MailerLite vs. ActiveCampaign vs. beehiiv

When you choose a newsletter platform, you've got money on the line. 

Every platform is different, and finding the “best” platform really means finding out which one is the best fit for your particular needs.

Pick the wrong one, and you're going to have weeks of frustration as you try to cobble together the features you want at a price that's within your budget. 

Or, you can look at our comparison of MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, and beehiiv. We’ve chosen these three platforms because they each benefit a different type of user. This guide will help you choose which platform is best for you.

Understanding the Basics of Newsletter Platforms

A newsletter platform is a software that allows you to send an email newsletter without needing to know how to code.

We’re going to compare MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, and beehiiv. In a moment you’ll understand why.

Practically every newsletter platform gives you options to customize your newsletter through a no-code editor or a selection of various templates.

Newsletter platforms also help prevent deliverability issues and ensure that you're compliant with recent anti-spam laws and other regulations.

In digital marketing, newsletter platforms are essential. They let you automate emails to different segments, send transaction-based emails, and target your marketing with laser-like focus.

There are dozens of useful newsletter platforms out there, but we're going to compare three of the most popular platforms. 

Let's look at what makes MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, and beehiiv different.

Key Features of MailerLite, ActiveCampaign, and beehiiv

We're going to take a deeper dive into each of these three platforms, but here's a chart to give you an idea of the variety available.

Note: Two monthly prices are shown for each platform. The lower figure is the cost per month if you pay for a full year in advance.

One of beehiiv’s notable features is that you can add a significant number of subscribers without increasing your costs.

For reasons we’ll discuss below, beehiiv is designed for writers and thought leaders whose core “product” is the content they create. 

Paid versions of beehiiv unlock several features designed to rapidly grow your newsletter and monetize it in several ways. 

ActiveCampaign is the most expensive option of these three, but it offers various automations, CRM, and other features that are useful for a complex business.

You'll get even more value from ActiveCampaign if you combine their email platform with their other products, such as their Sales platform and transactional email add-on.

If email marketing and a newsletter are just one piece of a larger business for you, then ActiveCampaign might be your best choice.

MailerLite offers many of the business features of ActiveCampaign, but without the price tag. This newsletter platform is especially good for e-commerce and selling digital products.

One area where MailerLite really shines is in its ability to provide sophisticated transactional email automations for things like abandoned carts.However, beehiiv has been upping their automation game recently 

Analytics and Reporting Features

Beehiiv has proprietary 3D Analytics™ which include easy-to-understand dashboards. Without the need to manually analyze your data, you can quickly make strategic decisions about things like marketing strategy, audience targeting, and content.

ActiveCampaign’s analytics provide hard data that can drive better business decisions. The newsletter platform alone can uncover insights about where and why someone subscribed to your email list.

ActiveCampaign’s lead scoring feature lets you set the criteria for which behaviors indicate an engaged user, and then rate each of your subscribers for additional targeting.

MailerLite’s analytics are less detailed, but still provide useful data. From page conversions to email open rates, you can quickly see what’s working and what’s not. 

For example, the Subscriber Reports show you the behavior of individuals, while Automation Reports will show you how a specific workflow is performing.

Security and Privacy Compliance

One of the overlooked factors when choosing email newsletter software is security—not just your security, but that of your users. 

The good news is that MailerLite, beehiiv, and ActiveCampaign all have taken steps to keep you compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

In addition, all three platforms have protocols in place to enhance deliverability, often a closely-related issue.

The Rise of beehiiv in the Email Newsletter Arena

beehiiv was founded by the staff of Morning Brew, an email newsletter that grew so big they were eventually able to acquire a $75 million company.

The founders created beehiiv to serve newsletter operators who, in the words of beehiiv cofounder and CEO Tyler Denk, “..were piecing together a Wordpress site, copying and pasting content into Mailchimp, trying to run a referral program via Airtable, and had zero insight about their audience…Most struggled to even get their newsletter out the door, or to establish any sort of momentum with their growth.”

