Mailchimp is an email service provider that has been around for several years. While It has some basic functionality that you can access for free, its premium email services can get pricey quickly as you add subscribers, and it lacks the essential growth tools a serious newsletter publisher needs to grow.

Mailchimp can be a useful platform if you have one-off emails, promotional or e-commerce type messages, or basic email campaign goals. However, it is quite limited for writers who want to develop and distribute a customized newsletter with advanced features.

In contrast, beehiiv is designed specifically for elite newsletter creation and distribution for content creators, publishers, and media companies. It’s razor focused on growth, with tools that empower users to scale their audience quickly and sustainably while allowing them to focus on creating content.

A new beehiiv customer summed it up best:

With that said, let's take a look at a side by side comparison of the two products. Our deep-dive comparison gives you all the information you need if you’re considering making the switch from Mailchimp to beehiiv.

Mailchimp vs. beehiiv: Key Comparisons

We will be looking at 4 key elements within our comparison: pricing, feature set, ease of use and deliverability.

1. PRICING

Pricing: Mailchimp

Publishers who have a moderate to large contact list (or intend to develop one) will pay a hefty price for premium services at Mailchimp.

Mailchimp has four subscription plans. In addition to plan-specific features, each plan has a maximum contact limit, along with a maximum email messaging limit. If you exceed the contact limit or messaging limit, you pay high overages on top of the plan price.

Free ($0/month): The Mailchimp “Free” plan is a basic starter plan that offers limited contacts, messages, and features. You can send simple email campaigns and track basic data on your audience.

The free plan has a hard limit of 500 contacts and a message limit of 5 times your audience size. At 500 contacts, that means 2,500 total monthly emails. If you want more contacts or messages, you have to upgrade. Your emails stop sending after you reach the monthly limit.

Essentials (Starts at $11/month): This plan also includes up to 500 contacts, but the message cap has a ratio of 10 times your list size. Thus, at 500 contacts, you can send 5,000 messages in a month before triggering overages. ‘Essentials’ also includes some testing and scheduling features.

You can have a larger contact list on this plan, if you are willing to pay extra. At 1,500 contacts, for instance, your price goes up to $23 per month (it’s $0 for up to 2,500 subscribers on beehiiv).

Standard (Starts at $17/month): This plan includes some personalization and optimization features that the lower-level plans don’t. The max contact list size for standard pricing is 500 contacts, which is the same for the “Essentials” and “Free” plans. The email cap ratio is 12 times your contact list size, which is 6,000 messages if you have 500 contacts

As with the Standard plan, you can have a larger contact list if you are willing to pay extra. As an example, a list of 1,500 contacts on the Standard plan is $59 per month (it’s $0 on beehiiv).

Premium (Starts at $299/month): This plan offers the company’s most advanced tools and premium support. The contact limit on Mailchimp’s Premium Plan is 10,000, and the maximum email count is 15 times your list size. If you have 10,000 contacts, that means 15 general mailings to all subscribers in a month.

You can have a list larger than 10,000, but your price goes up substantially. If you have 15,000 contacts, for instance, your price is $399, which means an additional $100 for 5,000 more contacts.

Pricing: beehiiv

In contrast to Mailchimp, beehiiv’s pricing is simpler, more straightforward, and significantly more affordable.

beehiiv has four plans. Each plan has a flat monthly price, with dedicated features and capabilities. Each plan has a maximum subscriber count, but unlimited sends. That means that regardless of what plan you’re on, there is no limit to the number of emails you can send out each month.

All plans include a rich foundational feature set:

• Web Hosting (SEO Optimized)

• Custom Newsletters

• Best-in-class CMS

• Campaign & Subscriber Analytics

• Newsletter Recommendations

• Magic Links

• Audience Segmentation (Limit 3)

• Custom fields

• Popups & Advanced Email Capture

• External Subscribe Forms

• Granular Attribution Data

• Real-time Email Verification

• Optimized Inbox Deliverability

• Dynamic RSS Feed

• Unlimited Sending

Launch ($0/month): Even beehiiv’s free pricing plan has an extensive list of features and capabilities. You have a subscriber limit of 2,500, which is five times higher than the cap on the Mailchimp free plan. And there is no limit to the number of sends you can do.

