beehiiv vs Loops

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.

Loops is an email platform built specifically for SaaS companies by a small team focused on lifecycle email. It brings marketing campaigns, event-triggered onboarding sequences (called loops) and transactional emails into one product, so a startup does not need Mailchimp for newsletters and a separate API service for password resets.

Contacts and their properties are synced through the API, SDKs and integrations such as Segment, Zapier, Stripe and Supabase, and product events trigger loops that branch on behavior. The editor is minimal and Notion-like, encouraging clean emails that look personal and land in the inbox, with optional styling and components. Transactional emails share the same contacts and domain setup, with separate unsubscribe handling. Pricing is based on the number of contacts, with a free tier for early products and paid plans that include unlimited sends.

Loops fits early and growth-stage SaaS teams that want lifecycle email done well without a complex marketing automation suite. Its limits are design depth, advanced segmentation, A/B testing and channels: there is no SMS or push. Customer.io is the step up when you need multichannel messaging and complex logic, Resend and Postmark are developer-first transactional services, and Brevo or Mailchimp suit businesses that need e-commerce features and heavy template design.