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Kit vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Which Is Best For My Newsletter Business?
A Detailed Comparison of Kit, Mailchimp, and beehiiv’s Features, Pricing, and Pros & Cons
Kawusara Salley
February 3rd, 2025
Kit (formerly ConvertKit) and Mailchimp are two popular email marketing platforms with many similar features.
If you're wondering whether ConvertKit or Mailchimp is the right choice for your needs, the answer often depends on your newsletter goals, preferences, and budget.
If neither feels quite right, beehiiv might just be what you’re looking for.
To help you decide, this Kit versus Mailchimp versus beehiiv comparison breaks down each tool’s features, pricing, and pros and cons.
Let’s begin.
Why Trust Me?
Kawusara has 5 years of experience using email marketing tools to run her side projects. She also loves researching, testing, and writing about software. This allows her to write comprehensively about this topic and share her unique insights.
Table of Contents
TL;DR — Kit vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv
Mailchimp is best for e-commerce brands and large marketing teams looking to build advanced email and SMS campaigns to promote their products.
Kit is ideal for content creators who want to build multiple sales funnels to promote and sell their digital products on autopilot.
Meanwhile, beehiiv is perfect for small to large content creators, digital solopreneurs, and media companies focused on monetizing their newsletter content through multiple passive income streams.
Kit vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Overview of Platforms
What Is Mailchimp?
When Mailchimp launched in 2001, it was the go-to email marketing platform for small businesses across a wide variety of industries. Many users loved its simplicity, generous free plan, and affordable paid plans.
However, in recent years, Mailchimp has evolved into a comprehensive marketing automation platform. It lets you connect with e-commerce shops, send promotional emails and SMS messages, track revenue generated from emails, publish content to social media, and run retargeting ads.
These features have raised Mailchimp’s learning curve and pricing plans. If you’re an e-commerce brand or enterprise team, the time and money investment is probably worth it. Otherwise, other email marketing platforms might be simpler and more affordable for your needs.
What Is Kit?
Ex-blogger, Nathan Barry, needed a creator-friendly email platform to sell his books and courses. So in 2013, he launched Kit to do just that.
Kit balances a user-friendly interface with robust email segmentation and automation features for sending highly targeted email campaigns. It also has built-in commerce tools for locking your newsletter content behind a paywall and selling digital products. Plus, Kit’s integration with Sparkloop and other course platforms makes it easy to grow your newsletter and expand revenue streams.
These make Kit great for handling email marketing and selling digital products under one roof. While its pricing works well for starters, Kit takes a cut of your earnings, making it harder to scale your earnings as you grow.
What Is beehiiv?
beehiiv is a newsletter platform that makes it easy and fun to start, grow, and monetize your newsletter. Built by ex-Morning Brew employees, it gives you access to the same growth and monetization tools that powered Morning Brew’s success.
Ever since its launch, beehiiv has won superfans for its clean and modern user interface for publishing newsletters, segmenting subscribers, and automating email sequences. It’s also the only newsletter platform that lets you set up growth and monetization systems without any strict requirements, technical expertise, or large audience.
With its flat-fee pricing, you can scale your revenue without worrying about paying commissions. This makes it an excellent choice for digital solopreneurs who are focused on building multiple passive income streams on the back of their newsletter content.
Kit vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Features Comparison
Mailchimp gives you over 100 templates to work with that you can customize using its drag-and-drop editor.
The pre-built layout templates make it easy to add new sections to your newsletter, which you can customize with text, images, videos, buttons, and social links.
If you have an e-commerce shop connected to Mailchimp, you can easily showcase products in your emails. There’s even a product recommendations block that displays products based on each subscriber’s past purchases.
Kit has 40+ newsletter templates to help you get started, but unlike Mailchimp, it doesn’t use a drag-and-drop editor.
Instead, it uses a block-based system where you click a plus button in the editor to add text, images, buttons, videos, polls, and countdown timers.
A unique Kit feature is its snippet tool, which lets you save content blocks. This way, you don’t have to waste time recreating the same sections for future newsletters.
Unlike Kit and Mailchimp, beehiiv has no newsletter templates for getting started. Instead, you can start typing your newsletter content directly inside beehiiv’s clean and minimalist editor.
Need to add content other than text? Just pull up the slash command.
It lets you add images, audio, videos, buttons, and file attachments. You can even embed social media content from platforms like YouTube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok.
Unlike Kit, beehiiv lets you drag and drop these blocks to organize your newsletter however you want. It also has a built-in AI assistant to help brainstorm ideas, fix grammar, improve readability, and even generate unique images.
Winner: beehiiv wins for having the most intuitive newsletter editor with AI tools for quickly writing and editing newsletters, and Mailchimp wins for having the most extensive newsletter templates with the option to customize them with e-commerce products.
