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MailerLite vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: An In-Depth Breakdown
Everything You Need To Know To Decide Which Newsletter Platform Is Right for You
Kawusara Salley
September 21st, 2024
What do MailerLite, Mailchimp, and beehiiv have in common?
Let me give you a second.
You guessed it. They're all email marketing platforms! But does that mean you can randomly pick one to run your newsletter, and you'll be fine? No, not exactly…and here's why.
Each of these platforms has unique strengths that make them ideal for a specific use case. I’ve thoroughly researched and tested each of these tools and put together my findings in this MailerLite versus Mailchimp versus beehiiv comparison.
I’ll break down each tool’s unique features and pricing and summarize what each is best for. By the end, you'll know which platform will best support the needs and goals of your newsletter.
Table of Contents
MailerLite vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv at a Glance
Before we get into the feature breakdown of each tool, here’s a summary of how they measure up:
Mailchimp is best for ecommerce brands and large marketing teams who need an all-in-one email and SMS marketing, social media scheduling, and ads management platform.
Meanwhile, MailerLite is best for small ecommerce brands and businesses that need a dedicated email and SMS marketing platform with a simple interface and affordable pricing plans.
beehiiv has the simplicity and affordability of MailerLite, but it’s designed for a completely different use. beehiiv is perfect for creators and media companies who are looking to proactively build, grow, and monetize their newsletters into a profitable business.
beehiiv Overview
beehiiv was launched in 2021 by Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett, and Jake Hurd, the same team that grew Morning Brew to over 4 million subscribers.
One goal was to make the powerful growth engine they built at Morning Brew accessible to creators who wanted to make money doing what they love, which is to share ideas and insights with their audience.
In just three years, beehiiv has earned a super loyal fanbase that loves its ease of use, advanced analytics, growth tools, and monetization features.
Ease of Use
The first thing you’ll notice about beehiiv is its user-friendly interface. You can quickly navigate to the various tools from the left navigation panel.
And on the right, you’ve got an onboarding checklist that includes a guided tour. This tour shows you around the interface, so you can jump straight to work.
beehiiv’s minimalist design extends to all tools, including its newsletter editor, where you'll likely be spending most of your time.
The newsletter post settings are neatly organized in the right panel, while the blank space is for writing your content.
Besides adding text, you can access the slash command center to add elements like headings, images, file attachments, and social posts to your newsletter. It works pretty much like Notion’s note-taking tool or, for WordPress users, the modern Gutenberg editor.
Advanced Analytics
beehiiv’s 3D analytics center gives you detailed and visual reports on your subscribers and newsletter performance.
The Subscribers Report highlights metrics like subscriber acquisitions by day, subscriber by acquisition source, and opens by country. This helps you understand your most effective channels for audience growth, so you can make data-driven decisions about where to invest your time and money.
Meanwhile, the Posts Report gives you a detailed breakdown of your overall open, click, unsubscribe, and spam report rates. These insights are super helpful for understanding your audience’s preferences so that you can optimize your future posts for higher engagement and conversions.
Monetization Features
beehiiv has four built-in monetization tools that let you earn directly from your newsletter, regardless of your audience size:
Ad network: Run ads for top brands like Aura, BetterHelp, and Babbel and get paid on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.
Premium subscriptions: Charge a monthly fee for access to your newsletter.
Boosts marketplace: Promote other beehiiv newsletters and earn a commission for every subscriber you send their way.
Partner program: This is beehiiv’s equivalent of an affiliate program. For every new paying subscriber you bring to the platform, you earn 50% of the revenue for 12 months.
beehiiv Pricing
beehiiv has four pricing tiers to support different stages of your newsletter growth.
Launch Plan: This plan is free forever and has everything you need to publish newsletters and grow your audience. You can run three different publications on this plan and send unlimited emails to up to 2,500 subscribers.
Scale Plan: This plan starts at $39/month for 1,000 subscribers. It’s for creators who want to hit the ground running by unlocking beehiiv’s growth and monetization tools. It includes unlimited seats for your team, advanced analytics, AI tools, and survey forms and polls.
Max Plan: This plan starts at $99/month for 1,000 subscribers and is perfect for serial creators and media companies who want to run up to 10 publications. It also comes with additional perks like priority support and access to the Newsletter XP Course.
Enterprise Plan: This plan, which offers cost-effective pricing, is for newsletter businesses with 100K+ subscribers and is customized to your needs. It also unlocks benefits like concierge onboarding and a dedicated manager.
