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Choosing the right email marketing platform is an art—I should know, I’ve been through a few of them in my time. I know how hard it is to compare all the available options and decide which features you need the most.
If you’ve done your due diligence, you’ve probably come across Kit (formerly Convertkit) and Beehiiv. They’re both popular picks and are often pitted against each other thanks to their suite of creator-friendly features (a comparison that neither tool exactly shies away from!).
Kit has been around for a while and is known for its powerful features. Beehiiv is newer but gaining fans fast.
So what's the deal with these two?
Kit was built with creators in mind. It offers robust email marketing tools and automation to help you grow your audience. Many bloggers, podcasters, and online course creators swear by it.
Beehiiv is relatively new in comparison. It was launched in 2021 by early employees of the Morning Brew newsletter and aims to give newsletter creators everything they need to grow and make money from their email lists in one central place.
Today, I’m sitting these two tools side-by-side and comparing their features, pricing, and ease of use. I’ll award a point to the winner of each category, so by the end you’ll have a good idea of which tool might be the best for you.
Beehiiv vs Kit: Summary
- Kit and Beehiiv are both solid choices if you want an easy-to-use platform with a straightforward email editor for sending regular newsletters.
- Kit stands out when it comes to automation and selling digital products. It offers more advanced options for creating sequences, segmenting your audience, and setting up sales funnels.
- Beehiiv, on the other hand, shines with its built-in monetization tools and affordable pricing, especially for larger subscriber lists.
- Beehiiv tends to be more budget-friendly for creators with lots of subscribers, while Kit's pricing increases more steeply as your list grows.
Ease of Use
The first thing you notice about Beehiiv when you log in is its clean, modern interface. This continues throughout the platform, giving even the most non-technical users a user-friendly experience. Because Beehiiv was made to simplify newsletter creation and growth, there is very little clutter. Users also have complete control over formatting and arranging content in an easy-to-use blog-style view.
The dashboard itself spotlights the most-used features (newsletter creation, list management, and analytics), all of which are easy to find in the main side bar. A nice touch is the “tips” widget that has direct links to features that can help you grow or analyze your list.
Kit’s dashboard is busier and can feel a bit outdated when sat next to something as slick as Beehiiv. This partly reflects how feature-dense it is. Since it caters more to creators who manage multiple types of content, not just newsletters, it can seem overwhelming for those who are new to newsletters and campaigns and it can take a while to familiarize yourself with everything on offer.
The Kit dashboard is structured around the main pillars—subscribers, broadcasts (emails), and automations. Once you’ve figured out how it all clicks together, it’s relatively easy to use, but it definitely feels a lot clunkier than other email platforms out there.
Winner: Both platforms are easy to navigate, but Beehiiv’s sleek, modern interface definitely gives it the edge here.
Beehiiv: 1
Kit: 0
Subscription and Monetization Options
Beehiiv has added several monetization methods to the platform over the past year and it recently bought Swapstack to enhance its existing ad network. Users can now connect with and promote sponsors all in one central space. Beehiiv even sends a regular list of potential ad opportunities to users from premium brands that match their audience.
There’s also a boost system, which works like a cross-promotion advertisement. Users basically “apply” for a boost from another newsletter and, once accepted, can share the boost to earn rewards.
Users can make money through paid newsletters via either monthly or annual plans, which is a great way to earn recurring revenue. But Beehiiv takes it a step further: it also offers a Lifetime Subscription for readers who prefer a one-time payment for unlimited access, and a ‘Pay What You Want' option, catering to readers on a budget.
Finally, an important aspect of Beehiiv is that it doesn't take a cut, allowing you to keep 100% of what you earn through its features.
Kit’s “earn” tab links to several monetization methods. Firstly, users can create and sell digital products directly through their Kit account, whether that’s paid newsletters, courses, or digital downloads. Creators can build everything in-app, including product landing pages and checkouts. You can also add a tip jar to your content to encourage subscribers to donate cash if they like what they see.
Then there are paid recommendations. Much like Beehiiv’s “boost” feature, you can recommend fellow Kit creators and get a kickback every time someone signs up using your recommendation link.
Winner: Beehiiv’s internal ad sponsorships are a great way for creators to match with relevant brands who’ll pay for newsletter airtime, but Kit is the winner here—creators often have multiple income streams, and the ability to create, promote, and sell products all in one place is a game-changer.
Beehiiv: 1
Kit: 1
Community Features and Audience Engagement Tools
Beehiiv was initially built as a newsletter platform and it's clear that its tools heavily lean into audience growth. While it does offer some powerful ways to manage subscribers and deliver content, there aren’t a ton of direct engagement tools beyond email, or likes and comments from readers (which are not enabled by default).
Its standout community-building feature is its built-in referral program, which lets you set up reward tiers, reward subscribers for referring new subscribers, and track referrals via the platform. The paid newsletter feature is more of a business feature than a direct community-building tool, but it does help creators build a community of loyal subscribers.
