beehiiv review: The future of newsletters?

If you’ve been looking for a newsletter platform, you’ve probably heard someone recommend beehiiv.

It’s been getting a lot of attention on social media, especially on LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter). People on Reddit have also shared their thoughts:

“If you’re currently on a different platform, I highly recommend giving beehiiv a shot. It’s not only made my life easier as a newsletter creator but has also helped me grow my audience more effectively.”

Another Reddit user also shared:

“I started with beehiiv and been using it for about 6 months. Super user friendly, it’s easy to learn how to use, and their YouTube videos are incredibly helpful to help you setup and enhance your newsletter and overall profile.”

But does beehiiv *truly* live up to the hype?

This beehiiv review will break down its features, so you can decide if it’s worth the hype, and most importantly, if it’s the right fit for your newsletter.

What is beehiiv?

beehiiv is a newsletter platform designed to help creators launch, grow, and monetize their newsletters—all in one place. 

It was founded in 2021 by former Morning Brew employees Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett, and Jacob Hurd, the same team that helped scale Morning Brew from a few thousand subscribers to over 4 million readers.

Their goal with beehiiv was to take the powerful growth system they built at Morning Brew and make it accessible to anyone. 

Since then, the platform has grown to become the only newsletter tool with extensive growth and monetization features to help creators turn their newsletters into a sustainable income stream.

As of October 2024, beehiiv is home to over 400,000 publishers—including big names like Milk Road, LA Mag, Product Hunt, and Boston Globe Media—and has helped them generate over $10 million in revenue.

beehiiv Review: Key Features

Now that you have an idea of what beehiiv is, let’s go over its key features so you can see if it has what you need in a newsletter platform.

1. Navigate the beehiiv platform easily

Creating a beehiiv account is brief and simple. And once you’re in, the dashboard is easy to figure out—no tutorials needed.

There’s an in-app tour that walks you through the basics, so you can get familiar with the platform right away. 

Plus, all the tools you need are in a collapsible left-hand menu, making it easy to move between pages, customize your newsletter, publish content, and set up your growth and monetization systems.

2. Customize your newsletter publication

beehiiv lets you customize your newsletter’s appearance. You can adjust the background color, typography, and text colors, as well as fine-tune elements like tables, buttons, images, bullets, and embeds.

Once you set these preferences, they apply to all your newsletter posts automatically. This keeps everything on-brand and saves you time since you won’t have to tweak the formatting for every new post.

beehiiv also includes a built-in website that serves as an archive for your newsletter posts. Well, you’re free to customize this “website” page as well.

For starters, you can start by adding a newsletter logo, description, custom URL, and social media links.

There are also options to change the website’s colors, typography, subscribe widget, post styles, and footer. 

That said, keep in mind that beehiiv’s website structure is the same for all creators using the platform, however, these settings let you personalize it to match your brand.

3. Publish content with the help of AI

beehiiv makes writing and publishing newsletters easy with a clean, minimalist editor. 

If you’ve used Notion, you’ll feel right at home—just start typing directly on the canvas and use the slash (/) command to add tables, buttons, images, audio, and video. You can also organize content into multiple columns, attach files, embed social media posts, and insert a table of contents.

The editor also comes with a built-in AI assistant to help draft content, fix grammar and spelling, translate text, and even generate images. 

And if you’re working with a team, you can collaborate directly in the editor using comments and @mentions. When you tag a team member, they’ll get an email notification to review and edit the content.

Once your newsletter post is ready, beehiiv gives you flexible publishing options. 

You can send the post directly to subscribers’ inboxes, publish it on your beehiiv website, or both. 

Plus, if you offer paid subscriptions (more on that later), you can choose whether a post is available to all subscribers or only to paying members. 

You can take this a step further by controlling the visibility of specific sections within a newsletter post. For example, you can include a bonus section in your post with exclusive insights or downloadable resources that only paid subscribers can access, while keeping the rest of the content available to everyone.

4. Collect subscribers via signup forms

By default, every beehiiv website includes a signup form for collecting the emails of visitors who land on your page.

Besides this, beehiiv lets you add signup forms inside individual posts. You can:

• Use popups: A form appears a few seconds or minutes after someone starts reading a post on your website.
• Gate content: Visitors must enter their email before they can read a full post.

If you already have a website on WordPress, Webflow, or SquareSpace, beehiiv lets you embed a signup form there too. This way, people can join your newsletter without leaving your site.

Currently, beehiiv’s signup forms only collect emails. But you can send a quick survey after someone subscribes to ask for extra details like their name, location, or birthday. This helps you build a more detailed subscriber profile, allowing for better personalization and audience engagement.

5. Grow your audience quickly

While you can always drive traffic from your website and social media to grow your beehiiv newsletter, the platform also has built-in growth tools to help you grow even faster.

One of the most useful is beehiiv’s recommendation engine, which lets you cross-promote your newsletters with other beehiiv creators. When someone subscribes to another newsletter, yours will show up as a suggestion for them to join as well. 

There’s also beehiiv’s referral program, which makes it easy to reward subscribers for bringing in new people. You can set up different perks based on how many referrals they get, like a free ebook for 10 referrals, promo code for 20 referrals, and brand merch for 50 referrals.

