Beehiiv vs Mailchimp: Which Email Marketing Beast is Better For Monetizing Content?

EmailTooltester is supported by readers like yourself. We may earn a commission when you purchase through our links. Of course, this won't increase the cost for you.

Mailchimp is, without a doubt, a major email marketing player, boasting an impressive 14 million active users. It’s long been the go-to choice and a default starting point for many new to the newsletter world.

But if you’re a content creator, blogger, or marketer focused on monetizing your newsletter, you might wonder: Is Mailchimp really the right fit for you?

That’s a valid question. While Mailchimp may be swinging the upper hand with its strong reputation and features, newsletter-focused tools like Beehiiv are bringing in the buzz.

As a creator-friendly platform, Beehiiv may be better equipped to assist with your goals and growth.

So let’s revise the question: Between Beehiiv vs. Mailchimp, which platform is built to support your next big step?

Let’s find out.

Beehiiv vs Mailchimp: Summary

Mailchimp is a versatile and feature-rich email marketing service, while newcomer Beehiiv is a creator-first platform with advanced newsletter functionalities. With the stark difference in their offerings, the right choice will depend on your audience size, goals, and content strategy.

Here’s a quick TL;DR so you’ll know what to expect from these two:

Round 1: Ease of Use

Beehiiv’s dashboard boasts a straightforward layout paired with a crisp, contemporary look. From the start, it’s clear that the platform prioritizes simplicity, focusing on giving creators the means to create a blog and a newsletter under one roof.

Finding features is effortless since everything is neatly categorized into sections like Audience, Design, and Monetize. I find this logical grouping of tools prevents overwhelm and keeps things easy to navigate.

Beehiiv's dashboard is simple and well-organized

I can’t say the same for Mailchimp, though. The interface is comprehensive, but it’s also clunky.

As an email marketing tool catering to various industries, its dashboard packs in a lot of tools, so it can feel crowded and intimidating at first.

There are too many expandable buttons on the sidebar menu. And each click gives way to a more overwhelming workspace view, like so:

Mailchimp's dashboard can feel a little cluttered and overwhelming

All that to say, be ready to spend a bit of time learning your way around.

Winner: Beehiiv. It excels in keeping things simple and focused on content creation. Mailchimp’s wide suite of tools is cluttered, which makes it more intimidating and less user-friendly.

Beehiiv – 1

Mailchimp – 0

Round 2: Email Editor

Immediately, Beehiiv stands out to budding content creators thanks to its simple editing interface.

You get an intuitive all-in-one editor to craft newsletters and sign-up forms with adjustable content elements like texts and images. Beehiiv keeps things simple and you don’t need technical expertise to design your emails and landing pages. That being said, if you’d like some further customization, there’s a code-block option available in the editor

What I find thoughtful is Beehiiv’s sleek, multi-step publishing experience conveniently available right at the top of the editor.

It consists of the basic content creation workflow steps: compose (area to write and edit with your team), audience (subscriber permissions and other settings), email (configure email elements, A/B test, and more), web (SEO tools and more), and review (schedule and sharing options):

Beehiiv's newsletter editor keeps things simple

The layout is clearly designed with creators in mind. It’s distraction-free, collaborative, and accessible, ensuring you don’t miss out on any important configurations when crafting your content.

With Beehiiv, you can also customize hassle-free signup and subscription upgrade pages.

A sign-up page, for example, contains only three sections: the above-the-fold area, where interested subscribers can enter their email address, and the testimonials and featured posts areas. The last two you can easily toggle off if you don’t want them displayed.

Shifting gears to Mailchimp, the platform offers two impressive email builders which also makes use of reliable drag-and-drop content modules:

• The Classic Builder is the best choice for custom coding templates and including RSS feeds in emails.
• The New Builder has a sleeker design and is outfitted with advanced capabilities like undo/redo, survey content blocks, and Content Optimizer (which makes in-line recommendations on how to improve email content based on best practices). Plus, there’s a support and help section to guide you.

Mailchimp's visual editor offers plenty of options

As for landing pages, Mailchimp has a separate free editor accessible through the Campaigns section.

While it’s tricky to locate at first, it’s intuitive once you get started, enabling you to manage and create optimized pages effortlessly.

Winner: It’s a tie—it’s all up to your needs. The simplicity of Beehiiv makes it an obvious choice for marketers and creators who want to focus on email-first content, while Mailchimp is a great option for those who need additional features like custom coding and integrated landing pages.

Beehiiv – 2

Mailchimp – 1

Round 3: Design And Flexibility

So far, Beehiiv has the lead, but this round is where Mailchimp steals the show.

