beehiiv vs Loops

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.

We've used just about every single marketing and transactional email sending tool on the market, and we believe that Loops is the most simple and modern solution, poised to take much of the market share in time.

You're probably exploring tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot (Marketing Hub), ConvertKit, and even Postmark, and you're probably banging your head against the wall because you're overwhelmed with options and not quite sure of the difference.

And that's totally fair! Believe us, we've used them all and more. Dive into Mailchimp and you'll be introduced to what feels like 20 different areas to accomplish basic things—they used to be the most user-friendly solution on the market, but with growth has come complexity and segmented products (like why are they trying to get me to create a website...?)—sending email shouldn't be so complicated.

I mean come on, you have contacts (an audience), and then one-off bulk emails (campaigns) you want to send to your contacts, and sequences (Loops) which are re-usable emails (e.g. like a newsletter or customer onboarding sequence):

Screenshot of Loops

The main differentiation point of Loops is that it is just super simple and straightforward to use. You can easily segment down your audience (contacts) by defining in the campaign or sequence whatever filtering criteria you'd like specific to the actual one-off email or sequence you are sending out—super straightforward:

Example of how to build a segment within an email sequence

What we like to say is the best email tool is one you rarely need to open up. Wait, what? Yeah create your email sequences once, and then use their flexible API to easily pass these contacts from your CRM to Loops.

While they advertise themselves as "better email for SaaS", we've been able to use them for our evergreen newsletter, which has nothing to do with integration into our products, it really just means that they have a robust API, allowing you to easily trigger one-off or sequences of emails (Loops) to go out at various points in the process.

These other email sending tools like ConvertKit, MailChimp, and Hubspot have just added so many additional "features" to try and extract more money (with the blink of an eye you'll be spending $20k/yr with Hubspot to unlock all of their marketing automation features). Loops on the other hand just has simple pricing and "gets out of the way", with a clean email editor, powerful API, and a great user-experience.

P.S. We use and love Postmark for sending transactional via our Communicate app, but that's only because it's more of a product, in most cases, companies shouldn't really be looking at an email sending tool like Postmark for marketing automation. Not to mention, Loops has actually just added transactional (one-to-one) email support, which should be able to take care of most transactional emails (like password reset emails, etc.)