MailerLite Overview
MailerLite launched their email marketing platform in 2010 with the intent to provide businesses with a simple email marketing tool to support their growth.
Today, many small to medium-sized businesses love MailerLite for offering most of the core email marketing features in advanced platforms like Mailchimp, but within a user-friendly interface and at affordable prices.
Ecommerce owners will also love MailerSend, MailerLite’s transactional email/SMS service for real-time communications with their customers.
MailerLite Features
MailerLite comes with a newsletter editor, customizable templates, subscriber segmentation, and surveys, but let’s take a closer look at some of its standout features:
Integrations
MailerLite integrates with over 100 third-party apps. This includes popular ecommerce apps like Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, and BigCommerce, as well as payment platforms like PayPal and Stripe.
If an app isn’t natively available, you can still connect to them via MailerLite’s Zapier and Make integrations or directly via their API.
Automations
MailerLite has 15 customizable automation templates for getting started with email marketing automation.
And if you want to build from scratch, you can choose from any of these triggers to kickstart an automation sequence:
Subscriber purchases a product from your shop or abandons cart
The exact match of a date (eg., national holidays)
Subscriber details are updated
Subscriber’s anniversary date
Subscriber completes form
Subscriber joins a group
Subscriber clicks a link
Set up these triggers to activate actions like sending an email, updating a subscriber's details, marking a subscriber as unsubscribed, and copying/moving/removing a subscriber from a group.
A/B Testing
MailerLite has comprehensive A/B testing tools for optimizing your landing pages, signup forms, emails, and automation workflows.
Create up to five versions of these assets, set a testing time period, and define your winning metrics based on factors like signups, opens, clicks, and conversions. Once the winner is determined, MailerLite displays (or sends) the winning design or content to your remaining subscribers.
MailerLite Pricing
MailerLite has a free plan that lets you get started with running your newsletter. You get access to their newsletter editor, automations, signup forms, and popups. Plus, you can send 12,000 emails every month, as long as you don’t exceed 1,000 subscribers.
Besides the free plan, there are three paid tiers that unlock unlimited email sends.
Growing Business Plan: This plan starts at $10/month for 500 subscribers and 3 team members. It also gives you access to unlimited templates, A/B testing, and 24/7 email support.
Advanced Plan: This plan starts at $20/month for 500 subscribers and unlimited team members, and you get access to more advanced tools like MailerLite’s AI writing assistant, Smart Sending (an AI-powered email scheduling tool), and 24/7 email & live chat support.
Enterprise Plan: This plan is for businesses with over 100K subscribers, and it comes with perks like onboarding consultation and training and a dedicated account manager.
Note: MailerLite’s transactional email and SMS service, MailerSend, is priced separately from their email marketing and automation tool.
Mailchimp Overview
Mailchimp made its debut as far back as 2001. Till date, it continues to be one of the top email marketing platforms, with over 13 million global users.
Besides email marketing, Mailchimp offers transactional emails and SMS marketing, making it ideal for ecommerce businesses looking to drive upsells and repeat purchases.
Mailchimp also lets you manage social media and retargeting ads, a useful feature for marketing teams who want to manage multi-channel marketing campaigns from a single dashboard.
Mailchimp Features
Mailchimp’s advanced features make it easy to set up complex cross-platform marketing campaigns. Let’s take a closer look at these advanced features that make it possible:
Customer Journeys
Customer journeys are Mailchimp’s fancy name for automations. It comes with over 100 customer journey templates across multiple use cases. Some examples include:
Welcoming new customers via email or SMS
Messaging customers who visited your shop
Informing customers on price drops
Sending abandoned cart reminders
Rewarding VIP customers
You can customize these templates to suit your preferences or build one from scratch with triggers, conditions, and actions.
Reports Dashboard
Mailchimp’s reports dashboard gives you the performance report of each of your email and SMS campaigns.
The reports show you the campaign’s open, click, and unsubscribe rates and how they compare to your own average campaign performance and that of your industry peers.
If you’ve connected Mailchimp to your ecommerce shop, you can track conversion performance with metrics like the number of orders the campaign generated, total revenue, and average order revenue.
Social Media and Ads Management
Mailchimp lets you connect to your Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) accounts, so you can post directly to these platforms and also include your posts from these platforms into your email content.
Besides social posting, you can also run Facebook and Google ads from your Mailchimp dashboard. This is super helpful for retargeting subscribers, new audiences similar to your subscribers, and non-subscribers who have visited your website or landing pages in the past. As a result, your ad campaigns are likely to bring in high-quality leads and boost your overall ROI.