In a similar vein, Kit focuses heavily on audience growth and monetization but falls short in the audience engagement arena. Like Beehiiv, it supports paid newsletters and there’s the Creator Network feature where creators can recommend each other’s content and cross-promote to grow their subscriber base.
Winner: Kit’s Creator Network is a genius way to lean on other collaborators, but it’s Beehiiv’s built-in referral program that takes the trophy here. There are ways you can reward subscribers for referring new leads in Kit, but this requires adding an extension or integration. With Beehiiv, it’s already built into the product.
Beehiiv: 2
Kit: 1
Design and Flexibility
Like the rest of the site, Beehiiv’s email editor is incredibly simple and clean, with easy-to-use content blocks for adding various elements and a built-in writing assistant for content creation.
Beehiiv’s editor is a basic WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface. There’s a visual editor for newsletters which, although relatively basic compared to Converkit, is clear and easy to use. It definitely prioritizes functionality over complex design choices—great for users who want to send out content quickly.
It’s worth noting that Beehiiv doesn’t have any pre-built email templates. Instead, you can create custom templates from scratch and save them to your dashboard. Then, when you want to send an email, you can choose from your library of pre-made templates.
Kit’s email editor provides a little more freedom. There’s a simple text-based editor with custom HTML or CSS options for those who want more control. For non-technical users, the drag-and-drop email editor lets you quickly format text, and add images, buttons, and videos. But you can also choose from a range of pre-built templates if you want your emails to look polished and professional. And, like Beehiiv, you can also create your own templates and save them to your account to use again and again.
Perhaps an important thing to note here is that Beehiiv offers a native website builder. You can customize it to include your brand colors, fonts, and icons, and use it to collect email addresses. Kit, on the other hand, has a variety of landing page templates but they’re often quite limited in style and design.
Winner: Both Kit and Beehiiv have pros and cons in this category. Kit’s templates are ideal for users who have little technical know-how, while Beehiiv’s extensive website builder and WYSIWYG editor can simplify the whole design process. I’m going to say it’s pretty neck-and-neck here.
Beehiiv: 3
Kit: 2
List Management
Beehiiv offers powerful list segmentation tools so you can group together subscribers based on when they joined your list, whether they’re paying subscribers, and engagement metrics like open or click-through rates.
You can choose from three types of segments: static, dynamic, and manual. Static segmentation creates a fixed group of subscribers and doesn’t update on its own, whereas dynamic segments continually update based on the conditions you set.
You can also create audience segments for different email campaigns, which is useful if you want to send more targeted content to different parts of your list. While you can apply tags to subscribers (like “new subscriber” or “VIP”), this feature is pretty basic. For example, you can’t set up automated rules based on user behavior (like clicking a link or visiting a certain page).
Kit has an equally powerful tagging and segmentation system.
You can tag subscribers based on actions (like whether they bought a product or subscribed to a specific sequence). This makes it much more versatile than Beehiiv, but it can feel a bit complex for new users. The easiest way to automatically tag subscribers is to set up “rules” for when someone takes a certain action. Kit then applies the appropriate tag to the subscriber or adds them to the correct segment.
Winner: Both Beehiiv and Kit’s segmentation capabilities are pretty powerful. You have complete freedom to create really complex segments that automatically update, as well as the ability to upload your own segments. I call this round a tie.
Beehiiv: 4
Kit: 3
Marketing automation
Beehiiv has really upped the ante with its automation features over the past year. If you’d have asked me a few months ago who won this category, it would have hands-down been Kit, but Beehiiv has come into its own.
Now, Beehiiv lets you create visual automation flows using a drag-and-drop workflow builder. You can add steps, time delays, and conditional branches to create highly tailored journeys for each customer. Plus, the trigger feature lets you trigger automated flows based on actions a subscriber has taken, including when and where they signed up, and whether they’ve upgraded to your paid newsletter.
Kit offers a similar level of automation. You can create advanced workflows in the visual editor. These can be based on a wide range of triggers, including purchases, website visits, link clicks, and more. You can also set up complex automation chains, including conditional paths (e.g. “if/then” conditions).
There’s also the “rules” feature in Kit that lets you set up manual triggers for different actions. These can be mapped to existing automated workflows.
Winner: This is a tricky category to judge because on the surface it seems like Kit pips Beehiiv to the post, but it’s almost too much. The combination of visual workflows and rules can get convoluted, especially if you’re running multiple campaigns simultaneously. I’m going to call this round a draw.
Beehiiv: 5
Kit: 4
Reporting
Beehiiv has really nailed it with reporting. You can track the activity of each individual newsletter subscriber, including how they found you and what emails they engage with the most.
When you log in to Beehiiv, the first thing you see is a snapshot of your performance. You can instantly see key metrics, including total subscribers, new subscribers (broken down over specific time frames), churn rate, open rates, and click-through rates. You can then drill down into specific email campaign results, like unsubscribe rates, bounce rates, spam complaints, and results from any A/B testing.