List Management
beehiiv lets you create tags manually and apply them to subscribers individually or in bulk. You can also auto-assign tags based on actions like a subscriber joining your email list or submitting a survey.
Using these tags, you can create static or dynamic segments. Static segments stay fixed after creation, while dynamic segments automatically update as subscribers meet or stop meeting your criteria.
Besides tags, you can base segments on attributes like a subscriber’s location, signup date, acquisition source, or engagement levels (such as open and click-through rates).
Kit’s list management features are similar to beehiiv’s but with more options for tagging and segmentation.
For example, you can tag and segment subscribers based on the signup form they used, their responses to form questions, links they clicked in your emails, or products they purchased.
These options help with running targeted campaigns that boost engagement, sales, and repeat purchases.
Mailchimp has even more options for e-commerce brands looking to target specific subscribers based on
engagement levels inside emails and SMS campaigns,
buying behavior like purchase date, products purchased, and amount spent on an order, and
predictive insights like gender, location, and likelihood to purchase.
Winner: Mailchimp wins for having the most extensive segmentation options, especially for targeting customers who are likely to boost your revenue based on their past behaviors. However, it’s mostly beneficial for ecommerce businesses.
Automation
beehiiv’s visual automation builder keeps things simple while giving you plenty of functionality. You can create workflows using:
Triggers like when a subscriber joins your mailing list submits a survey, or upgrades their subscription.
Conditions such as checking if a subscriber has opened or clicked a previous email within a certain time frame.
Actions like sending an email, updating a subscriber’s status, or adding a tag.
These help set up automated flows to welcome new subscribers, share mini-email courses, and promote events or product launches.
Kit’s visual automation builder is similar to beehiiv’s but has more options for complex flows.
You can add up to five triggers to start a single flow. Instead of adding emails with delays directly in the builder, Kit uses an email sequence builder to manage the entire series in one place. This simplifies editing and keeps the automation canvas cleaner.
It also features events, which lets subscribers skip or exit automations based on actions like making a purchase. A common use case for this feature is stopping promotional emails for a product a subscriber has bought.
If you don’t want to build email automations from scratch, Kit offers 25 pre-built templates for tasks like welcoming new subscribers, promoting products, and sending abandoned cart reminders.
Like beehiiv and Kit, Mailchimp has an equally robust automation builder with over 100 automation templates tailored to e-commerce brands. Some key templates include:
Reminders for abandoned carts
Thank you emails after purchases
Rewards for VIP customers
Mailchimp also supports multiple entry points for automation flows and lets you send email and SMS messages in the same workflow.
Winner: It’s a tie between Mailchimp and Kit. They both have unique features that make it easy to boost product sales, but Mailchimp’s are focused on boosting physical product sales in your e-commerce shop while Kit’s are purpose-built for driving digital product sales.
Growth Tools
Mailchimp has core growth tools like signup forms, landing pages, and website builders.
Unlike Kit and beehiiv, these are highly customizable—use the signup forms to collect subscriber details like name, emails, birth dates, and preferences, and customize landing pages with text, images, buttons, e-commerce products, and promo codes.
However, Mailchimp doesn’t go beyond providing these basics…you’re left on your own to share your landing pages and signup forms via social media and paid ads to grow your subscriber base.
Like Mailchimp, Kit lets you create unlimited signup forms and landing pages for collecting subscribers. However, while Kit has 50+ landing page templates, they are less customizable than Mailchimp’s—you can’t build pages from scratch or rearrange existing elements in the template.
Besides signup forms and newsletters, Kit has a built-in recommendation network to help you grow your audience through cross-promotion with other Kit creators.
Kit also lets you grow your audience via referral programs and paid recommendations via its Sparkloop integration. While you wouldn’t have to pay for Sparkloop if you’re connecting it with Kit, the setup process can feel very long and overwhelming.
beehiiv has signup forms and landing pages but with limited customization.
Signup forms only collect email addresses, though you can automate follow-ups to gather more subscriber details.
Plus, landing pages don’t let you add custom elements like images, videos, and buttons, but you can showcase past newsletter content (you have full control over which ones to display) to give potential subscribers a taste of what to expect in your newsletter and boost conversions.
What sets beehiiv apart is its extensive growth tools for quickly growing your newsletter on autopilot—no complex setups or integrations required.
These include the:
Recommendation network: Partner with other beehiiv creators to cross-promote newsletters.
Magic links: Share one-click subscribe links with creators on other platforms. Subscribers are added to your list automatically without needing to enter their email.
Referral program: Reward your existing subscribers with products, discounts, or promo codes for referring new signups.
Boosts marketplace (aka Paid recommendations in Kit): Pay other beehiiv creators to bring in new subscribers. All you need is a minimum budget of $50, significantly lower than Kit’s $2000 minimum budget.
