Beehiiv vs. Kit Comparison: Which platform is better?

Can’t decide between using Beehiiv or Kit? In this comprehensive comparison, I will breakdown the features and pricing of each platform and choose a winner.

If you don’t already have an email list for your small business, you need to start one. Luckily, there are plenty of email marketing tools to choose from.

In this Beehiiv vs. Kit comparison, we’re reviewing two of the top solutions for content creators.

Our final verdict? Beehiiv is an awesome up-and-coming platform for newsletters, but for true email marketing, Kit is the winner by far.

Let’s dive into their pros and cons, pricing, and what you need to know about their features.

Beehiiv vs. Kit: At a Glance

Criteria	Beehiiv	Kit	Winner
SMB Guide’s Rating	8/10	7.6/10	Beehiiv
Marketing Automation Capabilities	Workflow builder	Advanced automation	Kit
Email Builder	Dynamic builder with drag and drop	Text-based, visual editor	Tie
Personalization & Customization	Merge tags and segmentation options	Highly personalized	Beehiiv
Campaign Performance Tracking	3D analytics on campaign performance	Detailed metrics	Kit
Email Deliverability	✅	✅	Kit
List Management	Comprehensive list segmentation options	Advanced segmentation and tagging	Tie
A/B Testing	✅	✅	Tie
Advanced Reporting & Insights	Attribution tools for tracking	Advanced Insights	Beehiiv
Compliance & Security	✅	✅	Kit
User Experience and User Interface	Modern interface	Minimalistic interface	Kit
Integrations and Compatibility	API and webhooks for custom integrations	130+ integrations	Kit
Customer Support	Live chat, tickets, or email	Live chat and email	Kit
Pricing	Free – $399/mo	Free – $2,599/mo	Tie
Scalability	✅	✅	Kit

Beehiiv: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

Beehiiv is an up-and-coming newsletter platform launched in 2021. It’s built by creators, for creators and aims to simplify the process of creating and managing your campaigns.

Beehiiv comes equipped with robust features like 3D analytics, audience growth tools, and artificial intelligence (AI) to help you grow and scale your list.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

Beehiiv offers a free 30-day trial so you can test out its features before investing in a paid plan. Once you decide to upgrade, keep in mind that pricing is based on how many subscribers you have.

Here’s a breakdown of Beehiiv’s plans for up to 1000 subscribers:

• Launch: $0
• Scale: $39 per month ($34 per month billed annually)
• Max: $99 per month ($86 per month billed annually)
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Kit: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

Kit (formerly known as ConvertKit) is one of the most well-known email marketing services, particularly amongst bloggers. It’s tailored specifically for content creators, bloggers, and other small businesses.

Along with its user-friendly interface, it offers strong automation capabilities and other useful features for content creators.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

Kit offers a range of plans and pricing is further customized depending on how many subscribers you have. Every paid plan comes with a free 14-day trial.

Here’s a quick breakdown of Kit’s plans and pricing:

• Newsletter: $0 (up to 10,000 email subscribers, 1 email sequence)
• Creator: $29+ per month ($290 if billed annually)
• Pro: $59+ per month ($590 if billed annually)
• Custom: Custom pricing for 500,000+ subscribers

Marketing Automation Capabilities

Beehiiv allows for complex automation workflows with branching logic and actions triggered by user behavior, time-based events, and other outside variables.

Unfortunately, these automations are currently only available on the Scale plan and up.

Kit offers similar automation capabilities. You can choose from a range of triggers to initiate automated actions, such as user behavior, external events, and time-based triggers.

Kit also supports automation across external marketing channels like social media and SMS through its Zapier integration.

Because of this, Kit comes out on top in this category.

✅ Winner: Kit

Email Builder

You don’t have to have technical expertise to build emails with either Beehiiv or Kit as both have drag-and-drop email builders.

However, if you do have the necessary tech skills, you can build Beehiiv emails from scratch by editing the HTML directly.

Beehiiv also makes it easy to previous your campaigns on a variety of device types directly within the email builder.

Kit’s email editor also uses a drag-and-drop interface that allows elements to be easily moved and customized.

Both platforms also provide pre-designed email templates for use if you need them, though Beehiiv only offers three.

✅ Winner: Beehiiv

Personalization & Customization

Beehiiv offers incredible customization capabilities. You can create “publications” — which are essentially websites — and have a ton of control over how they look.

You can also customize your individual emails and optimize for SEO directly within the platform.

Emails in Kit are pretty customizable, but you may find that the Kit branding gets in the way and can be distracting at times.

Kit allows you to insert dynamic content based on subscriber attributes (such as their name, locations, or behaviors).

You can send out personalized greetings and target only specific audience segments with your campaigns.

✅ Winner: Beehiiv

Campaign Performance Tracking

Beehiiv gives you a holistic, up-to-date view of your campaign performance with powerful tracking and real-time reporting features.

The platform tracks important newsletter metrics including your open rates, CTR (click through rates), and ROI (return on investment).

Kit tracks similar email marketing data. You can also set and track specific campaign goals directly within the platform.

For even more complex performance tracking, you have the ability to connect your third-party analytics platform (like Google Analytics).

✅ Winner: Kit

Email Deliverability

For the best likelihood of your emails being successfully delivered to the intended recipients, Beehiiv provides a spam testing feature.

The idea is that users will test their campaigns to make sure they’re getting through spam filters and actually landing in subscribers’ inboxes.

