BeeHiiv Review: Why I Switched To It (And Later Switched Back To FluentCRM)

I originally wrote this review after I switched to BeeHiiv. That was mid-2023. I moved my newsletters over, I was optimistic, and I documented the reasoning.

Well… that experiment didn’t last. About four months in, I switched back to FluentCRM and I’ve been there ever since.

So this review is a little different now. It’s a retrospective. I’ll walk you through why BeeHiiv looked so compelling at the time, what it actually IS genuinely great at, how it stacks up against Substack and Kit (formerly ConvertKit)… and then I’ll explain honestly why I ultimately went back to FluentCRM and don’t regret it.

If you’re evaluating BeeHiiv right now, I think you’ll get more useful information here than from a review written by someone who just signed up last week. Because I’ve been on both sides of the fence.

One important caveat before we dive in: BeeHiiv has evolved significantly since I first reviewed it in 2023. Where I flag specific features or gaps below, I’ve noted where they’ve since changed. My core reasoning for switching back to FluentCRM is unchanged, but the platform I left in late 2023 is not the platform BeeHiiv is today. Let’s dive in…

Why I Switched To BeeHiiv In The First Place

Back in mid-2023, I decided to turn my RV blog (Happily RV) primarily into a newsletter. And I wanted a platform that was purpose-built for that. I was using FluentCRM for the email list for Happily RV, but FluentCRM is built as a full CRM and marketing automation tool, not specifically as a newsletter platform. Using it for newsletters felt like a bit of a waste of what FluentCRM is really good at.

Here’s what pulled me toward BeeHiiv at the time:

• Ability to publish (to the blog) and send the email simultaneously without having it be two separate actions.
• Built-in newsletter referral program. FluentCRM doesn’t have that and I would have needed a third-party tool like Sparkloop.
• Built-in ability to do cross-promotions with other newsletters on the BeeHiiv platform.
• “Magic Links” — one-click subscription links, great for promotion in other newsletters.
• Ability to do paid “boosts” on the BeeHiiv network to promote your newsletter.
• Built-in ad network, if I chose to monetize with ads in the newsletter.
• Built-in ability to run a paid newsletter upgrade and basically run a premium newsletter. And BeeHiiv doesn’t take a cut.

BeeHiiv is purpose-built for newsletter publishers with features aimed at growth. The platform was literally built by the people who built up the technology for Morning Brew. They know what they’re doing.

Shortly after moving Happily RV over, I also moved my main BMA newsletter (called The Edge at the time) to BeeHiiv. I even briefly rebranded it as The Morning WP to grow it as an independent property.

Spoiler: that whole reorganization got undone later. The newsletter is back at BMA now as The WP Edge, and it’s back in FluentCRM. But we’ll get to that.

Newsletters Versus Just A Normal Email List

There’s a difference between a newsletter platform and just an email list.

You can host your email list anyplace you want and there are a number of them out there, from Aweber, ActiveCampaign, Drip, Kit (formerly ConvertKit)… over to self-hosted options like GroundHogg and FluentCRM.

What’s the difference?

The primary difference is that, with a newsletter platform, the act of publishing means that it is going to your website and to your email subscribers simultaneously.

With both BeeHiiv and Substack, you have a website. You are publishing to that website. But, you are also sending off to all subscribers at the same time. The website and it’s subscribers are all in one. This makes management of the platform much simpler.

With most email platforms, any newsletter you set up is done as an email campaign. It is built completely separately from your website. So, for instance, you might publish an article to WordPress but then you would need to separately build and send an email to your list to send it to subscribers. These are then two separate sets of archives and two separate actions because blog posts and your emails are not inherently linked.

The closest thing that turns WordPress into a true newsletter platform is Newsletter Glue.

It is a fitting name because it pretty much “glues” your newsletter to your WordPress posts and allows them to be the same thing. Certainly, something like Newsletter Glue would be a solid option if you wanted to self-host everything. However, you’d lose the growth tools that come with a platform like BeeHiiv.

Publishing a newsletter inherently comes with a different set of needs than a typical email list.