The cool thing about Beehiiv is it also offers detailed engagement metrics so you can see how your audience interacts with your emails. It provides a handy visual breakdown of which links received the most clicks, how many of your subscribers actively engage with your emails versus those that are inactive, and subscriber growth metrics, including source tracking so you can see exactly where each subscriber came from.
Kit’s reporting is equally as detailed.
You can get percentage scores for individual email sequences, see an overview of each email’s performance, and drill down into subscriber metrics on a granular level. The subscriber scoring dashboard is a fun way to see the number of subscribers who have engaged with your emails over a certain timeframe and the ability to track how engaged individual subscribers are with each email is a nice touch.
Winner: Beehiiv has come a long way with its reporting—so much so that it’s now on par, if not better, than Kit, which has some powerful analysis capabilities. Beehiiv wins this round, though, with its detailed source tracking.
Beehiiv: 6
Kit: 4
Pricing and Fees
Both Beehiiv and Kit offer a free plan for those who just want access to the basic features. Beehiiv lets you have up to 2,500 subscribers and access to all its audience growth features, including custom websites, newsletter creation, analytics, tagging, and segmentation. The only thing you don’t get is the monetization features—notably the referral program and built-in ads network.
When you reach 2,500 subscribers (or if you want access to monetization features and automations), you’ll need to move to the Scale plan. Prices are as follows:
- Up to 2,500 subscribers: $59 a month
- Up to 5,000 subscribers: $79 a month
- Up to 10,000 subscribers: $99 a month
- Up to 25,000 subscribers: $149 a month
There are also Max and Enterprise plans that remove the Beehiiv branding and give users access to the platform's Newsletter XP course.
Kit’s free plan (Newsletter) is slightly better for new creators in that it lets you have up to 10,000 subscribers before you have to pay. With this plan, you’re limited to one basic visual automation and one email sequence, but you do get unlimited landing pages and opt-in forms, tagging and segmentation, paid newsletters, and the ability to sell digital products.
If you want more automations or access to the platform’s Creator Network, you need to upgrade to the Creator plan. Prices are as follows:
- Up to 1,000 subscribers: $25 a month
- Up to 5,000 subscribers: $66 a month
- Up to 10,000 subscribers: $100 a month
- Up to 25,000 subscribers: $166 a month
There’s also a Pro plan that gives you everything in the Creator plan plus Facebook custom audiences, a newsletter referral system, and 24/7 priority support.
The winner: Kit’s free plan lets you have more subscribers, but it's more limited than Beehiiv in that you can only have one automated sequence. The more subscribers you get, the more cost-effective it becomes to use Beehiiv, which is why it’s the winner of this round.
Beehiiv: 7
Kit: 4
Extras
Beehiiv was designed with newsletter creators in mind and brands itself as “the newsletter platform built for growth”., This is evident in its focused list of features that are geared towards this kind of business. Kit, on the other hand, has expanded to attract all sorts of creators—from digital product pushers and paid newsletter writers to coaches, artists, and teachers.
As such, Kit feels like a more robust ecosystem for creators for now (although word on the block is that Beehiiv is planning to take over the creator economy ASAP). When it comes to integrations, Kit is by far superior, offering over 100 direct integrations with various complementary tools and platforms. While Beehiiv does have integration capabilities, you have to use third-party software (like Zapier) to plug everything together.
I’m also a big fan of Kit’s “link triggers’, which let you trigger certain actions when a subscriber clicks a link in an email—e.g. you can tag them or enroll them in an email sequence.
Winner: It’s safe to say Kit wins this round—that’s not to say Beehiiv’s a total loser here. I like how simple it is and it’s very clear that it’s geared towards newsletter growth (and, you know, sometimes simple is better), but Kit just has the edge with its link triggers and direct integrations.
Beehiiv: 7
Kit: 5
Who is the winner?
Both Kit and Beehiiv are great options for creators, but Beehiiv just nudges ahead with its sleek, modern interface and its dedicated tools for audience growth. While Kit has a ton of features, it can feel overwhelmingly complex when you’re just getting started. Beehiiv, on the other hand, is simple but feature-rich. You can do most things you can do on Kit, but it’s just easier, more email-focused, and more enjoyable to use.
It also comes out on top for cost-effectiveness. Although its free plan only stretches to 2,500 subscribers compared to Kit’s 10,000, it quickly becomes the cheaper option as you grow. And, as you know, Beehiiv offers all the features you need for rapid growth!
Kit is still a stellar option if you’re creating a full-stack creator business complete with digital products and complicated funnels. Ultimately, the platform you choose depends on your goals, technical know-how, and appetite for growth.
But, if you’re looking for an email marketing tool that offers more than just the ability to create an email newsletter without a massive learning curve, Beehiiv is the perfect choice.
Our Methodology
This article has been written and researched following our EmailTooltester methodology.
Our Methodology