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Trying to figure out which email newsletter platform is better between Beehiiv and Mailchimp? I breakdown their features, pricing, and interfaces to find a winner.
Pricing:
Free - $399/mo
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Pricing:
Free - $1,600/mo
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Best For:
Content creators and small businesses
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Best For:
SMBs and enterprises
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One of the most important areas to invest as an SMB is email marketing. You need a solid email marketing platform to keep your customers engaged and attract new ones.
In this Beehiiv vs. Mailchimp comparison, we’re reviewing two of the best. Beehiiv is a newer platform geared towards content creators while Mailchimp is one of the most widely used solutions for email marketing.
Our final verdict? Both tools are excellent, but Beehiiv is overall a more dynamic solution that comes at a more affordable price point.
Let’s dive into their pros and cons, pricing, and what you need to know about their features.
Beehiiv vs. Mailchimp: At a Glance
Criteria | Beehiiv | Mailchimp | Winner |
---|---|---|---|
SMB Guide’s Rating | 8/10 | 8/10 | Tie |
Marketing Automation Capabilities | Workflow builder | Basic automation | Mailchimp |
Email Builder | Dynamic builder with drag and drop | Intuitive, easy-to-use | Mailchimp |
Personalization & Customization | Merge tags and segmentation options | Basic personalization | Beehiiv |
Campaign Performance Tracking | 3D analytics on campaign performance | Standard metrics | Beehiiv |
Email Deliverability | ✅ | ✅ | Beehiiv |
List Management | Comprehensive list segmentation options | Simple lists | Tie |
A/B Testing | ✅ | ✅ | Beehiiv |
Advanced Reporting & Insights | Attribution tools for tracking | Basic reports | Tie |
Compliance & Security | ✅ | ✅ | Mailchimp |
User Experience and User Interface | Modern interface | User-friendly interface | Tie |
Integrations and Compatibility | API and webhooks for custom integrations | 300+ integrations | Mailchimp |
Customer Support | Live chat, tickets, or email | Email and phone | Mailchimp |
Pricing | Free – $399/mo | Free – $1,600/mo | Beehiiv |
Scalability | ✅ | ✅ | Beehiiv |
Beehiiv: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing
Beehiiv is a newsletter platform built to help individuals, content creators, and small businesses grow. It aims to simplify the process of creating and analyzing email campaigns to make scaling your list — and business — easier.
It comes with a robust feature set, including 3D analytics, audience growth tools, and artificial intelligence (AI).
Pros & Cons
Free forever plan
User-friendly interface
Various monetization options
Advanced analytics & reporting
Limitations with customization
No mobile apps
Pricing
Beehiiv’s pricing, like most other email marketing platforms, is based on the number of subscribers you have. They also offer a free 30-day trial so you can get a feel for their features before committing to a paid plan.
Here’s a breakdown of the cost of Beehiiv 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
Access the best tools available in email, helping your newsletter scale and monetize like never before.
Mailchimp: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing
Mailchimp is one of the most well-known email marketing platforms out there — and for good reason. Its range of plans and user-friendly interface make it the ideal solution for beginners and seasoned marketers alike.
Mailchimp is designed to help you convert with both email and SMS through segmentation. It comes with advanced logic targeting and a generative AI feature to help you create on-brand content faster.
Pros & Cons
Free forever plan
300+ integrations
Personalized onboarding
iOS and Android app
Limited customization
Customer support can be improved
Pricing
Like Beehiiv, Mailchimp’s pricing is based on subscriber count. You can start using Mailchimp for free, but you’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription once you have over 500 email contacts.
Here’s a quick breakdown of Mailchimp’s plan options:
- Free: $0 (up to 500 contacts)
- Essentials: $13 per month (for 500 contacts)
- Standard: $20 per month (for 500 contacts)
- Premium: $350 per month (for 10,000 contacts)
Grow your business on your terms with Mailchimp's All-In-One marketing, automation & email marketing platform.
Marketing Automation Capabilities
Beehiiv’s automation features allow you to create complicated workflows with branching logic and conditional actions triggered by time-based events, user behavior, and other outside variables.