You don’t usually need much marketing automation. You don’t usually need autoresponder sequences, event tracking, and all the bells and whistles of a marketing automation platform.

What you DO need, though, is one seamless publishing experience and growth tools to help you build your subscriber base that are specific to newsletters.

BeeHiiv vs Substack (And Why I Chose BeeHiiv)

When I announced to my subscribers that I was going to switch the newsletter over to BeeHiiv, many people asked me why I was choosing it over Substack.

To be clear, even besides the fact that I chose to go with BeeHiiv, that doesn’t mean I think Substack sucks. 😇 In fact, because Substack has been around longer, it is more mature and has more features.

Even though BeeHiiv is younger, there were a couple things that initially got my attention:

1. BeeHiiv is specifically tailored to newsletter publishers. In fact, it is literally built by the same folks who built the technology behind Morning Brew. On the other hand, SubStack targets writers. In the real world, doesn’t matter. But, the obvious positioning of BeeHiiv toward newsletter growth called me out over the more generic positioning of being a “creator”. Growth is what I was interested in.
2. That branding and differentiation also means that BeeHiiv has some fairly large brands and large publications using it. Whereas SubStack is aimed more at solo creators. Again, it just tells me the customer avatar difference between the two companies.

Sending my newsletter via FluentCRM didn’t exactly suck. The only reason I would ponder shaking things up was if I thought I could GROW the list faster. And BeeHiiv spoke exactly to that goal.

Due to the targeting, I actually don’t view BeeHiiv and Substack as direct competitors. I think BeeHiiv is targeting a different type of consumer. In fact, if anything, I see BeeHiiv and Kit being more direct competitors.

But, let’s dive deeper than just the positioning here.

Things That Make BeeHiiv Better Than Substack

Overall, BeeHiiv seems like it was built by people who understand email marketing. On the other hand, SubStack seems more geared toward creators.

For instance, BeeHiiv offers custom fields on subscribers. Now, it isn’t as developed as something like FluentCRM. But, it has it. Substack doesn’t.

BeeHiiv offers Automations. In fact, it is a visual automation builder that works a lot like what we have inside of FluentCRM.

To be clear, back when I first reviewed BeeHiiv the automation functionality was still early-phase. It was quite limited in triggers and the only action was the ability to send an email. However, enhancements have kept coming. Even during my time as a customer I saw regular improvements, such as:

• Ability to trigger automations based on which specific embed form they came in on
• Ability to automatically do re-engagement (and handle people based on opens and non-opens)
• Ability to do basic conditional logic branches

Substack does not have automations like this. Likely, it never will. Substack just can’t do this because the target market of Substack just wouldn’t think to approach this like an email marketer.

When it comes to writing your newsletters, the writing interface of BeeHiiv is just more geared toward newsletters. In fact, it actually has similarities to the WordPress block builder in how it works. I found it to be more intuitive, personally.

Substack’s writing interface is nice and clean, but it would be more equivalent to the classic editor for WordPress. Toolbar at the top.

This difference is more than just form. For instance, with BeeHiiv you can insert a “Section” and then put anything you want in it. Then, you can put Visibility options on that section to show it only to paid subscribers, hide it from email, hide from subscribers, show only to subscribers, etc. Substack offers nothing like this.

BeeHiiv also does audience segments for email list segmentation. It has more thorough analytics.

And when/if the time comes that you start a premium subscription model, BeeHiiv doesn’t take any revenue. In fact, you literally connect up to your own Stripe account and it charges directly to it. With Substack, they will take 10% of your revenue. Depending on how many subscribers you get, that 10% can be quite a bit more money than the monthly cost of BeeHiiv.

Lastly, BeeHiiv has an API. This might seem nerdy, but what it means is that there are integrations with BeeHiiv. You can actually make BeeHiiv work with the outside using tools like Zapier or Make.com. This is HUGE. Substack literally has… nothing. No integrations at all.

Overall, I just felt like BeeHiiv was more built toward real email marketing. It was built by people who “get it”. Even the opt-in forms and the landing page designs seem better built for conversions. Growth is the name of the game with BeeHiiv.

