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Mailchimp vs. Substack vs. beehiiv: Which Newsletter Platform Is the Best?
Breaking Down the Features, Pros and Cons, and Pricing of Mailchimp, Substack, and beehiiv
Kawusara Salley
February 7th, 2025
So you want to start a newsletter…and you’re wondering whether to go with Mailchimp or Substack.
Or, maybe, you’re already using one of these newsletter platforms and wondering if it’s time to make a switch—or even try a new (and probably better fit) option like beehiiv?
Regardless of where you stand, this article will give you the clarity you need.
We’ll cover a detailed breakdown of Mailchimp vs. Substack vs. beehiiv to see how they compare with each other. By the end, you’ll know which tool is the best fit for your business’s needs and goals.
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 — Mailchimp vs. Substack vs. beehiiv
Short on time? Here’s how the three platforms compare:
Mailchimp is best for ecommerce brands that need an email and SMS marketing platform to promote their products and services.
Meanwhile, Substack is perfect for writers, book authors, and journalists looking for a simple newsletter platform to share their knowledge, build a community around it, and monetize with paid subscriptions.
Then, there’s beehiiv, which works best for content creators and media companies looking for a newsletter platform with extensive growth and monetization tools to quickly grow their audience and monetize across multiple passive income streams.
Mailchimp vs. Substack vs. beehiiv: Overview of Platforms
What Is Mailchimp?
Mailchimp launched in 2007 as a simple email marketing and automation platform. Over time, it has evolved into a comprehensive marketing solution that lets you manage SMS marketing, publish content to social media, run retargeting ads, and track revenue generated from emails.
These features make it easy for ecommerce brands to boost revenue and return on investment (ROI) from marketing efforts. However, if you don’t need these advanced features, Mailchimp’s complex interface and expensive paid plans aren’t worth it.
What Is Substack?
Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie founded Substack in 2017. Their goal was to help writers connect with their audience and monetize their content.
Today, Substack has attracted writers, journalists, published authors, and professors who want to own their audience and dictate their earnings. They love Substack’s simple interface for publishing newsletters, podcasts, and video content.
Most importantly, you can sign up to Substack for free and earn by putting content behind a paywall. While this is great for starters, Substack’s commission-based model for charging platform users may not scale well as your earnings grow.
What Is beehiiv?
beehiiv stepped into the email marketing scene in 2021. It was launched by a team of ex-Morning Brew employees who grew the newsletter to over 4 million subscribers. Their goal with beehiiv was to make Morning Brew’s growth and monetization tools accessible to everyone.
So unlike other newsletter platforms, beehiiv is packed with growth tools like a referral program, a recommendation network, and a boosts marketplace to help you grow your audience quickly. It also offers multiple ways to monetize with ads, boosts, and premium subscriptions.
Instead of charging a percentage of your earnings, beehiiv uses a flat fee pricing model—which means your costs won’t increase as you earn more. This makes it an excellent choice for content creators, digital solopreneurs, and media companies focused on building a sustainable business with multiple income streams.
Mailchimp vs. Substack vs. beehiiv: Features Comparison
Now, we’ll take a deep dive into each tool’s features and how they compare with each other.
With Mailchimp, you can write your newsletters from scratch or get started with any of its 100+ newsletter templates.
These templates cover multiple use cases including welcome and thank you messages, announcements, event invitations, and promotions for products or services. Its intuitive drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to customize them—add or edit existing headings, paragraphs, images, videos, and social blocks.
And if you’ve connected Mailchimp to your ecommerce shop, you can showcase these products inside your newsletter and use the layouts tool to arrange them into multiple columns.
beehiiv’s block-based newsletter editor makes writing smoother and faster—similar to taking notes in Notion.
You can type and format text directly in the editor and, with the slash command, add headings, images, videos, audio, tables, and social media content.
If you need help with your newsletter subject line, content outline, or first draft, beehiiv’s AI assistant will quickly whip one up for you—just describe what you need with a text prompt.
When your draft is ready, you can also use beehiiv AI to correct spelling and grammar, improve readability, and maintain a consistent tone.
For teams, beehiiv supports real-time collaboration. Work with colleagues on the same document and leave inline comments as feedback.
Writing in Substack is like writing inside a Google Doc—you have a blank writing space with a top toolbar for formatting your text, adding images, embedding audio and video, and inserting buttons.
Unlike Mailchimp and beehiiv, Substack isn’t limited to newsletters. You can also use it to publish podcasts and video content.
Community Building
Mailchimp’s focus is to help you promote your products and services...that’s it. It doesn’t have tools for building a community around your content.