Winner: While having limited signup form and landing page customization, beehiiv wins for providing built-in recommendations, boosts, magic links, and referral tools to help with your newsletter growth efforts.
Monetization Options
Mailchimp has no monetization tools for making money directly from your newsletter content or commerce tools for selling directly on the platform. Instead, it’s built to help you promote affiliate products or your own products.
Meanwhile, beehiiv lets you earn directly from your newsletter in three main ways:
Ads network: Partner with brands to advertise in your newsletters and earn on a cost-per-click basis.
Boosts marketplace: Get paid by other creators for sending them new subscribers.
Premium subscriptions: Set up subscription tiers to provide exclusive newsletter content and other perks to subscribers.
Kit’s built-in commerce tools also support multiple monetization methods.
You can collect tips, charge for exclusive newsletter content, or sell digital products and services like downloadable files, consultations, and event tickets. However, unlike beehiiv, which lets you keep all your earnings on the platform, Kit takes a 0.6% commission fee on earnings (plus standard payment processing fees.)
Thanks to Kit’s Sparkloop integration, you can also get paid by recommending other Kit creators’ newsletters. This time around, Kit takes a 23.5% cut of your paid recommendations earnings.
Winner: beehiiv wins for providing multiple ways to directly monetize your newsletter content. Unlike Kit, it lets you keep 100% of your earnings, making it a more scalable option for growing your newsletter revenue.
Analytics
Kit’s analytics are fairly basic on standard plans. The dashboard provides metrics like open, click, and unsubscribe rates for individual emails and your overall newsletter.
If you’ve created landing pages, you can track total visits, the number of subscribers gained, and conversion rates for each page.
For more advanced insights, Kit has partnered with Segmetrics to offer an Insights dashboard, but it’s only available on the highest paid plan.
The Insights dashboard includes detailed analytics on subscriber acquisition sources, subscriber engagement levels, and sales performance for products sold through Kit Commerce.
Meanwhile, beehiiv comes fully equipped with a 3D analytics dashboard, which is available on its starter plan. It’s divided into two main sections:
Subscriber reports: Track subscriber growth over time and see which organic and paid channels—such as social media, search engines, Google ads, the beehiiv referral program, the beehiiv recommendation engine, etc.—drive the most subscribers, engagement, and conversions. This makes it easy to identify and focus on your best-performing traffic sources.
Post reports: Track the performance of individual posts and your entire newsletter with metrics like open, click, and unsubscribe rates. The dashboard also highlights your top-performing posts and links, making it easy to see which topics and formats resonate most with your audience.
beehiiv also lets you filter these insights by periods, acquisition source, and campaigns, giving you a deeper understanding of performance trends.
Mailchimp offers detailed analytics for your newsletters but doesn’t provide insights into subscriber growth. You can track open, click, and unsubscribe rates for individual campaigns as well as overall performance.
Benchmark reports let you compare a campaign’s results against your average performance or similar businesses in your industry.
For e-commerce businesses, Mailchimp goes further.
It tracks email-driven orders, total revenue, and average order value, helping you see which campaigns generate the most sales.
Winner: beehiiv wins for providing detailed, visual insights into subscriber growth and newsletter performance. Unlike Kit and Mailchimp, which reserve these features for their highest plans, beehiiv includes them in its starter plan.
Integrations
beehiiv has 10+ native integrations with website and e-commerce platforms like WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix to help you collect email subscribers.
For apps without native support, you can set up custom connections using Zapier, beehiiv’s API, or webhooks.
Kit supports over 100 native integrations, including course, webinar, and survey platforms like Thinkific, Teachable, Demio, eWebinar, Typeform, and Interact. These connections allow you to sync and tag contacts from external platforms into Kit.
For example, if someone purchases a course or fills out a form on one of these platforms, their information is transferred to Kit with relevant tags, making it easier to segment your audience.
If you need additional custom integrations, you can do so via Zapier or Kit’s API.
Mailchimp also lets you connect with over 100 third-party apps including e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Wix, as well as CRM software like Zoho CRM, Zendesk, and Copper CRM.
You can also link your account to social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), allowing you to post directly from Mailchimp. It also lets you run Google and Facebook ads to retarget existing subscribers and reach new audiences similar to them.
Like Kit and beehiiv, Mailchimp also supports Zapier and API access.
Winner: It’s a tie between Mailchimp and Kit. They both have extensive native integrations, Zapier integration, and API access. The only difference is that Mailchimp’s integrations are ecommerce-focused, while Kit’s are creator-focused.
Kit vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Pricing
Mailchimp’s free plan lets you create unlimited landing pages, capture subscriber emails, and send 1,000 monthly emails to a maximum of 500 contacts.
The Essentials plan starts at $13/month for 500 contacts and “10 x contacts” monthly emails. It also includes 3 team seats, 100+ email templates, A/B testing, and 24/7 email and chat support. You can also remove Mailchimp branding.
