beehiiv vs Customer.io

beehiiv is one of the best newsletter platforms out there if you're trying to build, grow, and actually make money from your audienceIt's built around marketing features and ROI in a way most traditional email tools just aren't.

Unlike tools like Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or ActiveCampaign, beehiiv feels much more purpose-built for newsletters, especially if referrals, sponsorships, paid subscriptions, and audience growth are part of the plan.

A lot of that comes back to why it was created in the first place. beehiiv was co-founded by former Morning Brew team members, including Tyler Denk, who was Morning Brew's second employee. Morning Brew for context was a dedicated newsletter business that exited for $75M.

And Tyler? He worked across product, engineering, and growth. He literally redefined what a newsletter could be, using viral growth tactics like a powerful referral system, which led to Morning Brew becoming one of the largest newsletter exists ever. They got very good at growing newsletters.

So this is why beehiiv actually feels different. Most email marketing software has bolted on newsletter growth features because customers asked for them, but beehiiv was built from the ground up by a team that actually understood the needs of a newsletter business at the deepest level.

They knew referrals, analytics, monetization, and audience growth needed to be core to the product from day one. And to them, it was super clear that there was a massive gap in the market as none of the existing platforms actually gave them what they needed. So Tyler and the team ultimately left Morning Brew to build the newsletter platform they wished they had.

Customer.io is great for building segmented onboarding funnels within your product (e.g. a series of emails and push notifications based on the onboarding flow).

It allows you to manage all of your communication flows with the customer in a visual way.

We've been seeing more and more companies switch over to this due to their flexibility of native integrations.

You can also do things like push app sign-ups and in-app events to a shared channel in Slack, or even use it to automatically push out updates to shared Slack Connect channels.