Grow ($49/month or $42/month billed annually): This plan includes all features in the company’s free “Launch” plan, along with custom domains, ability to charge access, unlimited polls, promotional offers, A/B testing, API access and customer html. It has been designed to help you learn your audience and grow your contact list. This plan is capped at 10,000 subscribers.

Scale ($99/month or $84/month billed annually): This is beehiiv’s highest standard plan and pricing tier. This plan includes all features of the company’s “Grow” plan, along with an integrated referral program, 3D analytics, multiple publications, A/B testing and priority support. This plan is capped at 100,000 subscribers.

Enterprise (custom pricing): For publishers larger than 100K subscribers, the Enterprise Plan is the best fit. Not only do you have access to our full feature suite–you also have the option to send from a dedicated IP address and have access to priority customer support. Most importantly, we’ll conduct Quarterly Business Reviews with your team to ensure you’re getting the most value out of beehiiv and achieving your email goals.

The Verdict on Pricing

beehiiv has two key advantages over Mailchimp in terms of pricing: it is significantly more affordable, and the pricing is more predictable. You always know your monthly rate with beehiiv; we won’t charge you large overages for going over sending limits. At Mailchimp, your rates can quickly change each month if you exceed the contact limits or message limits.

The highest standard plan at beehiiv is the “Scale” plan, which allows up to 100K subscribers, and has a monthly rate of $99. And this includes unlimited sends. At Mailchimp, with 100K contacts, the “Standard” plan is $605 per month, and the “Premium” plan is a whopping $825/month - more than 8x beehiiv’s price.

2. FEATURES

Features: Mailchimp

Mailchimp is not just an email service provider. Because they also support other channels outside of email, their email solution is relatively basic, focusing primarily on email marketing campaigns.

Mailchimp identifies four basic categories of features included in its email marketing services:

• Design and Templates: You can create basic emails that are largely templated and allow for limited customization.

• Segmentation: One of the more effective aspects of Mailchimp’s email services is the ability to create audience segments that you can target with dedicated messages and campaigns.

• Automations: Various capabilities are available for developing and delivering automated campaigns to targeted audience members.

• Analytics and AI: You have access to various analytics and AI tools that help you understand your audience and its responsiveness to campaigns. Higher pricing plans enable more analytics features.

Features: beehiiv

Many other ESPs, including Mailchimp, spread themselves thin trying to offer emails along with many other marketing tools. beehiiv has one core focus - email newsletters - and its goal is to be the best in the world at it. Its services focus on helping newsletter publishers develop branded newsletters, understand their audience, and grow and monetize their subscribers.

What really separates beehiiv from Mailchimp and other email marketing service providers is its emphasis on customization and growth. As indicated in the features table below, beehiiv has an extensive list of features available (many included even in the free plan). Custom design features allow you to create a custom branded newsletter that resonates with your audience.

Because subscriber growth is so important to newsletter publishers, beehiiv has a number of growth-oriented features, including:

Referral Program: Built-in tools that allow you to attract new subscribers by offering incentives to existing subscribers to refer people they know.

Recommendation Engine - This is a powerful tool that enables newsletter publishers to mutually recommend subscribers. For active publishers, it recommends subscribers to your content if it is relevant. Similarly, your subscribers are recommended to other publications of interest.

Email + Web Capability: You can publish your newsletters as blog pages on your website to enhance reach and improve search engine optimization for your site.

Advanced Analytics and Audience Polling: Features that help you to better understand the makeup of your audience, which is useful in targeting new subscribers.

Additionally, beehiiv also has a number of monetization features that help you earn revenue from your subscriber base and newsletter. These monetization features include:

Premium Subscriptions - Use advanced conversion tools to turn your visitors and subscribers into paying customers.

Ad Network - You can monetize non-paying subscribers as well by leveraging beehiiv’s premium advertiser network.

The Verdict on Features:

The following table is a more in-depth, direct comparison of the features available on Mailchimp and beehiiv. As you can see, beehiiv has a broader suite of growth & monetization tools. Its niche focus on newsletters allows for greater development of in-depth features for newsletter design and delivery. In contrast, Mailchimp primarily offers email marketing services, with limited features for developing a well-branded newsletter.