The beehiiv platform is focused on making the design and customization of emails as easy as possible, so that newsletter operators can focus on creating content that makes a difference. 

The beehiiv platform includes several channels to grow and monetize your newsletter. And beehiiv doesn’t “punish” writers for growing. You can have up to 2,500 contacts for free, and as your list grows into the tens of thousands and beyond, the savings become astronomical compared to other newsletter platforms.

MailerLite's User-Friendly Approach to Newsletter Management

In some ways, MailerLite offers more comprehensive newsletter management than beehiiv, at a lower cost than ActiveCampaign.

In particular, it offers more options and flexibility in the creation and integration of a blog or website.

This makes MailerLite a reasonably-priced newsletter tool for beginners. 

However, MailerLite doesn’t offer as many options to customize your newsletter. This is why many advanced creators have shifted their newsletters to beehiiv.

Likewise, a growing business may want to switch over to a newsletter tool like ActiveCampaign, which comes with many more capabilities around sales, CRM, and transactional emails.

ActiveCampaign: Advanced Automation for Savvy Marketers

ActiveCampaign is not cheap, but if you’re planning to combine their email management with the many other tools on the platform, it might be a good fit.

Even with their most basic email plan (starting at $49/month with 1,000 contacts and up to 10k sends), you get a lot of special features that can help you grow. For example:

• Landing pages, including pop-ups and 

• Integrations with WooCommerce, Shopify, and other major ecommerce platforms

• Capture and sync leads directly from Meta

• Conditional content shown to users based on their tags, previous activity, or other criteria

• Custom domains

Additionally, you can use more features by either upgrading to their Professional plan, subscribing to their Sales platform, or adding transactional emails.

If you are gaining subscribers through product sales, or combining email marketing with sales calls, a broad-service platform like ActiveCampaign will help you manage everything under a single umbrella.

Comparing Email Newsletter Software: Usability and Design

While all three platforms offer email newsletter software, it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison when it comes to usability and customization.

Again, the best fit is the best platform.

Customization Capabilities of Each Platform

Before we jump into newsletter customization, let’s take a brief detour and talk about websites.

One thing that sets MailerLite apart is that the platform gives you more options to customize your site. The drag-and-drop website builder lets you create your own customized layout by placing content blocks where you want them.

While beehiiv’s email newsletter software enables you to customize your newsletter in a staggering number of ways, the website feature doesn’t give you as much customizability as MailerLite.

ActiveCampaign, on the other hand, doesn’t even provide website creation. If you’re using ActiveCampaign, you need to have a website already. 

ActiveCampaign focuses on landing pages, analytics, and other useful tools to add to your website.  

So, if you want your software tool to double as a web builder, and you’re picky about how you want your site to look, MailerLite will probably bring you the most satisfaction of the three.

But if we’re talking strictly about customization in email newsletter software, the picture changes dramatically.

Mailerlite and ActiveCampaign both use the common drag-and-drop editor. 

ActiveCampaign has over 250 templates, which gives you more choices than MailerLite. (The latter claims to have over 100 templates, but we could only find 49 on their site.)

However, beehiiv gives you the most email (not website) customization. 

For example, you can adjust 42 different variables in your Header Text, such as font, text size, color, placement, etc. And that’s just one detail in your header.

As you go through every detail of your newsletter, you can change colors, backgrounds, and just about any element you can think of. 

It’s easy to experiment, because you can see how your changes look in real time.(We’ll show you how the beehiiv editor works in “Ease of Use Comparison,” below.)  

Ease of Use Comparison

If you’re a beginner and want to dive into customizing your email immediately, MailerLite has the most user-friendly interface. 

Its drag-and-drop editor is a common feature already familiar to many creators, and this makes it easy to use.

On the downside, you have to work from one of MailerLite’s templates, and this puts a limit on how much you can customize with this newsletter tool. For a beginner, having fewer choices can make design easier. 

ActiveCampaign uses a similar approach, although its newsletter software gives you more options.

In contrast, many users need some time to get used to beehiiv’s no-code editor. 