Meanwhile, beehiiv lets you do just that. It allows you to publish your newsletter content to a blog page as well. This serves two purposes:
Engage existing subscribers: Email subscribers can access your content on the blog and interact with it by liking, commenting, and sharing it on social media. This encourages further discussion around your newsletter content and strengthens the connection with your audience.
Attract future subscribers: They can view all of your past newsletter content in one place and jump into ongoing conversations right away.
Like beehiiv, Substack also saves your newsletters to a blog page and allows readers to engage with them, but Substack has more channels for interacting directly with your audience:
Discussion threads: Share short posts to ask your subscribers a question or gather their thoughts about a topic.
Chat: This is a private space where you and your subscribers exchange messages, images, and videos in real time.
Notes: Substack has a built-in version of X (formerly Twitter), which lets you share updates, thoughts, tips, or highlights from your newsletters. These posts reach your subscribers and Substack’s reader community at large.
Segmentation
Substack’s email segmentation feature is very basic. It lets you filter your mailing list by subscription source, subscription type (free or paid), engagement levels, and subscriber revenue generated. From there, you can send them an email or reward them with a paid subscription for a limited time.
However, Substack doesn’t let you save these segments for future use—you’ll have to recreate these filters every time you want to write to a specific segment or reward them.
Unlike Substack, beehiiv’s segmentation feature is flexible.
For example, you can build a complex multi-layer segment using the “AND” and “OR” operations to target subscribers who meet all conditions in one criteria set while satisfying only one condition in another criteria set.
Plus, beehiiv lets you save multiple segments with a name, description, and segment type (static or dynamic). Static segments don't update after you create them. In contrast, dynamic segments update automatically as you gain new subscribers and existing ones fail to to match your segment’s criteria.
That’s not all.
Besides just sending emails to your segment, beehiiv lets you execute other bulk actions like unsubscribing them from your newsletter, gifting them a premium subscription, and adding them to an automation sequence.
Mailchimp’s segmentation feature is very similar to the one in beehiiv.
The only difference is that ecommerce brands can implement more segmentation strategies—targeting subscribers by their purchase activity, purchase date, likelihood to purchase in the future, and lifetime value.
These segmentation strategies allow you to send your subscribers personalized emails that resonate with them and drive sales.
For example, you can segment subscribers who purchased a specific item in the past and recommend similar items to boost repeat purchases.
Automation
Substack doesn’t let you set up automations. The only thing you can do is to send welcome emails to new subscribers.
Unlike Substack, beehiiv has a visual automation builder for creating automated email sequences. It lets you specify trigger conditions, set time delays, and choose actions like sending emails and updating subscription statuses.
This automation builder enables you to create email sequences for multiple use cases, including:
Welcoming new subscribers
Collecting additional subscriber details after signup
Running mini email courses
Promoting upcoming events or product launches
Mailchimp has the most powerful automation suite. It lets you build email and SMS sequences from scratch, as well as hybrid sequences combining the two.
If you don’t want to build from scratch, Mailchimp has over 100 automation templates to use as a starting point. Again, ecommerce brands will find these templates most useful for:
Reminding customers of their abandoned cart
Thanking customers after a purchase
Collecting feedback post-purchase
Rewarding VIP customers
Growth tools
Mailchimp has the core growth tools for growing your mailing list—signup forms, landing pages, and websites. These tools are super basic in Substack and beehiiv but highly customizable in Mailchimp.
For example, Substack and beehiiv only let you collect email addresses in signup forms, but Mailchimp lets you get their personal details (like name, birthday, and gender) and preferences (for example, whether or not they like ice cream).
Plus, you can customize your landing pages and websites with images, videos, buttons, products, and social links.
As mentioned earlier, Substack (and beehiiv) let you have a signup form, landing page, and website, but these have limited customization.
That said, here’s where Substack stands out:
Substack’s reader community makes it much easier to grow your audience—think of it like the reader community on Medium. Readers can browse the platform for newsletters that match their interests and subscribe right away.
Substack also has a recommendation system that lets writers promote each other’s newsletters to grow their audiences. So if a writer recommends your newsletter, it’ll be featured on their homepage so their subscribers can find and join it.
Like Substack, beehiiv has a recommendation engine for cross-promoting newsletters with other beehiiv creators…but it works a bit differently.
Instead of hoping readers will find your newsletter in the recommended section of another creator’s homepage, here’s what happens on beehiiv:
Let’s say Creator A recommends your newsletter.
When a new subscriber joins Creator A’s newsletter, your newsletter will be immediately suggested to them as well, giving them the option to subscribe right then and there.
There’s more.
beehiiv lets you set up a subscriber referral program. It’s basically a way to reward existing subscribers for bringing in new subscribers.