That’s partially because Beehiiv doesn’t come with pre-built templates to boast about. Instead, you’ll need to design your own from scratch using the editor, then save them for when you’re ready to craft your email content.

If you’re skilled at creating sleek newsletter and landing page templates, I’m sure you’ll be fine. Otherwise, you’ll need to invest time and effort into learning and designing them.

Mailchimp, on the other hand, offers over 100 email templates included with any paid plan (Free plan users have access to some pre-built designs). If the available options don’t cut it, you can code your own or purchase one from the Mailchimp Marketplace.

Mailchimp's email templates

Mailchimp’s templates look clean and sleek, but they’re mostly geared toward ecommerce. There are only 31 templates available for newsletter design.

But, I’m happy to report that they’re all professionally designed, responsive, and mobile-optimized, sparing you the hassle of making sure they work well on any device.

Mailchimp also offers free landing page templates, which are neatly split into basic and themed categories, alongside varied design options for sign-up forms—offering embedded, pop-up, and block options. You can customize everything to fit your specific branding needs and workflow.

Winner: Mailchimp edges out Beehiiv here. It offers more design versatility and pre-built options. The competition doesn’t offer much on this front, sadly.

Beehiiv – 2

Mailchimp – 2

Round 4: Monetization Options

Beehiiv positions itself as the platform for “paid newsletters made simple”—and that simplicity extends beyond just crafting content. It also covers the revenue generation part quite well.

Beehiiv offers a suite of tools to help you set up multiple tiers of paid subscriptions, integrate sponsored content, and add ads directly to your newsletter.

Beehiiv offers some great monetization options, including paid newsletters and custom offers

Having all these revenue-focused features is excellent for solo creators and niche publishers who want to make the most out of their newsletters.

The only drawback? All these incredible monetization features are only available in paid plans.

Meanwhile, Mailchimp doesn’t quite measure up in this department. Many of its growth-oriented tools cater more to ecommerce businesses, such as personalized product recommendations and promo code blocks.

Don’t get me wrong: These are great add-ons if you sell physical or digital products like courses, ebooks, or merchandise—but they’re not as helpful for monetizing your newsletter.

Adding to that, Mailchimp enforces strict policies on affiliate marketing (though affiliate links are generally allowed), so you’ll need to make sure you’re always playing by the rules.

Winner: Beehiiv takes the crown back with features designed to help creators monetize with ease and scale their audience without limits.

Beehiiv – 3

Mailchimp – 2

Round 5: Audience Engagement Tools

Growing a newsletter involves gaining and retaining subscribers.

Fortunately for you, Beehiiv takes a hive-powered approach to growth with several key features:

Beehiiv's Boosts feature partners you up with other creators to cross-promote your newsletters

• Boosts, a two-sided marketplace, which lets you advertise with other newsletters. You set your price and only pay for engaged subscribers who sign up. Creators who leverage this feature see an average overall monthly growth of 137%.
• A referral program to incentivize your subscribers to share your newsletter. It’s simple to set up and runs on autopilot.
• Beehiiv Recommendations, a free version of Boosts, which allows you to exchange recommendations with other newsletters. Note: Active Boosts gets priority placement on the Recommendations page.

While Beehiiv currently doesn’t support discussion forums like Substack, your audience can still interact with you and fellow readers through the comments section.

Mailchimp simply misses the mark, offering none of these cool, collaborative features for creators to create the same sense of community or expand reach.

To increase subscriber count, you’ll need to focus on running active campaigns in your emails and make use of strategies like adding signup forms or widgets to your website and Facebook page.

Winner: Beehiiv wins once again for its thoughtful creator-friendly features like Boosts, Recommendations, and a built-in referral program.

Beehiiv – 4

Mailchimp – 2

Round 6: List management

With Beehiiiv, you can manage and track your audience with advanced list segmentation and engagement monitoring. This makes it easier to tailor your content to specific reader interests and behaviors.

Personally, I find the subscriber profile dashboard a nice touch. This tool shows you each user's metrics and lets you monitor their engagement individually:

Source: Beehiiv

You can manually or automatically update your segment lists to make sure you’re always sending the right emails to the right group. Tags based on criteria like subscriber type, custom categories, and sign-up origin are a big help here, giving you the flexibility to group readers according to your content strategy.

Mailchimp, on the other hand, recommends you create only one list for your primary audience, then use tags and segments to sort them out. This can be messy, and you’ll need Marie Kondo-level of organization to make the most out of it.

