Beehiiv and ConvertKit are 2 of the best choices for email marketing software. Period.
If you’ve narrowed your search down to these 2, you’ve done a good job.
Choosing the right one for you could make a huge difference in your bottom line.
Which one is better?
It honestly depends on your exact needs.
We will focus on our own unique experience, and also focus on the most important differences between Beehiiv and ConvertKit.
Quick backstory: At AI Growth Guys, we have been doing email marketing for 20 plus years and have a good sense of what to look for.
We had an English learning podcast with over 200k email subscribers (non native English speakers). We sold subscriptions to our VIP lessons that were behind a paywall. The vast majority (over 75%) of our sales came from email marketing.
We’re currently running 88Herbs, a premium brand of natural health supplements. Email marketing is a major driver of the sales on our website.
We’ve used newsletters to sell both digital and physical products.
We think our experience will be useful to you.
Good news, email marketing software has come such a long way in the last 20 years, especially the last few years.
There are so many better features now to help you earn money.
Pay attention!
What features are the most important features to consider when choosing email marketing software?
- Price
- Unique features
- Monetization
- Templates
Price
Let’s start with an important one. The price. Which is more expensive, Beehiiv or ConvertKit ?
Both have different pricing models.
There are some situations where Beehiiv is more expensive, and some situations where ConvertKit is more expensive.
Overall, however, Beehiiv is cheaper in most cases.
Note: Beehiiv recently updated their pricing model. It is still cheaper than ConvertKit, but it has changed. Take a look here: Beehiiv’s new pricing.
In a nutshell, Beehiiv has put more features into the Scale plan, and the price for the Scale plan starts at $39 per month (down from $99). However. If you get close to 100 000 subscribers, it does get more expensive than before. (It is still much cheaper than ConvertKit in every bracket though. Check it out in detail here: New Beehiiv pricing
The reason is that Beehiiv uses a flat rate pricing scheme that doesn’t depend on the number of subscribers (up to 100 000).
ConvertKit uses a sliding scale for pricing. The more email subscribers you have, the more your monthly fee is.
Here is a table showing the monthly pricing of Beehiiv vs ConvertKit at various subscriber counts.
Note: These are prices of their premium plans. Scale for Beehiiv and Pro for ConvertKit.
| Number of Subscribers | Beehiiv Price ($) | ConvertKit Price ($) |
| 1000 | 84 | 50 |
| 5000 | 84 | 93 |
| 10000 | 84 | 140 |
| 25000 | 84 | 233 |
| 55000 | 84 | 433 |
| 100000 | 84 | 673 |
Although ConvertKit does get a lot more expensive as the subscriber count increases, price is not the be all and end all consideration for choosing email marketing software.
It still should be a major consideration though, obviously
Email marketing is incredibly valuable. Getting the most out of your list is often more important than thinking about pricing only.
Look at how much one email subscriber is worth.
Most email subscribers are worth between $5 and $40 over the course of their lifetime.
So if you have an email list of 100 000 subscribers, that is often worth between $500 000 and $4 000 000 in profits!
If you can maximize the value of your list, that is often more important than saving a few dollars monthly on your email marketing software (or even a few hundred dollars)
What do we like better about Beehiiv?
We personally use Beehiiv for our email marketing software.
That should tell you something.
We have their “Scale plan” and we like the pricing structure.
When we pay for the whole year at once, it is $84 per month
It stays at this price even when we have 100 000 subscribers.
We aren’t there yet with this list, but we have 10s of thousands of subscribers from other email lists we’ve built up over the years.
This Scale plan allows us to import email lists from 3 different websites.
If we were paying for the same service with ConvertKit for 100 000 subscribers, this would be over $600 per month.
Also, Beehiiv has Boosts and Referrals.
Boosts are a way to promote your email newsletter to subscribers of other newsletters in a related niche. You pay the owners of other newsletters to promote your newsletter to their audience. Beehiiv’s marketplace makes this very easy to do.
Referrals are a way to incentivize subscribers of your own newsletter to find new subscribers for you.
This is an awesome feature.
Personal story: The reason I even found out about Beehiiv referral links is because a newsletter I subscribe to asked me to refer their newsletter to others. I did it right away because I wanted to download whatever it was they were giving away (A free PDF cheat sheet or something). I saw first hand how easy it was and how effective it could be. This was one reason we put Beehiiv at the top of our list for which email software we’d get for this website.
Beehiiv makes it easy to set up a unique referral link.
Then, after you get your referral link, in one of your emails you could say, “If you email this link to someone you think would be interested in this newsletter and they subscribe, then I’ll send you a free ebook”
Beehiiv keeps track of how many referrals each of your subscribers has.
You can set up more substantial “gifts” to give if someone refers 5 or 10 more people to your list. If you use this effectively, it can really accelerate the growth of your email newsletter.
Beehiiv also has a strong and growing marketplace of other newsletters looking to promote their email list.
It is a great way to earn money off of your email list.
Here is a personal case study of what we did and how this worked.
Basically, during our first week with Beehiiv, we got an email saying someone wanted to sponsor our email campaign.
We tried this with a small list of just over 2000 people from our old list (over 10 years old)
We were offered $1.20 per click, and we got 22 clicks.
That means we earned $26.40 from one email.
It might not sound like much, but it was an old list. Also, at that pace, if we had used our full original list of 200 000 people, we would have earned $2640 from that same email.
Not bad.
I’ve heard of offers on Beehiiv paying triple that amount as well.
What do we like better about ConvertKit?
ConvertKit has better landing page templates to make lead magnets.
These are beautiful and easy to use.
Lead magnets are super important in email marketing, because in order to grow your email list, you need to attract people to your newsletter in the first place.
Templates that look good and convert well are key to getting people to subscribe to your email newsletter.
ConvertKit also has 2 new features to help grow your email list.
They have “Recommendations” and a “Creator Network”.
If someone subscribes to your email newsletter, you can have a popup that says, “Thanks for subscribing, here are 3 other people you may also be interested in following”.
These recommendations come from their “Creator Network”.
You can search the creator network to find people who have similar newsletters to you. Other people are doing the same thing. So when you recommend their newsletter to your audience, they are likely to do the same thing in return.
They have many success stories on their website, where these “recommendations” have increased their email list by over 25%, which is by 10s of thousands of new email addresses.
For example, Tim Ferriss from “The 4 Hour Work Week” and James Clear from “Atomic Habits” are popular creators in this network.
Conclusion:
We chose Beehiiv due to the price and the fact that we like their referrals and monetization aspects better.
ConvertKit is an awesome option as well, especially if you like their better landing page templates and are planning to be active in their impressive creator network.
It is smart to check out both of them. No matter which one you choose, you will be in great company as both are improving all the time, and both have great networks.
Some of the links in this post may be affiliate links. We might earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It’s one way to support us and keep things running. We also only put affiliate links we believe in fyi.
