This might be one of my favorite articles.

Reviewing two platforms I love, recommend, and keep a very close eye on. 

MailerLite is the Email marketing platform of choice for my own businesses and for my clients. Although, I’ve recently started recommending Beehiiv given the impressive new features, pricing model, and team. 

In this article, you’ll see the main differences between Beehiiv and MailerLite so that you can make an informed decision on which email marketing platform is best for your business. 

Summary table

1. Beehiiv vs MailerLite – high-level background information

Beehiiv is a newer entrant into the market but is slowly becoming a very strong competitor. Popular newsletters such as Milk Road and Fantasy Life use Beehiiv to connect with their audience. Milk Road was eventually acquired for eight figures, so this should give you confidence that Beehiiv is a great platform, even if you want to scale. Beehiiv is a fantastic option for email newsletters since it has specific features that are most beneficial to these types of businesses. It’s possible that Beehiiv will remain as an email newsletter platform instead of trying to become an “all-in-one” solution like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign. 

Whilst MailerLite is similar to Beehiiv, it has been around for longer and boasts more features. It was initially started as an agency in Lithuania but eventually pivoted to an email marketing platform. MailerLite now has 130 team members in over 40 different countries. All of my businesses operate on MailerLite, however, I have contemplated switching to Beehiiv for this specific website. In saying that, MailerLite has made some leaps and bounds in the last twelve months by launching a new version of MailerLite and labeling the older one “MailerLite Classic”. They seem aggressive towards releasing new features, keeping the pricing affordable, and ensuring the user interface does not become overwhelming or complicated. 

2. Beehiiv vs MailerLite – core features

Both Beehiiv and MailerLite have similar features, although there are a few key distinctions that make them stand out. Rather than boring you with every single feature, I’m only going to call out their key features so you can get a quick understanding of where they shine or fall short. 

Beehiiv’s core features

• Ultra flexible newsletter editor.
• Offers a free newsletter course to help you scale.
• Automatically get your own landing page to collect subscribers.
• Built-in referral system to help you grow your subscriber list.
• Advanced segmentation with metrics, attributes, and events. 
• Recommendation network that helps you achieve scale with other newsletter businesses. This is a key point of differentiation with MailerLite and should be considered if you run a newsletter. Note: It is not available, you need to join the waitlist.
• A native one-click poll feature that helps collect feedback. 
• You can build an SEO-optimized website on the back of the newsletters to store your content and bring in more visitors. 
• Super simple onboarding process to help you get started immediately.
• Growing repository of documentation (video & text).

Where Beehiiv falls short:

• Lack of options and templates to create beautifully designed newsletters.
• The automation interface isn’t as intuitive as MailerLite.
• I found there to be a steeper learning curve.

MailerLite’s core features 

• Very affordable at all stages of your business growth.
• Easy to create and manage automated sequences.
• MailerLite takes extreme measures to ensure deliverbaility is great. You must be approved before you can even send emails. 
• The interface is easy to use and navigate.
• You can create and embed forms onto your website (including popups, inlines, exit intents, etc).
• Option to receive a daily update on the performance of your list.
• A handy mobile app makes it easy to keep an eye on everything (I check this daily).
• The website builder is becoming more advanced and in some cases competes with other basic website builders such as Carrd, Wix, or Ghost. 
• In comparison to software like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign it is great value for money.
• You can test up to five variations of a landing page and run A/B tests on each. 
• MailerCheck helps validate subscribers to keep your list clean.
• Offers a transactional email and sms service. 

Where MailerLite falls short:

• It’s more tedious to create your own landing page and capture forms.
• The dashboard doesn’t allow you to access every feature in one or two clicks.
• The analytics aren’t as detailed as Beehiiv, it only contains the basics. 
• As you scale the pricing gets more expensive. 

3. Beehiiv vs MailerLite – ease of use

The hardest part of writing a comparison between these two platforms is that they’re pretty similar in most cases. Whilst the user interfaces and use cases can be slightly different they still achieve similar results. Since most users are concerned with automation, workflows, and email editors I’ll use these features as the primary reference point for how easy the tools are to use. 

Beehiiv’s ease of use

One thing that stands out to me when it comes to Beehiiv is that the main dashboard allows you to access every feature. There are no wasted clicks to find something. When compared to MailerLite, there’s at least an extra click involved to access every feature. The other point of differentiation is the email editor which acts like a blog post editor making it convenient and easy to use. 

