ActiveCampaign vs beehiiv

ActiveCampaign is an email marketing and marketing automation platform headquartered in Chicago. Jason VandeBoom founded it in 2003 as on-premises software before it moved to SaaS. Its core job is to send the right email, SMS or WhatsApp message at the right time based on what a contact does, using a visual automation builder with branching logic.

The automation builder handles multi-step journeys with waits, conditions, goals and split tests, triggered by site visits, purchases, form fills, tags or CRM events. Campaigns use 250+ templates and, on Pro, predictive sending, conditional content and attribution. Since 2025 the Active Intelligence layer adds AI agents that build segments, automations and brand kits, a conversational workspace, and a remote MCP server; every plan includes 500 AI credits a month. Plans are priced by contacts: Starter ($19/month for 1,000 contacts billed monthly) covers email and automation, Plus adds landing pages, generative AI and SMS, Pro adds advanced segmentation and three seats, and Enterprise adds SSO, HIPAA support and custom objects. CRM pipelines, WhatsApp and transactional email are add-ons.

ActiveCampaign suits SMBs, ecommerce stores and agencies that need deep automation without HubSpot pricing. Mailchimp is easier for simple newsletters, Brevo and MailerLite are cheaper at large lists, and HubSpot is stronger as an all-in-one CRM.

Buying tip: prices rise steeply with contact count, so clean inactive contacts before upgrading. The 14-day trial needs no card, and annual billing saves roughly 17 to 21%.

beehiiv is a newsletter platform founded by former Morning Brew engineers, including CEO Tyler Denk, to give independent publishers the growth tooling that helped Morning Brew scale. It handles writing, sending, hosting and monetizing a newsletter in one place, and has grown quickly since its public launch in 2022.

Every publication gets a visual editor with polls and surveys, a hosted website with SEO-friendly archives and custom domains, segmentation and analytics. The free plan covers up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends. The paid Lite plan, priced by list size, unlocks the features that matter for growth: a referral program, Boosts (paid recommendations from other newsletters), the beehiiv Ad Network, paid subscriptions through Stripe, automations and A/B tests. Pro removes beehiiv branding and adds webinars and advanced analytics, and Enterprise adds dedicated IPs and SLAs.

beehiiv suits media-style newsletters, niche publications and journalists who treat the newsletter as the business. Its referral and ad network features have no real equal among email tools. It is not built for e-commerce lifecycle marketing (Klaviyo), creators selling courses and digital products (Kit), or SaaS product email (Customer.io). Substack is the main alternative for writers who value its network effects more than control over branding and monetization.

Over 2024 and 2025 beehiiv kept expanding beyond email with a richer website builder and AI writing tools, positioning itself as a full publishing platform.