That’s not all.

You can use Magic links to collaborate with creators on other newsletter platforms, so their subscribers can join yours with a single click—no long signup process needed. 

And if you have some cash to invest in your newsletter’s growth, then the boosts feature is for you. It lets you pay other beehiiv creators to bring you new subscribers.

6. Monetize your newsletter content

Forget about selling digital products or services for a moment—beehiiv gives you built-in ways to make money directly from your newsletter content. 

Here’s how:

• Ads: Join beehiiv’s ad network and partner with top brands to display ads in your newsletter. You earn money for every click the ad gets.
• Boosts marketplace: Get paid for referring subscribers to other beehiiv newsletters listed in the marketplace.
• Subscriptions: Charge a monthly or annual fee for access to exclusive newsletter content and premium resources.
• beehiiv affiliate: Promote beehiiv to others and earn 50% of the revenue they generate for their first year.

You can withdraw all of your earnings at any time via the bank account connected to your Stripe. 

7. Promote your digital products and services

With beehiiv, you can make money not just from your newsletter content but also from any digital products or services you offer. beehiiv’s segmentation, automation, and A/B testing features make this possible.

The segmentation feature lets you group your audience based on their engagement levels (like open and click rates) and information you’ve collected about them through surveys. So for instance, if you’re looking to send promotional emails for a specific product, you can target subscribers who have shown interest. 

Also, the automation tool takes care of repetitive tasks, like sending freebies to new subscribers or setting up automated email sequences to promote products and drive sales.

Then there’s beehiiv’s A/B testing tool that lets you test up to four subject lines for every newsletter post to see which one performs best. This helps with improving the open rates of your promotional emails.

That said, these features are still pretty basic. 

If you need more advanced options—like multiple landing pages or advanced automation triggers—you might want to pair beehiiv with platforms like Kit (formerly ConvertKit), MailerLite, Flodesk, or Mailchimp.

8. Track newsletter performance

beehiiv makes it easy to keep an eye on how your newsletter is performing with its analytics dashboard. 

You can track subscriber growth with a visual breakdown of daily acquisitions. You’re also able to see where your subscribers are coming from—whether through organic search, paid ads, or beehiiv’s growth tools—and even view their top locations.

For newsletter performance, there’s a separate page that gives you an overview of key metrics like deliverability, open rates, and click rates across all your emails in one place. 

Whether you’re measuring subscriber growth or newsletter engagement, you can filter the data by a specific time period and export it as a CSV, XLSX, JSON, or PDF file. This makes it easy to analyze trends and adjust your newsletter’s growth strategy accordingly.

9. Integrate with external tools

beehiiv connects with 12 platforms, mostly blogging and ecommerce software like WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, Wix, and Shopify. 

These integrations make it easy to turn your website visitors into newsletter subscribers without any hassle.

If you need to connect with a tool that isn’t on the list, no worries. beehiiv works with Zapier, so you can connect it to thousands of apps for custom workflows. And if you want even more control, you can use beehiiv’s API and webhooks to connect it with other tools in your tech stack.

10. Access documentation and support

beehiiv has put a lot of effort into building a solid knowledge base to help users get started and troubleshoot any issues.

Besides that, they’ve also put together the beehiiv 101 course, which is the perfect place for beehiiv newbies to start. It’s a step-by-step guide that walks you through everything from setting up your account and publishing newsletters to growing your audience and monetizing your content.

If you prefer video tutorials, beehiiv’s YouTube channel has over 300 high-quality, step-by-step tutorials to help you get comfortable with beehiiv and answer any questions you have. 

Should you have any questions that haven’t been covered in their knowledge base, you can reach out to their customer support team via live chat. 

Oh, and one more thing…

If you’re on a paid plan, you also get access to THE HIIV, beehiiv’s exclusive Slack community. It’s a great place to connect with other beehiiv creators, share your newsletter growth journey, and even find collaboration opportunities for cross-promotion.

beehiiv Review: Pricing

beehiiv makes it easy to get started with a free plan, which includes all the essential features for publishing newsletters and sending unlimited emails to up to 2,500 subscribers.

If you need access to beehiiv AI, growth and monetization tools, and customer support, you’ll have to upgrade to the Scale plan, which starts at $39/month for 1,000 subscribers.

For those managing multiple publications or working with a larger team, the Max plan starts at $99/month. This plan lets you create up to 10 publications, collaborate with unlimited team members, remove beehiiv branding, and get priority customer support.

Once your subscriber count exceeds 100,000, you’ll need to move to the Enterprise plan, which comes with custom pricing. To get a quote, you’ll have to reach out to the beehiiv team directly.

beehiiv Review: Pros and Cons

Who is beehiiv for?

beehiiv has made starting, growing, and monetizing newsletters super easy. 

It handles the heavy lifting behind the scenes while giving you a clean interface that lets you focus on creating and sharing content.

So, you should go with beehiiv if:

• You need a user-friendly and budget-friendly platform for newsletters and email marketing.
• You want built-in growth and monetization tools without relying on third-party integrations.
• You’re looking to turn your newsletter content into a profitable income stream on its own.