Even though there are still features I would like to see BeeHiiv add, I like the direction it is going more than Substack.

Things That Make Substack Better Than BeeHiiv

As I have said, Substack positions itself toward “creators” more than email marketers and newsletter owners. For that reason, you see some things geared more toward people who just think in terms of content creation.

While BeeHiiv does support multiple publications, they are treated quite separately. Whereas Substack does have the ability to cross-post to multiple publications at the same time. This isn’t something I require, but… cool for people who might need it.

Substack also has more social functionality built-in. For instance, it has a chat function to host chats with subscribers. It also has a “Notes” function which works kind of like a social media newsfeed where you can share things from other “Stacks” you’re reading. Interesting. Overall, Substack is set up to be more like a social network which supports long-form content.

Overall, Substack is also more… minimalist. You either care for that or don’t. Personally, I don’t. However, if the goal is simplicity of interface and, frankly, features… Substack works pretty well.

But, I’ll be clear here…

When it comes to actual marketing, I don’t think there’s much doubt that BeeHiiv is better suited. I tried to find more points that make Substack better than BeeHiiv, but frankly… I have a hard time finding them. 😇 

BeeHiiv Vs. Kit (Formerly ConvertKit)

While BeeHiiv and Substack are often thought to be the closest competitors, I actually see BeeHiiv and Kit being the closer rivals. Both are going after the same target market and have similar capabilities.

Kit is also positioned at creators (like Substack), but it is much more strongly catering to people who do it for business. Kit has nice visual automation building, its own commerce platform, and more. Kit is a really nice platform.

I’m not going to bore you with a full feature-by-feature breakdown here. Kit is well known already. But, here’s how I feel BeeHiiv and Kit compare…

Things Kit Is Better At…

Kit has more flexibility when it comes to its automations. I also find Kit’s automation builder to be a bit more intuitive than that of BeeHiiv.

Kit supports tagging. This is just a basic function of email lists that enables segmentation in a far more flexible way than BeeHiiv currently does. I expect BeeHiiv to support tagging at some point soon, frankly. It feels like an oversight that it’s missing.

Kit also provides the ability to sell things via their own platform. BeeHiiv does not. If that’s important to you, it may be a big deal for you. For me, however, I would always choose a more direct option anyway. For me, I prefer to use my own platform powered by WooCommerce.

Kit has been around much longer and for that reason has way more integration options. Tons of web-based tools and WordPress plugins integrate with Kit. Kit even has their own WordPress plugin that is quite powerful. For instance, their plugin now even supports member-gated content as well as auto-embed of your newsletter archives right into your site. In essence, this more closely puts Kit into direct competition by having you be able to publish to your site and your email list at the same time.

BeeHiiv is severely lacking in these kinds of third-party integrations at the moment. It’ll get there. But, we’re not there yet with it.

Kit is even busy tackling the growth tools of BeeHiiv. For instance, BeeHiiv has the referral program and the Recommendation Engine where you can not only incentivize people to share your newsletter with perks, but you can also pay per lead within the internal ad network of BeeHiiv to grow your list. These are really awesome features of BeeHiiv. But…

Did you know Kit acquired Sparkloop back in 2023? Sparkloop is one of the most well known viral promotion platforms for newsletters… and Kit bought it. You could see the writing on the wall for what that meant for the platform going forward.

Things BeeHiiv Is Better At…

BeeHiiv is much earlier in its product cycle than Kit. Part of that means fewer features and fewer integrations, which is natural for this stage of the cycle. However, it also means that they are rapidly developing.

In the time that I was a customer of BeeHiiv, I witnessed almost weekly release of new features into the platform. And these weren’t puny little features… but big features that were quite important. Their speed of development was impressive.

I also very much appreciated how responsive they were. In fact, one of their product announcements about some design enhancements to the web design features actually contained a small problem with the content width. I simply replied to that email to tell them. I quickly got a reply directly from the CEO:

That same day, the issue was fixed.

Few days later, I gave them another suggestion…

Sure enough, in a bit over a week of that exchange, the ability to trigger automations based on the embed form used was added to the system.