You can reward them with a physical product, a digital product like an ebook or course, or discount on a paid product.
And if you want to set up tiered rewards based on the number of referrals your subscribers bring, you can do that too…it’s super simple—no code, no integrations, and no automations required.
And if you have some cash to invest in your newsletter’s growth, you can join the Boosts marketplace. This lets you pay other creators for every new subscriber they refer to your newsletter.
Monetization Options
Mailchimp doesn’t have monetization tools. It’s designed for businesses that use newsletters to promote their products and services rather than earning directly from newsletter content.
Meanwhile, Substack lets you lock access to your newsletter content and engagement features (like comments, chat, and discussion threads) behind a monthly or yearly subscription.
You can also set up a founding member subscription for your super loyal fans, giving them the option to pay a higher annual fee to support your work.
Like Substack, beehiiv lets you lock access to your content behind a paywall, but you’ve got more flexibility here.
In addition to monthly and yearly subscriptions, you can offer one-time payments along with a trial option. This gives readers a chance to try out the premium experience before deciding to make any payment.
beehiiv also has an ad network for earning additional income without the extra work—it’s like enabling Google ads on your website; but this time, you’re enabling ads inside your newsletter.
The ad network connects you with top brands like Babbel, Aura, and Betterhelp, allowing you to earn on a pay-per-click basis.
Remember what we mentioned earlier? About growing your beehiiv newsletter by paying other creators to bring new subscribers?
Well, you can flip the script and be the creator, earning money from others willing to invest.
All you have to do is visit the Boosts marketplace, find newsletters that align with your audience’s interests, and recommend them.
As your subscribers sign up for these newsletters, you’ll be earning some extra cash…it’s a win for them, and a win for you too!
In addition to these built-in monetization tools, beehiiv allows you to promote affiliate products and your own products inside emails—a move that isn’t encouraged on Substack, mostly due to their earnings-based pricing model.
In other words, beehiiv gives you complete control over your earnings.
Analytics
Substack’s email marketing analytics breaks down key metrics like total views, open rates, likes, comments, and new subscribers for individual posts and your entire newsletter publication.
You can also monitor your top traffic sources and sort them based on the number of visits, free subscriptions, or paid subscriptions they generate.
Meanwhile, beehiiv provides a more comprehensive and visual overview of your newsletter’s performance, broken down into two main dashboards:
Subscriber reports: These track your subscriber growth over time, highlighting the organic and paid channels driving the most subscribers, engagement, and conversions. They help you understand your most effective traffic sources and double down on them.
Post reports: These track open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates across your newsletter publication. They also rank your top-performing posts and links across your emails and blog pages. These insights help you identify post elements that resonate with readers and those that don’t, so you can optimize your future posts effectively.
Unlike Substack and beehiiv, Mailchimp doesn’t provide any insights into subscriber growth. However, it covers everything about newsletter performance.
Besides just getting the open, click, and unsubscribe rates of newsletter posts, Mailchimp’s benchmark reports give you more context about how these compare with your average campaign performance and that of peers in your industry.
Ecommerce businesses can also track the number of orders an email generated, average order value, and total revenue.
Integrations
Substack doesn’t easily integrate with third-party apps. It has two main built-in integrations—Unsplash for sourcing stock images for your newsletter and Stripe for accepting subscription payments…that’s it.
There’s no integration with an automation app like Zapier or access to Substack’s API.
Meanwhile, beehiiv easily connects with external apps. It has about 10 native integrations with website builders, ecommerce platforms, and payment gateways like WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, Shopify, and Stripe.
If your software of choice isn’t natively supported, no worries! You can connect with them via beehiiv’s Zapier integration or API.
Mailchimp connects natively with over 100 business apps. This includes ecommerce platforms and CRMs like Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Zoho CRM, and Copper CRM.
Mailchimp also connects with social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) for social media posting from its dashboard.
Even better, you can run Google and Facebook ads to retarget your existing audience or people who have interacted with your ecommerce shop in the past. This approach to running ads is more likely to boost your marketing ROI.
Like beehiiv, Mailchimp also has a Zapier integration and provides API access for connecting custom apps.
Mailchimp vs. Substack vs. beehiiv: Pricing
Anyone can sign up for Substack and start publishing content for free—no feature restrictions whatsoever.
However, once you start making money on the platform, Substack takes a 10% cut on your earnings, which can quickly add up as your revenue grows.
Meanwhile, beehiiv offers free and paid plans for small and large creators. Unlike Substack, beehiiv doesn’t take a cut on your earnings regardless of your plan:
Launch (Free forever): It has everything you need to write and publish newsletters. You can send unlimited emails every month to up to 2,500 subscribers across 3 publications.