If you opt to create multiple lists, however, there’s a caveat: Duplicate contacts in separate lists will increase your total contact count, likely driving up your costs.

However, it has one shining feature called Groups, which uses subscriber-provided data to create categories based on interests and preferences. Your readers are also allowed to group themselves.

Winner: Beehiiv's simple but effective contact management approach trumps Mailchimp's restrictive and expensive methods.

Beehiiv – 5

Mailchimp – 2

Round 7: Automations

Automations help you create effective workflows that run in the background while you focus on delivering quality content and building relationships with your readers.

Beehiiv’s automation tools are refreshingly simple yet flexible. They let you design multistep journeys tailored to your readers with triggers based on key subscriber actions, such as signing up, submitting forms, or upgrading to premium subscriptions.

Plus, you can add time delays or conditional branches to ensure that subscribers get exactly the content they need, when they need it.

Beehiiv's workflow builder

That said, Mailchimp is miles ahead of the competition. Its Classic Automation handles essential campaigns tied to your subscriber’s important details, milestones, and activity.

It then raises the bar with advanced features like customer journey builders to tailor experiences that match your follower’s behaviors.

For instance, you can create an email automation flow for active subscribers who might have missed your special announcement:

Mailchimp's customer journey builder

It’s easy to re-engage your audience when Mailchimp thinks of the many ways (through pre-built journeys) that you can do so without breaking a sweat. And if you do want to roll up your sleeves and get to work, there’s also the option of building your own automated customer journeys.

Winner: Mailchimp takes care of most of the heavy lifting, all you need to do is set it in motion.

Beehiiv – 5

Mailchimp – 3

Round 8: Analytics and Reporting

Beehiv’s dashboard landing page gives you a quick snapshot of your publication’s performance based on the time frame you set (e.g., last 4 weeks, last 7 days, etc.).

You can toggle between an overview mode or dig into other metrics related to audience, engagement, and monetization right on the home screen as well.

Personally, I think this quick access is a huge time-saver, letting you catch a glimpse of critical information without needing to dig through layers of menus.

The platform’s standout reporting feature, 3D analytics, hones in on what matters for creators like you: your posts and your subscribers. Beehiiv separates this into two separate insight panels:

• Posts Reports, which track performance and engagement metrics for your content
• Subscribers Reports, which monitors acquisition channels and strategy performance.

Together, these tools let you measure ROI on your campaigns effectively. There’s an added perk of Clicks Reports, where you can monitor which links are driving the most clicks and how your audience is engaging in near real-time.

That said, if you think Beehiiv’s reporting tools are doing a great job, next to Mailchimp’s, you might find them lacking.

Mailchimp has a far more granular and highly-adaptable analytics and reporting suite. You get:

• A thorough marketing dashboard for monitoring your overall performance metrics, including individual and detailed message performance, which tracks the most critical email marketing KPIs like open rates, revenue, click rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates for every email you send.
• Impressive reports variety for reviewing advanced email marketing metrics like email forwards and forward opens, average revenue per automation, and top subscriber locations and email clients.

What’s more is that you can customize and organize reports to focus only on the metrics you want to track:

Mailchimp's custom reports

Beyond email, it also monitors metrics for landing pages, automations, and social posts, allowing you to see your marketing performance from a broader perspective.

Winner: Mailchimp is the champ of metrics with its comprehensiveness and customizability. So if you’re all for creating data-driven strategies, it will definitely be the cornerstone for decision-making.

Beehiiv – 5

Mailchimp – 4

Round 9: Integrations

Beehiiv has foundational integrations available to simplify migrating newsletter content from other platforms like Substack, importing contacts from forms and websites, and sharing content updates with followers on apps like Discord and Slack.

All of that to say, its interoperability functions are pretty basic.

Mailchimp, being around for almost two decades, already works with tons of third-party apps—more than 250 of them! These pre-built integrations are sorted into 19 categories, which includes subscription management, content, contact management, and forms and surveys.

Mailchimp offers a huge library of integrations

If you own an online store, connecting your existing ecommerce tech stack will be a breeze as well.

Winner: Mailchimp is the obvious winner. With its vast integration library, you won’t have to worry about compatibility or building workarounds for your favorite tools.

Beehiiv – 5

Mailchimp – 5

Round 10: Extras

Beehiiv is intended to be a fuss-free tool for growing newsletters, so it doesn’t come with a lot of bells and whistles.

For the most part, its offerings center on improving content creation, monetization, and subscriber management—that’s the scope of it.

One example is a rich AI feature to help content creators “work smarter”. You get a writing assistant and editor, language translation capabilities, and tools for designing images to complement your content.