3. EASE OF USE

Ease of Use: Mailchimp

There are few things more frustrating to a newsletter publisher than a clunky and confusing email platform interface. You want to put your energy into creating great content and growing your audience. Navigating a complicated user interface burns time and energy.

Basic functions in Mailchimp are relatively easy to use.

However, things get a bit murkier when you want to branch out into more advanced features. The navigation on Mailchimp is challenging. There are a lot of menu links and it is sometimes hard to find what you want. It’s difficult to accomplish basic tasks, and they often require buying additional 3rd party tools.

Ease of Use: beehiiv

beehiiv was developed as a creator-centric newsletter platform. Thus, optimized ease-of-use has always been the primary objective of its founders, who were previously early employees at Morning Brew.

Marketer Milk’s recent review stated:

“The issue with many existing newsletter platforms is that they don’t feel creator-centered. I want a newsletter platform that lets me fully customize my newsletter designs, makes it super easy to write and send emails, and gives me tools that help me analyze metrics and get more subscribers.”

The dashboard and design areas inside beehiiv are very clean. Menu navigations are easy to follow. One unique feature in beehiiv is its AI persona, which helps guide you through basic setup of your account and newsletter. Customers can get started on beehiiv in just minutes, whether they’re starting from scratch or migrating hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

The Verdict on Ease of Use:

Mailchimp and beehiiv are both relatively easy to use for the core functionality they provide. If you are simply looking to create one-time email messages or campaigns, the basic functionality of Mailchimp is simple to use.

The real delineation in usability comes into play for users who want to create and publish professional newsletters and actively grow their subscriber base. beehiiv is a dedicated newsletter creation, publishing, and growth platform. Its features are designed as user-friendly to suit these purposes.

4. DELIVERABILITY

Deliverability: Mailchimp

With all of the work that goes into a great email newsletter, creators want to feel confident that emails will reach the target audience. Mailchimp has some challenges with deliverability, including bounced emails and emails landing in spam folders.

A lot of the issues with Mailchimp’s deliverability stem from its large user base and the capabilities included in its “Free” platform. It has a lot of low-quality senders that bloat their systems and lead to low engagement rates.

Email Deliverability Report recently conducted a study of email deliverability across many of the mainstream email service providers. The percentage of emails reaching user inboxes was relatively modest across the board. Mailchimp had a 73.74 percent deliverability rate, with 22.86 percent going to spam and 3.40 percent getting lost. Mailchimp’s deliverability rate was 14th out of the 20 providers evaluated.

Deliverability: beehiiv

Deliverability is another key area where beehiiv’s focus on newsletter publishing and growth comes into play. beehiiv has a team of dedicated deliverability experts and consultants whose sole focus is ensuring your emails land in subscriber inboxes. All sends are monitored in realtime, and the beehiiv team is alerted immediately to any sends with lower deliverability. From there, the team works directly with their deliverability experts to remedy the issue.

The beehiiv infrastructure is one of the key factors that contribute to high deliverability rates. It isn’t bogged down by a large user base of low-quality senders. Additionally, it uses real-time email verification to ensure your subscribers are set to receive your emails from the start.

Read beehiiv’s Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability

The Verdict on Deliverability

As the data shows, a lot of mainstream platforms with larger user bases suffer from low deliverability rates. This point is especially true at free and lower-priced tiers.

In contrast, deliverability is among the core areas of emphasis for beehiiv in its effort to give creators a winning newsletter growth platform.

Conclusions

Mailchimp and beehiiv are very different email platforms in terms of their core focus and their capabilities. Mailchimp offers several marketing related solutions, but in our opinion ventures out of their core competency, leaving users with more general marketing tools but nothing newsletter focused, which is the base of their service at the end of the day.

beehiiv is a more dedicated platform for newsletter creation, publishing, and delivery. Its superiority in custom design, reliable deliverability, subscriber growth and affordable pricing make it the better choice for serious newsletter publishers.

Making the move from Mailchimp to beehiiv has never been easier. See a few recent happy customers who made the switch:

Set up your beehiiv account today, and bring your Mailchimp audience with you!