Published on by Affiliate Inventory
Reader offer: start beehiiv through our link and you get a 14-day free trial on a paid plan, then 20% off your first three months. No code to enter — the discount is carried by the link and applied at checkout.
The one-line answer
If the newsletter is the business, use beehiiv. If the newsletter supports a business, use MailerLite.
That single distinction settles the choice for most people, and everything below is the reasoning behind it. Both tools send email reliably. They disagree about what happens around the sending.
What each one is actually for
beehiiv was built by operators who scaled Morning Brew, and it shows in what ships: a subscriber-facing web archive with SEO-friendly post pages, referral programs, recommendation networks, boosts, paid subscriptions and an ad marketplace. It treats a newsletter as a media property with an audience to grow and revenue to extract.
MailerLite is a general email marketing platform. Campaigns, automations, signup forms, landing pages, a light website builder, and — this is the part people underrate — e-commerce integrations that let you tie an email to a purchase. It treats email as one channel among several.
The overlap is real but shallow. Ask which product you’d be sad to lose and the answer sorts you immediately: beehiiv’s growth loops, or MailerLite’s automation-plus-store plumbing.
Pricing, honestly
Both have a free tier and both charge by subscriber count, so a like-for-like number depends on your list size. The structural difference matters more than the headline price.
MailerLite’s free plan is small — 250 subscribers and 2,500 emails a month. Paid plans start at $12/month (Comfort) and $25/month (Power), and the price climbs with your list. At a few hundred or a few thousand subscribers, MailerLite is the cheaper bill and it isn’t close.
beehiiv inverts that. Its free Launch plan carries 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends — ten times MailerLite’s free ceiling — and its paid plans are flat rather than banded: Scale at $43/month and Max at $96/month, both covering up to 100,000 subscribers. So beehiiv costs more to start and dramatically less to scale. The crossover lands somewhere in the low thousands of subscribers, depending on how hard MailerLite’s usage banding bites.
What the extra money buys on the way up is monetisation infrastructure — the ad network, boosts and paid subscriptions are the things that can make the plan pay for itself. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on whether you’ll use them.
This is exactly the gap the offer closes: 14 days free, then 20% off for three months takes the price question off the table long enough to answer the only question that matters, which is whether you’ll actually use the growth tools.
Start beehiiv with the trial and discount →
Growing the list
beehiiv is the stronger tool here, and it isn’t a close call. Referral programs, recommendations from other newsletters, boosts (paying for qualified subscribers) and a public post archive that search engines index are all first-class features, not integrations you bolt on.
MailerLite gives you forms, pop-ups and landing pages. Perfectly good, entirely conventional, and mostly dependent on traffic you already have. There is no equivalent of beehiiv’s newsletter-to-newsletter growth network.
Making money from it
beehiiv: paid subscriptions with billing handled, an ad marketplace that matches sponsors to newsletters, and boosts that work in both directions — pay to grow, or get paid to recommend.
MailerLite: sell a product, connect a store, tag buyers, automate the follow-up. It’s the better tool if the revenue lives outside the newsletter and the email’s job is to move people toward it.
Neither approach is superior. They monetise different things — attention versus transactions — and you almost certainly know which one describes you.
Deliverability and support
Both maintain solid sending reputations and both offer custom sending domains on paid plans. Neither is a reason to choose one over the other in 2026.
MailerLite has been around since 2010 and its help documentation reflects that maturity. beehiiv, launched in 2021, moves faster and ships more, which cuts both ways: newer features, newer bugs.
Migration is not the trap it looks like
Both import CSVs, both support custom domains, and both let you keep your existing signup forms pointed somewhere new. What doesn’t migrate cleanly is automation logic — sequences have to be rebuilt by hand — and, from MailerLite to beehiiv, e-commerce tagging that beehiiv has no concept of.
If you have three automations, switch without a second thought. If you have thirty, cost the rebuild before you commit.
So: which one?
Choose beehiiv if you’re building an audience as the product, you want referrals and recommendations working while you sleep, you intend to sell ads or paid subscriptions, or you’re leaving Substack and want the growth tooling without the revenue share.
Choose MailerLite if you already sell something else, you need automations tied to purchases, or your list is small enough that $12/month against $43/month is the number that decides it.
Choose neither yet if you haven’t written four issues. The platform is not what’s stopping you.
The offer, one more time
Our beehiiv link gives you a 14-day free trial on a paid plan, then 20% off for three months — long enough to import a list, run one referral campaign and see whether the growth tools move anything. It’s an affiliate link: it costs you nothing extra, it’s what applies the discount, and it pays us if you stay.
Comparing beehiiv against something else? vs Substack · vs Kit · vs Ghost. Or read beehiiv’s pricing plan by plan and the offer in full.
Promoting these platforms rather than picking one? The affiliate terms are laid out side by side in beehiiv vs MailerLite — commission, cookie window, payout schedule and the restrictions on each.
Written by Affiliate Inventory
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