It’s not much, but it’s nice to have for newsletter management.

Plus, Beehiiv isn’t stingy on product development. They listen to users and incorporate feedback through regular product updates. So ask, because you might receive. You can find the latest additions here—they post almost monthly.

Mailchimp, on the other hand, is brimming with extras. You get more than a newsletter platform. It’s a full-fledged marketing automation software that helps you run seamless campaigns on socials and SMS too.

There’s even a free website builder, which can come in handy if you ever want to expand your newsletter into a full-fledged nook on the internet. (Beehiiv has one too, but it's mainly to collect your newsletter entries.)

Mailchimp can automatically brand your newsletters based on your existing website

And let’s not forget Intuit Assist and Creative Assistant. Together, they can help you run your newsletter by drafting and designing content, streamlining automations like welcome emails, and suggesting ways to improve your campaigns based on data.

As of writing, Mailchimp is also working on AI models to predict customer journeys and spot subscribers who are primed to convert.

Winner: Mailchimp. Since Beehiiv is a niched tool for newsletters, we can’t expect it to offer extras as advanced as Mailchimp’s feature-rich ecosystem.

Beehiiv – 5

Mailchimp – 6

Round 11: Pricing

Both Beehiiv and Mailchimp offer free plans—though Beehiiv’s is notably more generous.

For no extra cost, you can manage an account with 2,500 subscribers, making it a standout choice at the entry level. The free account also comes with perks like audience segmentation and customized emails.

Mailchimp’s free plan, on the other hand, is more basic. You have a limit of 500 contacts and only 1000 sends a month.

Both platforms have one thing in common, though: You need a paid plan to access advanced tools and capabilities, so let’s compare their closest similar tiers: Beehiiv’s Scale plan and Mailchimp’s Standard plan.

Beehiiv pricing

As you can see, they look like they’re closely matched in pricing. Beehiiv's Scale plan starts at $39/month for 1,000 contacts, while Mailchimp's Standard plan is priced at $20/month for 500 contacts.

But here’s what you don’t see at the outset: Mailchimp’s plans have monthly email-sending limits, whereas Beehiiv’s Scale plan includes unlimited sends.

Plus, Beehiiv’s Scale plan comes with growth-friendly tools for content creators and marketers like Beehiiv AI, audio newsletters, a recommendation network, and magic links.

Mailchimp’s Standard plan is also packed with features, but many are more ecommerce-leaning (such as abandoned cart recovery, customer journey building, and MMS marketing).

Finally, scaling up with Beehiiv is easier on the wallet—the fully-featured Max plan starts at $99/month, while Mailchimp’s Premium plan starts at $350/month. That’s a big jump.

Winner: Beehiiv’s pricing plan is more beneficial to content-focused individuals. You get unlimited sends and have an easy option to scale your subscription as your following grows.

Beehiiv – 6

Mailchimp – 6

Side-by-side comparison of Beehiiv vs Mailchimp

Detailed comparison of features

Mailchimp vs Beehiiv: What’s The Right Choice For You?

Beehiiv and Mailchimp bring different strengths to the table, resulting in a well-deserved tie.

The final decision all comes down to your needs.

Beehiiv is a cost-effective newsletter solution that wants to help you grow your subscribers and monetize your content. That’s all there is to it—for many content creators and marketers, that’s more than enough.

> Read our buzz-worthy review of Beehiiv here.

> Take Beehiiv for a completely sting-free trial here.

Mailchimp is a solid email marketing tool suitable for businesses and online stores, but the steep price tag and extra fees don’t justify it. If you still want an all-around platform, software solutions like Mailerlite or Brevo offer similar feature sets at lower price plans.

> Read our honest review of Mailchimp here.

> Take a swing at Mailchimp for free today.

The authors

Learn more about us

Inka Wibowo

Senior Content Manager

Hi, I'm Inka! I spent the earlier part of my career in agency land, helping businesses of all sizes get their email marketing campaigns up and running. Now, at EmailTooltester, I'm using my experience to help businesses like yours find the best email marketing services for your needs. Although I've used dozens of different tools, I'm most familiar with Mailchimp and Kit (I use the latter for my personal newsletter!).

Jul Domingo

Hi! I’m Jul Domingo. I’m a content writer focused on companies (SaaS, PaaS, B2B) serving small and medium-sized businesses. Having been born into an entrepreneurial family, I am passionate about helping SMEs like you make smart business decisions. Working with EmailTooltester allows me to accomplish that, particularly in terms of helping your organization establish a strong digital presence.

Learn more about us