Flodesk and beehiiv are both relatively new to email marketing, but they were built for very different users.

Flodesk, launched in 2019, was created to simplify marketing automation for small businesses. Its flat-fee pricing made it especially appealing to teams working with tight budgets.

beehiiv came later with a different focus—helping creators launch and grow newsletters without juggling multiple tools. Instead of patching together a blog, email platform, and monetization tools, beehiiv wraps it all into one platform, so you can get started fast.

Which platform’s right for you? That depends on what you’re trying to build.

I’ve tested both platforms and broken down the key differences in this Flodesk vs. beehiiv comparison to help you decide.

Why Trust Me?

Kawusara has five years of experience using email marketing tools to run her side projects. She also loves researching, testing, and writing about software, allowing her to write comprehensively about this topic and share her unique insights.

The first thing you’ll notice after signing up for Flodesk is how clean and clutter-free the interface is. 

All Flodesk’s features—Email, Forms, Workflows, Checkouts, Audience, and Analytics—are laid out neatly in the top menu. Plus, using each of these features is pretty easy and straightforward.

beehiiv has a more feature-rich interface, so it’s not quite as minimal as Flodesk. However, it still ranks high on my list of easy-to-use platforms.

When you log in to beehiiv, you’re taken to a dashboard that shows your subscriber growth and newsletter performance at a glance. You can even start writing your first newsletter right away before diving into the rest of the features, which are arranged in tabs inside the left-hand menu.

Figuring out how to use these features feels intuitive. Should you get stuck, beehiiv offers plenty of tutorials to help you out.

While templates on older email platforms often feel dull and boring, Flodesk’s designs are a breath of fresh air.

You get access to 85 beautiful templates that cover most use cases for small businesses—welcome emails, newsletters, freebie delivery, announcements, product sales, and more.

Whether you start from a template or a blank canvas, Flodesk’s block-based editor makes it easy to build out your emails. 

Each block can be text, images, buttons, countdown timers, polls, videos, or social links. You can even connect your Instagram account and embed specific posts directly into your emails.

I love how Flodesk (like beehiiv) doesn’t limit you to stacking blocks vertically, you also get multiple layout options to play with the structure and overall look of your email.

beehiiv is still growing its template library. Right now, there are seven newsletter-style templates for niches like tech, fashion, and wellness, with more on the way. 

That said, you don’t have to wait around. You can design your own emails from scratch and save them as templates to reuse later.

When it comes to writing your newsletter content, beehiiv gives you more options to play with inside the editor. You can add tables, file attachments, a table of contents, and even drop in content from Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X (Formerly Twitter).

beehiiv’s editor is also built to make your workflow easier and boost your overall productivity. You can collaborate with your team inside beehiiv and use beehiiv AI to help you draft and polish your content, adjust the tone, or generate images to go along with your emails.

Another thing beehiiv does really well is offering multiple publishing options. You can send your content directly to subscribers’ inboxes, publish it on the web (where they’ll live as blog posts), or do both. 

If you’ve enabled paid subscriptions, (more on this in the monetization section), you can also choose whether each piece of content is available to everyone or only to paying members.

Flodesk keeps things pretty basic when it comes to segmentation. 

You can set up segments that update based on form submissions, link clicks in emails, and triggers from automation flows. That’s about it.

If you want to create segments based on other details—like where someone signed up from, their subscriber status, engagement level, or data points like gender or location, it gets tricky.

While you can filter your audience using those details, Flodesk won’t let you turn that filter into a segment that updates on its own. You’d have to manually create the segment and add the matching subscribers yourself. It’s doable but not the most efficient, especially as your audience grows.

beehiiv, on the other hand, gives you a lot more room to work with. It includes everything Flodesk offers and adds way more options. 

You can filter and segment based on subscriber location, acquisition source, subscription status or tier, and engagement metrics like opens, clicks, and bounces.

Remember how Flodesk doesn’t support segments that update automatically based on certain user demographics and behavior?

Well, beehiiv handles that really well with its dynamic segments feature that updates in real time as your audience interacts with your content.   

You can also get super specific. For example, instead of creating a vague “engaged subscribers” segment, you can define exactly what engagement means to you by setting your own thresholds for open rates, click rates, and more.

Flodesk comes with nine automation templates that cover common use cases for small business owners. These include freebie delivery, welcome, sales, followup, and re-engagement sequences.

You can start with one of these templates or build your own from scratch using Flodesk’s visual automation builder. It’s simple to use and lets you create complete automation flows with triggers, delays, if/else conditions, and “send email” actions.

beehiiv’s automation tool is pretty similar in structure, but it’s more flexible.

You get more trigger options, including:

You can also add up to three triggers to kick off an automation flow.

Also, thanks to the built-in webhooks feature, you’re able to send real-time data to external apps based on different trigger events.

Flodesk is mainly focused on marketing automation, helping you send emails that nurture your audience and drive sales for business offers. Like most platforms in this space, it doesn’t have growth tools and leaves the list-building part up to you. 

Meanwhile, beehiiv comes with built-in growth tools to help you attract new subscribers without needing to rely solely on outside efforts.