Automation and workflows

At first, the automation is a bit overwhelming and not that intuitive. You can easily be stuck trying to work out what to click, how to format the email, and how to preview it easily. MailerLite trumps Beehiiv on this front. Once you have completed the automated emails you can visualize the whole campaign which is handy.

Email editors

When I first started exploring the Beehiiv post editor I was confused. It wasn’t a standard email editor so it threw me off a little bit. After spending 15 minutes working it out, everything made complete sense and I realized just how flexible it was. But there is a major downfall, you can not access a large variety of templates. In fact, I couldn’t locate any of them. You’re left to create these on your own.  

The best part of the Beehiiv editor is that you write once and publish everywhere. You can simply toggle between “Post” or “SEO” to update things like the website hyperlink, or meta details of the article. Again, this feature is very handy for email newsletters, but a bit redundant for websites that already have high-performing content and blogs. If you have guest authors you can add them as a collaborator which is super handy for email newsletters since they’ll likely have writers/editors that are very hands-on with the content. 

MailerLite’s ease of use

One of MailerLite’s core values is keeping things “lite”. They go to extreme measures to avoid any clutter or confusion in their interface. I’ve found creating campaigns, automation, and signup forms to be extremely simple. The lack of advanced features in some cases really is a blessing since it prevents perfectionists from spending too much time trying to create the perfect email. 

Automation & workflows

MailerLite stands out when it comes to automation. It’s incredibly simple and intuitive to create whilst still being powerful enough to handle advanced requests.

The user interface makes it simple enough to understand how each part of the automation will work, you can easily preview the email and also view an overview of the whole sequence. Within each automation, you can choose different steps including email, delay, condition, action, or A/B test. 

Email editors

MailerLite has one of the best email editors I’ve used, and I’ve tried them all! It’s very easy to use an existing template, create your own and even duplicate it to save time. There is some limited flexibility in the design but I think this is actually a good thing, if there wasn’t I could easily get lost trying to create a perfectly formatted email. 

Related: MailerLite vs Convertkit.

4. Beehiiv vs MailerLite – pricing

When it comes to pricing, Beehiiv is cheaper at the higher end. For 100k subscribers Beehiiv is only $99/mo whereas MailerLite is $425/mo. This is insanely more expensive. But before you freak out, you need to weigh up the features. MailerLite offers more advanced features, including Facebook custom audience integrations, multiple trigger automation, and much more. 

In summary, if you run an email newsletter that plans to scale to 100k+ then Beehiiv is the best option for you. For other businesses that sell products or services, MailerLite is still a great option. 

Beehiiv pricing

• Free plan: $0 up to 2,500 subscribers with access to some features. 
• Grow plan: $49/mo with up to 10,000 subscribers with access to most features.
• Scale plan: $99/mo with up to 100,000 subscribers with access to all the features. 
• All plans are cheaper if paid annually.

MailerLite pricing

• MailerLite pricing is scalable based on the number of subscribers and features.
• Free Plan: $0 for 1,000 subscribers with basic features.
• Growing Business Plan: $32/mo for 5,000 subscribers and additional features such as 
• Advanced Plan: $39/mo for 5,000 subscribers and all available features (including Facebook custom audience integration and multiple trigger automation).
• Enterprise clients need to request a quote. 
• Plans are discounted on a yearly subscription.

5. Beehiiv vs MailerLite – Example newsletters 

Example Beehiiv newsletters

• Sticky Notes by Cole Schafer
• Milk Road by Shaan Puri and Ben
• Payload Space
• Shop Pulse
• Exec Sum

Example MailerLite newsletters

• Message Factory
• Good Schooling
• Ticker Nerd (one of my businesses)
• Nutt Labs

6. Beehiiv vs MailerLite – the ideal user

By now you’re probably leaning towards a specific tool given your use case. But if you’re still confused then I’m going to break down the ideal customer for each tool. 

Beehiiv’s ideal customer:

• Anyone that wants to start an email newsletter business.
• A business without a website that wants to start a blog and newsletter combination. 

MailerLite’s ideal customer:

• The content site with thousands of visitors a month and wants to start leveraging email.
• The product or service business relies on emails to generate revenue.
• The business that wants to leverage email and SMS in the future.

7. The final verdict

Both Beehiiv and MailerLite are incredible tools. However, Beehiiv shines as the better email newsletter platform whereas MailerLite stacks up as the best email marketing platform for business (this includes newsletters, transactional emails, sequences, etc). 

Frequently asked questions