Mailchimp works similarly, allowing you to create automations so that your campaigns are sent out at specific intervals or triggered by a specific event.
Automation workflows within Mailchimp can include either a single email or a series of emails.
While both platforms offer similar automation capabilities, Mailchimp’s automation features are just a bit more intuitive overall.
✅ Winner: Mailchimp
Email Builder
You can create emails in Beehiiv using its drag-and-drop interface or by editing the HTML directly. You’ll be able to preview what your campaigns will look like on a variety of devices directly within the email builder.
Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop email editor allows you to customize every element, from text blocks, photos, videos, social media buttons and links, and more.
You’ll have full control over the aesthetics of your campaigns as well, including the font, colors, and branding elements.
If you don’t want to create campaigns from scratch, you can start with one of their pre-made templates and go from there.
Mailchimp even offers a comprehensive step-by-step guide, further simplifying the process of creating email campaigns.
✅ Winner: Mailchimp
Personalization & Customization
One of the big draws of Beehiiv is its incredible customization capabilities. You pretty much have full control over the appearance of your emails, when/how they’re sent out, etc.
You can even tweak SEO settings directly within the platform.
Mailchimp is pretty customizable. However, I found that it can be a bit limiting, especially the visual aspect. Fonts are limited, and you’ll be stuck with Mailchimp’s branding on your emails if you’re on the free plan.
Both platforms allow you to personalize emails with dynamic content insertion (e.g. names, geography, previous actions) to ensure that emails are specific to subscribers.
✅ Winner: Beehiiv
Campaign Performance Tracking
Beehiiv offers powerful tracking and real-time reporting features so you always have an up-to-date, accurate picture of your campaign performance.
It tracks important email marketing data like your open rates, CTR (click through rate), conversion rate, and ROI (return on investment).
Mailchimp provides comprehensive reports with data on your campaign clicks, opens, and conversions.
You’ll also be provided with comparative reports, which look at the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns compared to industry standards.
✅ Winner: Beehiiv
Email Deliverability
Beehiiv allows users to run spam tests on their email campaigns, which can increase the likelihood that their emails will be successfully delivered to the intended recipient.
Mailchimp doesn’t really offer anything like Beehiiv’s spam testing feature. However, Mailchimp’s overall email deliverability as of January 2024 is 89.5%, which is classed as an excellent score.
Email deliverability can be a difficult metric to accurately measure. However, because Beehiiv offers a dedicated spam testing feature to help users increase their email campaign deliverability, they come out on top here.
✅ Winner: Beehiiv
List Management
Both Beehiiv and Mailchimp provide adequate list management features.
Beehiiv includes features like audience segmentation and grouping, contact importing/exporting, contact scrubbing, and more.
Mailchimp offers three primary ways to manage your contact list:
- Tags: Customizable labels based on information outside of what Mailchimp collects; used primarily for organization
- Groups: Lets your customers tell you what kind of content they want to receive; created through a form field when people subscribe to your list
- Segments: Filters you can apply to your list; can be based on both demographic and behavioral data
Mailchimp also offers a way to import/export your contact list.
✅ Winner: Tie
A/B Testing
Beehiiv enables you to perform A/B testing, which lets you trial different email layouts, subject lines, send times, and more to see which combination proves to be the most effective.
Mailchimp also offers A/B testing, but only on the Essentials plan and higher. Creating one is pretty straightforward, and the software allows you to choose how many of your contacts will receive test combinations and choose how the winning combination will be determined.
Beehiiv comes out on top in this category because their A/B testing is offered to all subscribers, not just those on certain plans.
✅ Winner: Beehiiv
Compliance and Security
Mailchimp’s email platform complies with the GDPR and U.S. CAN-SPAM Act. It also encrypts user data to keep it safe against unauthorized access.
With Beehiiv, you can easily ensure your newsletter(s) are compliant with GDPR and CCPA standards by visiting the Website Building and editing your publication’s security settings.
Mailchimp wins here simply because its compliance is automatic, whereas it’s an extra step in Beehiiv to toggle compliance features on.
