Mailchimp vs Beehiiv: which for a creator newsletter?

I’ve run newsletters on both, and the thing that took me longest to understand is that they’re not really competing for the same job. They look similar because they both send email to a list. What they assume about why you’re sending it is completely different.

Get that assumption right and the choice is obvious. Get it wrong and you spend a year fighting your tooling.

The assumption each one makes

Mailchimp assumes you have a business that sells something, and email is one of several channels supporting it. Its whole design follows from that: audience segmentation, e-commerce integrations, landing pages, ads, customer journeys.

Beehiiv assumes the newsletter is the product. Growth mechanics, referral programmes, a sponsor marketplace, paid subscriptions, recommendations from other newsletters. It’s built by people who ran a newsletter as a business.

So the question isn’t which is better. It’s whether your newsletter is the thing you sell, or a way to sell the thing you sell.

Where Beehiiv wins

Monetisation is native. Paid tiers, sponsor matching and referral programmes all built in. On Mailchimp you’d be bolting three separate services together.

Growth features. The recommendation network, where newsletters cross-promote at signup, is genuinely effective and has no Mailchimp equivalent.

The writing experience. Cleaner and faster. Mailchimp’s editor carries the weight of a decade of enterprise features you’ll never touch.

Web archive by default. Every issue becomes a real page that can rank in search. Mailchimp can do this, awkwardly.

Pricing shape. Aligned with newsletter economics rather than contact counts.

Where Mailchimp wins

Automation depth. Real customer journeys with branching, conditions and behaviour triggers. Beehiiv’s automation has improved and it’s still simpler.

Integrations. Enormously more, especially e-commerce. If you sell products online, Mailchimp probably already connects to your store.

Segmentation. Slicing your list by purchase history, engagement and custom fields is where Mailchimp is genuinely strong.

It does more than newsletters. Landing pages, forms, ad audiences, basic CRM. One subscription covering several jobs.

Maturity. Deliverability, support and documentation from a company that’s been doing this a very long time.

I use Mailchimp on one project for exactly this reason, and my HubSpot vs Mailchimp comparison covers where it sits against the CRM-first options. If you want the broader email tool landscape, best AI email marketing tools for solo businesses has the wider field.

The question that decides it

Ask: if this newsletter tripled in size, how would I make money from it?

“I’d sell more of my existing product or service.” Mailchimp, or something like it. You need the email to drive behaviour elsewhere, and that means segmentation and automation.

“Sponsorships and paid subscriptions.” Beehiiv. Those are features, not things you should be assembling yourself.

“I genuinely don’t know yet.” Beehiiv’s free tier, honestly. It’s more generous for a pure newsletter and you can migrate once you find out. Starting on the platform with heavier machinery you don’t use yet is a tax on uncertainty.

What neither solves

Both will happily send email to nobody, and neither has an opinion about whether you should be writing it.

The things that determine whether a newsletter works are all upstream of the tool: a clear reason for someone to subscribe, a consistent schedule you can actually keep, and a welcome sequence that turns a signup into a reader. The platform affects none of those.

If your list isn’t growing, the problem is almost certainly your lead magnet or your signup placement, not your ESP. How to write a lead magnet in an afternoon with AI and how to build an automated welcome email sequence with AI are the two pieces that actually move that number, and they work on either platform.

Deliverability, briefly

Both are fine, and both will be ruined by the same behaviours: buying lists, emailing people who never opted in, misleading subject lines, and never removing subscribers who haven’t opened anything in a year.

That last one feels wrong and matters enormously. A smaller engaged list lands in inboxes; a large disengaged one gradually stops landing anywhere. Prune annually, and don’t be sentimental about the number.

My take

If you’re a creator whose newsletter is the thing, Beehiiv, without much hesitation. The growth and monetisation features are the product, and assembling equivalents around Mailchimp is a project you don’t want.

If you run a business that sells something and the newsletter supports it, Mailchimp is the more capable tool and the automation depth will matter more than the growth features ever would.

The mistake I’d steer people away from is picking on price or on which interface looks nicer. Both are reasonable at both. What isn’t reversible without real friction is discovering in eighteen months that your platform has no concept of the way you want to make money. Answer the monetisation question first, honestly, and the tool choice makes itself. For the full email comparison field, GetResponse vs Mailchimp covers the other serious contender.