Kit has a strong reputation amongst email providers and has an extremely high delivery rate of 99.8%. They also have resources to help users improve their email delivery rate.

✅ Winner: Kit

List Management

Beehiiv’s list management features include things like audience segmentation, grouping, contact importing/exporting, contact scrubbing, and more.

Kit also offers a considerable number of features for managing your list. For example, you can organize subscribers into tags and segments, collect subscribers’ preferences, import/export your list, etc.

All-in-all, both tools are pretty much tied in this category.

✅ Winner: Tie

A/B Testing

Both Beehiiv and Kit allow you to perform A/B tests, which allow you to trial different aspects of your email campaigns (subject lines, send times, etc.) to see which combinations are most effective.

✅ Winner: Tie

Compliance and Security

Kit is fully compliant with several regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, EU-US Privacy Shield Framework, and other international and U.S. privacy laws.

It provides secure list management so you can be sure your customer data is stored safely.

Beehiiv is also compliant with GDPR and CCPA standards — but there’s a catch. You have to manually turn this feature on, and forgetting to do so could potentially have serious consequences.

To toggle it on, visit the Website Building tab and edit your publication’s security settings there.

Since Kit’s compliance is automatic, it comes out on top here.

✅ Winner: Kit

User Interface and User Experience

Beehiiv’s interface is user-friendly and doesn’t require users to have any sort of technical knowledge.

Its drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to build and design nice-looking campaigns from scratch. The dashboard is straightforward, with various tabs to see your newsletter content, your audience, analytics, etc.

Kit also has an extremely user-friendly interface. However, seeing as its more of a “true” email marketing platform, marketers will likely find it a bit easier to navigate than Beehiiv without getting lost in features that aren’t relevant to them.

✅ Winner: Kit

Integrations and Compatibility

Kit offers more than 130 integrations with third-party platforms like Salesforce, Google Analytics, Zoho, Zapier, and more.

However, it’s important to note that you need to be on a paid plan in order to take advantage of these integrations.

Beehiiv’s integration capabilities, on the other hand, are somewhat unclear. I couldn’t locate a list of specific integrations on their website, so it’s difficult to say what — if any — apps they can connect directly to.

Unfortunately, neither Beehiiv or Kit have an official mobile app at this time. There is a third-party dashboard app for Kit — KitPilot — but it’s in no way supported by the official company.

✅ Winner: Kit

Customer Support

Beehiiv only provides priority email support. If you have a more simple query, you may also be able to get help via its live chatbot.

Kit offers more customer service solutions, with live chat and email support. Response times are generally pretty quick, too.

There’s also an active community forum where you can reach out to other Kit users for additional support, tips, and guidance.

✅ Winner: Kit

Pricing

Beehiiv’s plans are accessible even for small companies just getting their feet wet with email marketing. Its free plan covers up to 2500 subscribers, which is quite generous compared to what many competitors offer.

Kit also has a nice free plan that covers up to 10,000 subscribers, but it comes with one major caveat — you can only create a single email sequence on that plan.

However, when you’re looking at paid plan options that can support around 1000 subscribers, Kit actually ends up being the more affordable option.

At the end of the day, you have to decide which is better for your needs — a platform that’ll stay free for longer (Beehiiv), or a platform that’ll scale more easily and affordably as your business grows (Kit).

✅ Winner: Tie

Scalability

It’s important to keep in mind that Beehiiv was built more as a newsletter platform/autoresponder combo rather than a dedicated email marketing software.

It’s not really built for large-scale email marketing campaigns. And while its built-in monetization methods are nice, they don’t really make sense for bigger companies to pursue.

Kit, on the other hand, is a dedicated email marketing platform with plans that can support up to 500,000 subscribers (or even more if you get on a custom plan).

The company has been well-trusted for years and many content creators have started using it and stuck with it as they’ve grown their companies.

✅ Winner: Kit

Standout Features of Beehiiv

• 3D analytics and advanced automation: Beehiiv provides in-depth analytics to help you uncover behavior patterns and garner insights for how your subscribers interact with your email campaigns.
• Website builder: If you want to give new subscribers access to your past newsletter content, you can do so with Beehiiv’s built-in website builder. This feature allows you to host your newsletters online and share it with new or current subscribers.
• Audio newsletters: Audio is becoming one of the most popular methods of consuming content. Beehiiv’s AI allows you to easily transform your written campaigns into audio newsletters to improve your campaign’s accessibility and reach.
• Monetization: Beehiiv has built-in monetization methods that can be particularly useful for smaller creators/business owners. Monetization methods include joining an ad network, boosting other newsletters, and paid subscription models.

Standout Features of Kit

• Targeted focus: Kit was built with a focus on content creators and bloggers. Because of this, it includes specialized features and streamlined workflows that were designed specifically with these user groups in mind.
• Visual automations: Kit’s visual automations builder makes it near effortless to automate your emails. You can use it to segment your audience based on their customer journey, send targeted content to specific audiences, and customize a subscriber’s path based on their behavior.

Beehiiv vs. Kit: SMB Guide’s Verdict

Beehiiv and Kit are both excellent email marketing tools for content creators and SMBs.

However, we think Kit is the better of the two for most use cases. Kit (formerly ConvertKit) is a well-known and trusted brand with robust features and an extremely high email delivery rate.

Start a free trial of Kit today!

If your primary goal is to start a newsletter to share content, you should go with Beehiiv. Beehiiv is unique, affordable, and has several options for monetization.

Start your free trial of Beehiiv today.