✅ Winner: Mailchimp
User Interface and User Experience
Both of these platforms are user-friendly and should be easy for marketers of all skill levels to navigate.
Beehiiv prioritizes creation, with a large “Start Writing” button at the top of the dashboard. You can also customize the dashboard with shortcuts to your most frequently used features.
Mailchimp is known for its easy-to-use campaign builder. Navigating among the software is also relatively simple. You can easily access your subscriber lists, reports, and campaigns directly from the left sidebar.
Like most other email platforms, there can be a bit of a learning curve when it comes to more complex tasks like segmentation and automation.
✅ Winner: Tie
Integrations and Compatibility
Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate any specific information about Beehiiv’s integrations on their website.
Mailchimp, on the other hand, is extremely flexible. It connects with over 250 third-party apps such as analytics software, social media platforms, scheduling apps, and more.
Beehiiv unfortunately doesn’t have a mobile app, whereas Mailchimp does.
✅ Winner: Mailchimp
Customer Support
Beehiiv doesn’t offer phone or live chat support. It does, however, provide priority email support and a live chatbot for assistance on simple queries and issues.
Mailchimp offers email and live chat assistance to its subscribers, as well as phone support if you’re on the Premium plan or higher.
The caveat is if you’re on the free plan, where you’ll only have access to customer support for the first 30 days.
✅ Winner: Mailchimp
Pricing
Beehiiv offers a generous free plan that covers up to 2500 subscribers. While Beehiiv’s “out of the box” pricing options may appear expensive at first, that’s because they cover more subscribers.
For example, Beehiiv’s default plans cover up to 1000 subscribers while Mailchimp’s only cover up to 500 (unless you pay for more).
Mailchimp offers a free forever plan as long as you stay under 500 subscribers. Its paid plan options are tiered in a way that ensures you’re only paying for the exact resources you need.
However, many marketers consider it expensive, especially those with a lot of subscribers sending many emails per month.
Overall, Beehiiv’s plans are more generous, allowing for more subscribers and providing more features at a lower price point.
✅ Winner: Beehiiv
Scalability
Beehiiv is a great tool built with smaller creators in mind. But it also scales really well, so it can grow with you as your business evolves.
Its Enterprise plan can be tailored to the specific needs of large organizations and allows for infinite subscribers all at a custom price point depending on your needs.
While Mailchimp is excellent for small to mid-sized businesses, it can get extremely expensive for large companies with massive subscriber lists.
Once you’ve grown your list to a certain point, it’ll likely make more sense to switch to another provider rather than sticking with Mailchimp.
✅ Winner: Beehiiv
Standout Features of Beehiiv
- Audio newsletters: Beehiiv allows creators to turn their written newsletters into audio content using AI. Not only does this feature improve accessibility, but it also accommodates one of the most common emerging styles of content consumption — helping creators widen their reach.
- Website builder: Beehiiv comes with a built-in website tool which allows you to host your newsletters online. This is a great, hassle-free option for those who want to provide subscribers access to archived content.
- 3D analytics and advanced automation: Beehiiv’s 3D analytics provide deeper insights into how subscribers interact with your newsletter by exposing behavior patterns and potential areas for improvement.
Standout Features of Mailchimp
- Landing page editor: Landing pages often help boost conversion rates. With Mailchimp’s landing page editor, you can easily create your own landing pages from scratch or select one of the existing template designs.
- CRM and contact list: Mailchimp’s contact list functionality connects automatically with its CRM system, where you can organize and categorize your contacts. While other CRMs can be complex to navigate, Mailchimp proves its data in a more approachable way.
Beehiiv vs. Mailchimp: SMB Guide’s Verdict
Beehiiv and Mailchimp are both solid contenders when it comes to email marketing software.
If you’re a content creator looking for something fresh, dynamic, and affordable, consider Beehiiv.
Start your free trial of Beehiiv today.
But if you’re an e-commerce brand or otherwise are more interested in the traditional email marketing approach, Mailchimp may be a better fit.
Try out Mailchimp for free today!
Grow your business on your terms with Mailchimp's All-In-One marketing, automation & email marketing platform.