You have to select which aspect of your newsletter you want to edit from a drop-down menu on the left:

Once you’ve selected an area, the dropdown opens up a flexible range of options. 

Once you get used to beehiiv’s editor, their newsletter software is easier to use than as compared to other newsletter platforms.

Overall, beehiiv does the best job of hitting the sweet spot between ease of use and ability to customize.

Analyzing Email Newsletter Management: Automation and Integrations

Before we compare and contrast, it’s worth noting that all three of these newsletter tools have automations that will save you time. They integrate with multiple apps, including the common ones you would expect.

Third-Party Integrations and Ecosystem

beehiiv proudly boasts, “We play nice with dozens of other software tools.” Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, and WordPress are among those tools. 

beehiiv also integrates with Zapier, so you can work with most apps that aren’t already part of the beehiiv integration setup.

If you have a paid beehiiv plan it’s easy to create an API key to integrate almost anything into your email newsletter management. 

At last count, MailerLite integrates with 143 popular apps, including Zapier. This newsletter platform also offers an API key for paying users.

And true to their broad and comprehensive approach, ActiveCampaign integrates with more than 870 apps. This makes ActiveCampaign the most versatile choice when it comes to linking additional features to your email newsletter management. 

Automation Features in Depth

MailerLite’s automation features are centered around triggered emails. When a subscriber performs an action such as filling out a form, clicking a link, or updating their profile, each of these actions “triggers” a specific email.

The platform also has specific automated workflows for actions such as abandoning a cart or making a purchase.

On MailerLite’s Advanced plan, you can have up to three triggers for the same automation. Another useful feature is the ability to A/B test up to 3 workflow variations.

ActiveCampaign offers longer, more complex automated journeys than MailerLite, with multiple triggers and automations. You can also time the triggers. 

For example, you can configure an automation to delay sending an email for a set duration after someone views a specific web page. 

While beehiiv automations don’t have the firepower of ActiveCampaign, there’s a lot you can do with the grid builder.

Using beehiiv’s grid builder, you can do things like add steps, delay responses, and even create conditional branches. 

Pricing and Value: Which Newsletter Tool Offers More for Your Money?

Pricing Plans Detailed Comparison

We’ve already shared a bit about the lowest-cost plans for each platform, but now we’ll give you some more details. Keep in mind that comparing email newsletter platforms is like comparing apples to oranges.

Unless otherwise stated, all of these prices assume you have 1,000 contacts for the first price and 5,000 for the second. Prices reflect the monthly cost if you pay for a full year in advance.

MailerLite is the cheapest of the three email newsletter platforms, but the cost can rise quickly if you have a substantial number of contacts. At 10,000 contacts, its Growing Business price goes up to $65.70, making it more expensive than beehiiv. 

ActiveCampaign has the most confusing price structure. For one thing, its pricing page compares the Plus plan to a “Lite” plan, but we were unable to find ActiveCampaign Lite anywhere on the site. 

The pricing on the Marketing and Sales bundle is even more perplexing. Many services offer a discount for buying both plans together. But the cost of the bundle is higher than if you bought these products separately. 

Finally, there’s some overlap between ActiveCampaign Plus and Professional, based on the number of contacts. If you don’t pay attention to this, you could be paying for Professional while only using Plus.

Out of these three email newsletter platforms, beehiiv has the most simple and hassle-free pricing structure. 

With beehiiv’s Scale plan, you can get access to features like the Ad Network and Boosts, which quite literally can make you more money than what you invest in beehiiv.

beehiiv vs ConvertKit: A Quick Side-by-Side Look

While ConvertKit isn’t one of the email newsletter platforms we set out to review, its similarity to beehiiv merits a quick comparison of beehiiv vs. ConvertKit.

They are both relatively new newsletter tools, and they have a similar focus, in that they were built by creators and for creators. 

Comparative Analysis of beehiiv and ConvertKit

Because of their creator-centered focus, beehiiv and ConvertKit have many similar features. They both offer strong newsletter tools and minimal website tools.

There are two main sets of features that ConvertKit doesn’t have. While ConvertKit enables you to build landing pages, the platform doesn't provide a website or a blog. In contrast, beehiiv automatically posts your emails to a customizable blog.