Mailchimp Pricing
Mailchimp’s free plan gives you access to signup forms and landing pages for capturing emails. However, you can only send 1,000 monthly emails (with a daily limit of 500 emails), as long as you don’t pass the 500 contacts limit.
The Essentials plan starts at $13/month for 500 contacts and “10 X Contacts” monthly email sends, with no daily limits. This plan also lets you remove Mailchimp branding on all assets, gives you access to 3 team seats, A/B testing, 100+ email templates, and 24/7 email & chat support.
To unlock advanced features like social posting and ads management, you need to get Mailchimp’s Standard plan. It also comes with a higher bandwidth of 5 team seats, sending “12 X Contacts” monthly emails, and managing 5 separate audiences (with each having their own publication).
The Essentials and Standard plans have a limit of 100,000 contacts. If you exceed this limit, you need to be on the Premium plan. It comes with a “15 X Contacts” monthly send limit, unlimited audiences, unlimited team member seats, personalized onboarding, and phone support.
Note: If you want to connect your Mailchimp website to a custom domain, it costs an additional $10/month. Also, sending transactional emails and SMS messages are priced separately.
MailerLite vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Superior Newsletter Design Flexibility
MailerLite and Mailchimp have a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor. While this is great, it’s more likely to slow down your content production because you might end up spending more time on the aesthetics of your emails rather than the content itself, which is what your audience signed up for.
Meanwhile, beehiiv provides a distraction-free slash command interface for writing your newsletters. When you’re done with the content, you can adjust your email’s theme settings on a separate page to align with your brand, and these changes apply to all your emails.
Winner: beehiiv
MailerLite vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Unmatched Audience Growth Tools
When it comes to growing your audience, you need signup forms, landing pages, or a website to capture subscriber details. Mailchimp, MailerLite, and beehiiv have these features, but that’s just about where their similarities end.
With Mailchimp and MailerLite, you’re left on your own to promote your newsletter and encourage people to sign up. This isn’t the case with beehiiv.
beehiiv has in-built growth tools like the recommendation network for connecting with other newsletter owners to cross-promote your newsletters and the referral program for rewarding your subscribers (with merchandise, ebooks, courses, etc.) when they bring in newsletter subscribers.
Winner: beehiiv
MailerLite vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Comprehensive Monetization Strategies
Mailchimp and MailerLite can only serve as email marketing and automation platforms, so they don’t have monetization tools for monetizing your newsletters. Their goal is to help you promote another business with promotional emails.
In contrast, beehiiv helps you run your newsletter as a profitable side hustle or business on its own. So, as we discussed earlier, it’s got the Ad network, Boosts marketplace, premium subscription, and partner program for expanding the passive income streams of your newsletter.
Winner: beehiiv
Final Thoughts
While MailerLite, Mailchimp, and beehiiv are email marketing and automation platforms, they serve completely different purposes.
If you’re an ecommerce business owner who needs advanced automations and analytics or a marketer who’s looking for an all-in-one marketing hub, then Mailchimp’s for you.
But if you need core Mailchimp-like features for your small or medium-sized business, along with simplicity and affordability, MailerLite is the best choice.
Meanwhile, if your goal is to build, grow, and monetize your newsletter into a profitable side hustle or media company, beehiiv has all of the tools to make it happen.
Thankfully, beehiiv has the best free plan to kickstart your newsletter and send unlimited emails, so why wait?
Get started with beehiiv today!
MailerLite vs. Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Frequently Asked Questions
How Do Mailerlite, Mailchimp, and Beehiiv Compare in Terms of Pricing?
beehiiv has the best free plan (unlocks 2,500 subscribers and unlimited monthly emails) and affordable paid plans. This is followed by MailerLite and then Mailchimp.
Can I Migrate My Email List From One Platform to Another Among Mailerlite, Mailchimp, and beehiiv?
Mailchimp, MailerLite, and beehiiv let you import a CSV file of your contacts from other platforms into their dashboard. And if you run into issues, you can contact their support teams for assistance.
What Kind of Support Can I Expect From Mailerlite, Mailchimp, and beehiiv?
All three of the email marketing platforms have an extensive knowledge base and a YouTube channel packed with high-quality, step-by-step tutorials; and, if you need extra support, beehiiv’s free and starter plans let you submit a ticket from your dashboard.
On the other hand, MailerLite and Mailchimp offer 24/7 email and live chat support on paid plans, with Mailchimp stepping it up by offering phone support on its highest plan.
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.
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