That kind of responsiveness and direct involvement of the team is something I really appreciated during my time on the platform.

Another major point of differentiation is the price. Both platforms offer free plans, however the BeeHiiv free plan offers more capability and more subscribers than Kit does at the same tier.

Once you go to paid plans, the pricing of BeeHiiv has historically been FAR more favorable — especially for large lists. Kit’s pricing scales up quickly as your list grows.

BeeHiiv is in a completely different league than Kit when it comes to pricing at scale (in a good way). But keep in mind — even BeeHiiv’s pricing climbs as your list grows. Both platforms scale up with your subscriber count. More on the “growth tax” problem later.

Things BeeHiiv Was Still Missing When I Left (And What’s Changed Since)

Some background: BeeHiiv iterates fast. When I was using it in 2023, there were a handful of basic features I wished the platform had. Since I left, they’ve closed most of those gaps.

Gaps that existed when I left, but have since been added:

• Subscriber tagging — now fully supported (with color-coded tags, segment membership, automation triggers)
• Triggering automations at the subscription-form level — now available multiple ways
• Webhooks as an action inside automations — now native
• Bulk subscriber operations (edit, remove, tag) — now handled through segment workflows
• Website design flexibility — massively expanded, including an AI website builder

If you’re evaluating BeeHiiv today, don’t rule it out based on my old missing-features list. Check their current feature set at beehiiv.com — they iterate fast enough that anything I wrote about “gaps” needs verification.

The one real gap that still exists as of 2026:

• Cross-posting a single post to multiple publications simultaneously. BeeHiiv supports multiple publications per account, but each is a separate silo — you can’t send one post out to all of them at once. Substack still holds an edge here for anyone running multiple newsletters.

The bigger point: BeeHiiv today is broader than “a newsletter platform.” They now host podcasts, sell digital products, offer an AI website builder, do dynamic personalized content, and market themselves as a “Creator OS.” My criticism about BeeHiiv being narrowly newsletter-focused is dated. It’s a much wider platform now — which is either great news or beside the point, depending on your fit.

Why I Ultimately Switched Back To FluentCRM

After about four months on BeeHiiv, I pulled the plug and moved everything back into FluentCRM. Here’s the honest breakdown of why.

BeeHiiv is built for publishers. I’m not a publisher.

This is the biggest single reason. BeeHiiv’s target customer is a newsletter publisher. Someone whose newsletter IS the business. Someone selling eyeballs and ad space. Someone who thinks of their newsletter as a media property.

That’s not me. My newsletter is a marketing format. The actual product of my business is what I sell… ONEPass, Concierge, courses, services. The newsletter feeds those. BeeHiiv’s whole design philosophy is built around a different customer avatar than me, and I felt that friction every day.

It’s not a real marketing automation platform (and probably never will be)

BeeHiiv is very good at what it does. But what it does is a subset of what a real email marketing platform needs to do. It was missing basic things I use every day in FluentCRM:

• Proper tagging at the subscriber level
• Real custom fields with proper functionality
• Meaningful segmentation for behavior-based automations
• Deep integrations with WordPress, WooCommerce, my LMS, etc.

Some of that will get added over time. But BeeHiiv’s roadmap is aimed at newsletter publishers, not business owners running full marketing stacks. Different roadmap. Different focus. That’s not a criticism of BeeHiiv… it’s just a mismatch with what I actually needed.

The killer moment: I couldn’t offer subscriber choice on cadence

Around the time I was on BeeHiiv, I wanted to start a second, more frequent email track (the “Founder’s Memo”). I surveyed subscribers and the response was strong… as long as people could choose their cadence.

BeeHiiv couldn’t do it. There was no way to let subscribers opt into different email streams from the same list.

FluentCRM does that natively. Basic stuff.

That’s when I knew this experiment had a shelf life.

Digital sovereignty pulled me back

I care a lot about digital sovereignty — owning my own tools, my own data, my own infrastructure. FluentCRM runs on my WordPress site. My list, my rules, my server. BeeHiiv is a hosted platform. Every subscriber I added lived on someone else’s infrastructure, subject to someone else’s terms of service and pricing changes.