Scale (Starts at $39/month for 1K subs): This is for creators who want to start earning with beehiiv right away. It unlocks all of beehiiv’s monetization tools, unlimited team members, survey forms, polls, and beehiiv AI.
Max (Starts at $99/month for 1K subs): This is for creators and media companies looking to run up to 10 publications. You get extra perks like removing the beehiiv branding, priority support, and lifetime access to the Newsletter XP Course, a premium newsletter growth and monetization course featuring experts like beehiiv’s co-founder Tyler Denk.
Enterprise (Custom pricing): This plan is for publications with 100K+ subscribers. It comes with exclusive benefits like personalized onboarding and a dedicated account manager.
Mailchimp has a free plan, which lets you capture subscriber emails via signup forms and publish newsletters. However, you can only send a total of 1,000 monthly emails as long as you don’t exceed 500 contacts in your mailing list.
The Essentials plan starts at $13/month for 500 contacts and “10 x Contacts” monthly emails. This plan lets you have 3 team seats, access the newsletter template library, use A/B testing tools, and remove Mailchimp branding. You also get access to 24/7 email and live chat support.
For pro users looking to maximize product sales via social media scheduling and retargeting ads, Mailchimp’s Standard plan is for you. It starts at $20/month for 500 contacts and “12 x Contacts” monthly emails. It also unlocks 5 team seats and lets you manage 5 separate audiences (with their different newsletters).
The Premium plan starts at $350/month for 10,000 contacts and “15 x Contacts” monthly emails. It also comes with unlimited audiences, unlimited team seats, personalized onboarding, and phone support.
Mailchimp vs. Substack vs. beehiiv: Pros and Cons
Here’s a summary of each platform’s strengths and weaknesses:
Mailchimp Pros | Mailchimp Cons |
✅ Intuitive drag-and-drop editor | ❌ Steep learning curve |
✅ Robust automation builder | ❌ Limited free plan |
✅ 100+ newsletter and automation templates | ❌ No built-in monetization tools |
✅ Extensive native integrations |
Substack Pros | Substack Cons |
✅ Access all features free forever | ❌ Limited native integrations |
✅ User-friendly interface | ❌ Basic segmentation feature |
✅ More community-building features | ❌ No automation builder |
✅ Publish newsletters, video, and podcasts | ❌ Heavy product promotion isn’t encouraged |
beehiiv Pros | beehiiv Cons |
✅ Generous free plan | ❌ No newsletter templates |
✅ Minimalist newsletter editor | ❌ Learning certain features may take a while |
✅ AI tools for faster content creation | ❌ Few third-party integrations |
✅ Extensive growth and monetization tools | |
✅ Promote digital products and affiliate links in newsletters |
Mailchimp vs. Substack vs. beehiiv: Final Thoughts
As we’ve seen, each platform has unique features that appeal to users with different goals.
Mailchimp’s newsletter editor, segmentation feature, and automation builder makes it easy for ecommerce businesses to run highly targeted email campaigns and showcase products in newsletters to drive sales.
However, if you’re looking for a simple newsletter platform to publish content in a variety of formats (newsletters, podcasts, and videos), interact with your audience on a regular basis, and get paid via subscriptions, then Substack is best.
Meanwhile, beehiiv’s extensive growth and monetization tools are perfect for creators and media companies that want to quickly grow their audience and diversify their income streams without worrying about paying high commissions as they scale.
With beehiiv, you’re also free to promote your digital and affiliate products as frequently as you’d like, so your earning potential is limitless!
Curious to see what beehiiv has in store for you?
Mailchimp vs. Substack vs. beehiiv: Frequently Asked Questions
What is the downside of Substack?
Substack has basic segmentation tools, limited integrations, and no automation builder. Additionally, it doesn’t encourage brands that focus heavily on promoting their own products or affiliate products—they want you to make money through paid subscriptions on the platform.
Does Substack integrate with Mailchimp?
No, Substack doesn’t integrate with Mailchimp. However, it does make it easy to transfer your audience and newsletter posts from Mailchimp to Substack.
Can you use Substack for email marketing?
No, you can’t use Substack for email marketing when your sole purpose is sending promotional emails. Instead, Substack is more like a newsletter platform where you provide value through your newsletter content and charge for access.
What is better than Substack?
beehiiv is a better alternative to Substack if you want more growth and monetization options for your newsletter. With beehiiv, you can grow your newsletter with the built-in recommendation network, referral program, and boosts marketplace.
Plus, with beehiiv, you can monetize your content via paid subscriptions, ads, and boosts. You’re also free to promote your products without restrictions.
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