These include a recommendation engine that lets you cross-promote your newsletter with other beehiiv creators, a referral program that rewards your subscribers for bringing in new ones, and Boosts, a feature that lets you invest money to have your newsletter promoted by others.

These tools are simple to set up, and…they get results.

Marcus Ramsey, founder of The Brink, hit 14,000 subscribers just one month after launching on beehiiv. He credits the referral program, saying, “It actually works. I've gotten a ton of subscribers from the referral program, and I didn’t have to spend any time implementing it or trying to get the tool to work.”

Christian Collard, founder of Sunday Money, used Boosts to land his first 1,000 subscribers. “I can just put money in there, and people will promote my newsletter to others; and that was how I got to the first thousand,” he shared.

Flodesk doesn’t have built-in monetization tools, which makes sense, given its focus. It’s designed to help you promote and sell your products and services, rather than earning money from your email content.

And that’s perfectly fine, because this is exactly what beehiiv is built for. With beehiiv, you can earn from your newsletter through:

These features are already built into the platform and have helped creators earn over $25 million so far.

If monetizing your content is a key part of your strategy, beehiiv makes it easy to start and scale.

beehiiv doesn’t have built-in commerce tools, but you can connect it to your checkout platform using Zapier or its application programming interface (API).

Flodesk, on the other hand, has its own commerce features. It lets you build simple sales pages for your digital products and customize your checkout with opt-ins, discounts, upsells, and testimonials. 

When someone makes a purchase, you can follow up with automated emails.

However, keep in mind that Flodesk isn’t built for advanced E-commerce flows like browse or cart abandonment. But if you're only selling low-ticket digital products like ebooks, templates and planners, it gets the job done.

Flodesk gives you a good overview of how your emails and funnels are performing. You can track subscriber growth over time, see which emails are getting the most opens and clicks, and even identify your most engaged subscribers.

You’ll also get insights into your top-performing forms, workflows, and checkout pages. These are helpful for figuring out what’s working (and what needs improvement) in your sales funnels and campaigns.

beehiiv’s analytics lets you dig deeper beneath the surface with its Subscribers Report and Posts Report.

The Subscribers Report lets you see where your subscribers are coming from—whether it’s search engines, beehiiv’s built-in growth tools, paid ads, or social media—and helps you compare which sources are driving the most engaged readers.

For the Inverse Cramer newsletter, these insights revealed that the majority of engaged subscribers came from X (Formerly Twitter), so they focused their efforts there to drive more growth. 

In the Posts Report, you can drill into the performance of each email using filters for open rate, click rate (via both email and web), unsubscribe rate, and spam complaints. This makes it easy to spot trends and double down on the content that resonates most with your audience.

Most email platforms use subscriber-based pricing—the more subscribers you have, the more you pay.

Flodesk takes a different approach with flat-fee pricing. It’s $38/month for email-only features and $64/month if you also want E-commerce.

However, Flodesk’s free plan is limited. You can create signup forms and link-in-bio pages to collect emails, but you won’t be able to send any emails until you purchase a plan.

In contrast, beehiiv uses the traditional model but offers a generous free plan. The free plan lets you send unlimited emails, grow up to 2,500 subscribers, and use the recommendation engine to speed up growth. 

beehiiv’s Scale plan starts at $39/month for 1,000 subscribers and includes automations, all growth and monetization tools, beehiiv AI, and three team seats for collaboration.

For larger teams or publishers managing multiple newsletters, beehiiv’s Max plan starts at $99/month for 1,000 subscribers. This lets you create 10 newsletter publications, get unlimited team seats, remove beehiiv branding, and access priority support.

If your list grows beyond 100,000 subscribers, beehiiv offers custom Enterprise pricing.

Choose Flodesk if you’re a small business owner focused on selling your paid products and services. 

Flodesk offers the essential marketing and commerce tools in one easy-to-use platform and at a flat rate that’s tough to beat. Its clean interface and intuitive design mean you spend less time learning the software and more time creating campaigns that drive engagement and sales for your business.

Go with beehiiv if your main focus is publishing newsletters and blog posts, growing your audience and earning directly from your content. 

beehiiv’s combination of features are rarely found in one place. Whether you’re building a personal newsletter or a full-scale media brand, beehiiv makes it easy to get started—you can be up and publishing in under 10 minutes.

Ready to grow your newsletter? Sign up for beehiiv today.

Flodesk is often compared to platforms like Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Kit. However, it stands out for its super minimalist interface and flat-rate pricing, but this simplicity comes with trade-offs—limited segmentation and automation, no A/B testing, and fewer integrations.

Yes, Flodesk has a free plan, but it’s limited. You can collect subscriber emails using forms, but you won’t be able to send any emails until you upgrade to a paid plan.

No, Flodesk isn’t a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. It’s an email marketing platform with basic subscriber management. You can add subscribers, save their details in custom fields, and segment them; but it doesn’t support CRM features like sales pipelines, lead scoring, and task management.

Yes, beehiiv is good for email marketing, especially for creators and media brands who want to publish newsletters, grow their audience, and earn from their content.