running to millions of rows. Suppressed addresses are managed from the dashboard or the API, request logs are available from anywhere, and sending statistics break down in more detail. API keys carry separate permissions, and a key exposed in public code is detected, revoked and reported to the team automatically. There is a CLI for the terminal, SDKs for several languages including an official PHP one, and support for custom headers. The template side deals with the awkward parts of email HTML. The code editor flags pasted markup that email clients will not render correctly. Templates can be organised into folders, charts can be embedded in a message, links can be turned into rich Open Graph previews, and AI prompts can reference existing content across broadcasts, templates and automations. Resend runs a hosted MCP server with OAuth built in, supporting OAuth 2.1 with PKCE, Client ID Metadata documents, an official HTTP transport and the Agent Plugins Standard. It connects to Claude in one click from the connector directory, and the MCP server and Resend skills install from the Codex plugin marketplace. Auth0 transactional email can be routed through it with an official integration, and sign-up works from inside Vercel or the Vercel CLI. A domain in use by another Resend team can be verified and transferred. The project began as open source in 2022, joined Y Combinator's winter 2023 batch and launched the sending platform that year.
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