beehiiv vs Loops
Both are marketing tools. Here is what separates them.
What beehiiv is
beehiiv is a newsletter platform that keeps the publishing tools and the earning tools in one account. Alongside the email editor sit a no-code website builder and podcast hosting, and the platform names four routes to revenue: paid subscriptions, its advertising network, paid recommendations and digital products. Paid subscriptions carry a 0 percent take rate, so reader payments arrive whole. The advertising network is the part with the most moving pieces. It requires the Scale plan or higher, and a publisher has to be actively sending to receive offers at all. Up to five ad offers can be reserved at a time. The advertiser, not the publisher, decides whether a placement is priced per thousand or per click: CPM deals pay a fixed amount per 1,000 unique opens, CPC deals pay per verified unique click, and placements are measured on impressions, unique opens and verified clicks. Earnings move through Stripe Express into a beehiiv wallet with no withdrawal fee, and payouts are processed on the 20th of each month for the previous month's earnings, which is worth knowing if you are planning cash flow around ad income. Launch is the free tier at $0 a month, capped at 2,500 subscribers with three publications and one team seat. It still includes the newsletter, a website, a podcast, custom domains, a link-in-bio page and the recommendation network, plus API access, though not the Send API. What it leaves out is the money: no ad network, no paid subscriptions, no digital products. Scale, listed at $517 billed annually and shown as $43 a month, is where those unlock, together with email automations, surveys and polls, A/B testing and the referral programme. It allows up to 100,000 subscribers and three team seats. Max, listed at $1,151 billed annually and shown as $96 a month, is aimed at operations running several titles: up to ten publications and unlimited team seats. It adds removal of beehiiv branding, audio newsletters, RSS to send, dynamic content, group subscriptions and the Send API. Enterprise covers audiences above 100,000 subscribers and adds dedicated IP addresses and SSO. The plan ladder tracks a publication's stage fairly closely. The free tier gives a writer everything needed to publish and grow an audience, and the paid tiers are largely about being allowed to charge for it, sell against it or run more than one title at a time.
What Loops is
Loops is email software aimed at SaaS teams, covering marketing, product and transactional email in one product rather than splitting them across separate tools. Emails are assembled from themes and reusable components so designs stay consistent across sends, and workflows are built from triggers, branching logic and audience filters. The free plan allows up to 1,000 subscribed contacts and 4,000 sends a month, includes unlimited team seats with no per-seat charge, and adds a Loops footer credit to every email. Paid plans put no cap on the total number of emails a team can send, and Loops charges no separate fee for those sends. Throughput differs too: free accounts are capped at 10 emails per second and paid teams at 1,000, and anything submitted above the per-second limit is queued rather than rejected. Transactional templates can be built in the visual editor or imported as MJML code, though the data variables passed into them accept only string or number values. A transactional email has to be published and its sending domain verified before the API will send it, which is the usual first thing to trip over when wiring up a new project. The API lives at app.loops.so/api and authenticates with a bearer token generated in dashboard settings. Standard endpoints allow 10 requests per second per team, while the content endpoints covering campaigns, components, email messages, themes, transactional emails, uploads and workflows are limited to 60 requests per 60 seconds per team. Requests over the limit return HTTP 429, with response headers reporting the limit and how much of it remains. Each value in a request body is capped at 500 characters including quotes. Loops publishes an OpenAPI specification in both YAML and JSON, official SDKs for Go, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby and Nuxt, and a CLI that installs by curl script or Homebrew tap and reads its API key from the LOOPS_API_KEY environment variable for use in CI. Setting up sending requires SPF, DKIM, MX and CNAME records supplied by Loops, and the recommendation is to send from a subdomain rather than the root domain. Free platform subdomains from Vercel, Netlify or Shopify cannot be used as a sending domain, which rules out the quickest route for a project still hosted on default infrastructure. Prebuilt integrations cover Stripe, Supabase, Clerk, Zapier, Make, Segment, Webflow, Bubble, PostHog, Auth0 and Framer. The Stripe integration accepts 21 event types spanning customers, subscriptions, invoices, checkout sessions, disputes and quotes, and ignores any event that arrives without an email address on it.
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