beehiiv vs Mailchimp
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 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.
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