Also, ConvertKit only provides the most basic analytics, in a feature called “List Growth Reporting.”

However, ConvertKit has some advantages over beehiiv. If you have 1,000 or fewer contacts, you can use the free plan, which includes many features that beehiiv’s free plan lacks. 

For example, Convertkit’s free plan includes A/B testing, digital products, and the ability to create segments. These features in require a paid plan in beehiiv.

But let’s talk about pricing. 

With a small list, ConvertKit has a small price tag. But around 5,000 subscribers, ConvertKit becomes more expensive than beehiiv, with similar features.

Support and Community Resources

ConvertKit has a Community Support feature in its free plan, as well as a Creator Network which you can try free for 30 days. 

Is beehiiv Better Than ConvertKit?

If you have fewer than 1,000 contacts and don’t expect to grow very quickly, and if you need a lot of features but can’t yet afford a paid plan, then ConvertKit is a good place to start.

However, if you’re thinking long-term, you intend to reach more than 5,000 readers, and you want to take advantage of beehiiv’s AI and analytical tools, then we recommend beehiiv over ConvertKit.

The Verdict: Choosing the Best Email Newsletter Platform for Your Needs

Final Considerations for Choosing a Newsletter Platform

If you’re a growing business with multiple products, ActiveCampaign is probably the best fit for you. You can take advantage of their sales and CRM tools in addition to using the email newsletter software.

If you’re a small ecommerce business with a limited budget, then MailerLite could be a better choice. You’ll get email marketing tools, the ability to sell digital products, and integration with ecommerce tools at a reasonable price.

But if you’re passionate about sharing your knowledge and talent, and if you want to reach the largest number of people, then beehiiv is the best email platform for you. 

The Los Angeles Times recently reported that the creator economy is expected to grow to half a trillion dollars by 2028.

If you’re a passionate creator, beehiiv is the best email platform to give you your share of this jackpot. It’s time to think big.

Challenge yourself to grow your contact list to 100k subscribers or more. And then, look at the pricing. This should make beehiiv a no-brainer.

beehiiv will help you grow your list through the referral program, boosts, and recommendations.Not to mention we are constantly adding new features to help you succeed.

The Ad Network, boosts, and premium subscriptions are three ways you can use beehiiv to monetize your newsletter.

It may not happen overnight, but that’s just one more reason to start a beehiiv newsletter today.

What Is the Difference Between beehiiv and Substack?

You could argue that Substack is easier to use for beginners. It has customizable templates for your newsletter, but there aren’t as many options as you would find with beehiiv. 

Fewer choices can mean greater simplicity, and if you just want to create a Minimum Viable Product with your newsletter, Substack will make the job slightly easier.

However, if you’re thinking long-term, beehiiv might be a better option. 

Obviously, more savvy and seasoned newsletter operators are going to want more flexibility to fit the newsletter to their brand.

And if you plan to monetize, Substack’s 10% fee on all platform transactions will sting. In contrast, beehiiv lets you keep all your revenue for a fixed monthly or yearly payment, and all you need to worry about are your Stripe fees and taxes.

Is MailerLite Good for Newsletters?

As we’ve mentioned before, MailerLite is good for newsletters. However, it’s designed for other businesses too. If you’re only using MailerLite for a newsletter, then you’re paying for features you don’t need.

How Does beehiiv Make Money?

As a business, beehiiv makes money from users who subscribe to its services. A better question is, “How does beehiiv make money for its users?”

There are 3 income streams supported by the beehiiv platform. Without needing additional tools, beehiiv users can monetize their email newsletters through the Ad Network, Boosts, and premium subscriptions.

Is beehiiv Scale Worth It?

If you want to grow your list into the tens of thousands, then beehiiv’s Scale plan will save you a lot of money. But that’s not the only reason beehiiv Scale is worth it. Segments, automation, A/B testing and 3D Analytics™ are all a part of beehiiv Scale. The plan also unlocks several tools to monetize your newsletter.