The Standard plan starts at $20/month for 500 contacts and “12 x contacts” monthly emails. You also get access to features like social media scheduling, retargeting ads, 5 team seats, and 5 separate audiences—essentially separate mailing lists, ideal for managing newsletters for different businesses under one account.
Then there’s the Premium plan, which starts at $350/month for 10K contacts and “15 x contacts” monthly emails. It also allows for unlimited team seats and unlimited audiences, as well as extra perks like personalized onboarding and phone support.
Kit’s free plan is very generous, offering unlimited signup forms, unlimited landing pages, and unlimited email sends to up to 10K subscribers. You can also start monetizing with tip jars, paid subscriptions, and digital products, though Kit takes a 0.6% commission on earnings plus processing fees.
The Creator plan starts at $25/month for 1K subscribers. It removes Kit branding and enables free and paid recommendations through Sparkloop, where Kit takes a 23.5% cut of paid recommendation earnings.
Then there’s the Creator Pro plan, starting at $50/month for 1K subscribers. It includes unlimited team seats, access to the Insights dashboard, and Sparkloop referral tools.
While Kit is great for new creators, commissions on earnings can add up quickly as you grow.
beehiiv’s free plan includes all the basic tools needed to start writing and publishing newsletters. It also lets you send unlimited emails to 2,500 subscribers across up to 3 newsletter publications (this is similar to Mailchimp’s audiences), which is usually more than enough for beginner creators.
The Scale plan starts at $39/month for 1,000 subscribers. It also unlocks unlimited team seats, beehiiv AI, and all of beehiiv’s monetization features. Unlike Kit, you get to keep 100% of all your earnings on the platform (you’ll only pay payment processing fees to Stripe).
The Max plan starts at $99/month for 1,000 subscribers. It’s for creators who want to remove the beehiiv branding and manage up to 10 publications under one account. You also get exclusive access to the Newsletter XP course, which teaches you how to level up your newsletter’s growth and monthly revenue.
For larger publications with over 100,000 subscribers, beehiiv’s Enterprise Plan offers custom solutions and pricing, along with benefits like onboarding and a dedicated account manager.
Kit vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Pros and Cons
Here’s a summary of each newsletter platform’s strengths and weaknesses:
Kit vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Which Newsletter Platform Is Best for You?
Each of these newsletter platforms—Kit, Mailchimp, and beehiiv—has their unique strengths, so the best choice depends on your goals.
Here’s a quick recap to help you decide:
Choose Mailchimp if you’re running an e-commerce business. It’s easy to connect to your shop, send highly targeted email and SMS campaigns, and track the ROI of your marketing efforts.
Go with Kit if you’re a content creator focused on selling digital products and services like ebooks, courses, and consultations. You can host them directly on Kit and set up dedicated sales funnels with landing pages, signup forms, segmented lists, and automation to promote and sell each product.
And if you’re a digital solopreneur or media company who wants to focus on growing and monetizing your newsletter, then beehiiv is the perfect choice for you. beehiiv makes it super easy to set up your growth and monetization systems, without any complex requirements, setups, and integrations.
Thankfully, beehiiv’s free plan lets you send unlimited emails to up to 2,500 subscribers. You only need to upgrade when you’re ready to start monetizing your newsletter.
Get started with beehiiv today!
Kit vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a better option than Mailchimp?
Kit is the best Mailchimp alternative for content creators who want access to similar segmentation and automation features for promoting and selling their digital products. And if your goal is to directly monetize your newsletter content, then beehiiv is the best Mailchimp alternative for you.
What is the difference between Kit and Mailchimp?
Mailchimp and Kit help you build advanced sales funnels to boost product sales. But the key difference is that Kit is tailored towards content creators who want to sell digital products like ebooks and courses while Mailchimp is better for e-commerce brands looking to sell more of their physical products.
What is better than Kit?
beehiiv is a better alternative to Kit if your main goal is to grow and monetize your newsletter. Unlike Kit, these features are built inside beehiiv, making it super easy to set up. Plus, you get to keep 100% of all your earnings.
What is the difference between Mailchimp vs MailerLite vs Convertkit?
Mailchimp offers robust email templates, list management, and automation tools for e-commerce and medium to large businesses. Meanwhile, MailerLite provides most of Mailchimp’s features at a lower cost for small businesses. Then there’s ConvertKit, which targets creators looking to promote and sell digital products.
What is the difference between Convertkit pricing vs Mailchimp?
ConvertKit’s free plan is more generous than Mailchimp’s, allowing unlimited emails to up to 10K subscribers. Its paid plans start at $25/month for 1K subscribers, offering access to most features. In contrast, Mailchimp’s free plan limits you to 1,000 emails for 500 subscribers, and its paid plans start at $13/month for 500 subscribers with limited features.
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