I had rationalized the switch by telling myself I’d keep an “in-house” copy of every BeeHiiv subscriber on FluentCRM. And I did build that. But maintaining a two-system setup was constant friction. And ultimately… why? What was I gaining that justified splitting the list?

The growth tools weren’t as compelling in practice as they sounded on paper

BeeHiiv’s marketing pitch leans heavy on the growth tools. The referral program. Cross-promotions. Paid boosts. Ad network. On paper, these all sound amazing. In reality:

• Referral programs. Subscribers don’t tend to use them nearly as much as you’d hope. Small percentage of your list will actively refer people.
• Cross-promotions. These make sense if your business IS publishing. If you sell your own stuff, cross-promoting other newsletters is a distraction. Why would I promote someone else’s newsletter to my subscribers when I want them to buy MY things?
• Paid boosts. They work, but they’re not free. It’s not uncommon to spend $2+ per subscriber acquired… sometimes much higher. That adds up fast.
• Ad network. Same problem as cross-promotions. If I want subscribers to buy from ME, why am I showing them ads for other people’s stuff?

All of these growth mechanisms make total sense for a publisher. Almost none of them made sense for me.

Cost matters (and BeeHiiv taxes your growth)

BeeHiiv was $99/month for me on the Scale plan when I was on it. But there’s a bigger structural point here worth naming… one that applies to BeeHiiv, Kit, and every hosted email platform:

You pay a growth tax. As your subscriber count climbs, your monthly bill climbs with it. BeeHiiv’s Scale plan starts at $43/mo at 1,000 subscribers… but by 10,000 subscribers you’re at ~$96/mo, and the Max tier at that same size is ~$193/mo. It keeps going up from there.

BeeHiiv is not a cheap platform. And to be fair, that’s because they do a LOT — newsletters, websites, podcasts, digital products, AI website builder, dynamic content, all of it bundled in. The pricing makes sense for what you get. But you pay for all of it whether you use it or not, and every subscriber you add makes your monthly bill go up.

FluentCRM has none of that. It’s a one-time-per-year license that runs my entire email stack on my own WordPress hosting. My list can go to 50,000, 100,000, more… the FluentCRM license cost doesn’t change. That’s a fundamentally different economics.

For a business owner with any serious growth ambition, that difference compounds fast.

The honest admission: this was grass-is-greener-itis

Look… I’m going to own it. Part of why I switched to BeeHiiv in the first place was chasing the shiny object. New platform, growing fast, built by the Morning Brew people, buzz in the newsletter world. I got excited and told myself the growth story would justify the move.

Growth didn’t happen the way I expected. And in the process, I’d added complexity, cost, and a dependency on external infrastructure to solve a problem I didn’t actually have.

Lesson learned. Sometimes the tool you already have IS the right tool. And “great platform” doesn’t mean “great for you.”

Who BeeHiiv IS Still A Good Fit For

Everything above is about MY business, not about BeeHiiv as a platform. BeeHiiv is genuinely well-built and getting better constantly. If you’re any of these, it’s still worth a hard look:

• Your newsletter IS your business. You’re a publisher. Content and audience ARE the product. You plan to monetize through ads, sponsorships, paid subscribers, cross-promo networks. That’s exactly who BeeHiiv is for.
• You’re currently on Substack and feel constrained. BeeHiiv is more business-friendly, has real automations, doesn’t take a revenue cut on paid subscriptions, and has import tools that make the switch easy.
• You’re brand new to newsletters and want the fastest path from zero-to-publishing without touching WordPress. BeeHiiv’s UX is genuinely excellent for that.

If any of that describes you, check out BeeHiiv — they have a free plan up to 2,500 subscribers, so you can try it without committing.

If you’re primarily a business owner who happens to send a newsletter (like me), or if you already run WordPress and value keeping your list in-house, I’d point you toward FluentCRM instead. It’s what I use now. It’s what I’ll keep using.

My Current Recommendation: FluentCRM

Check out FluentCRM here. It’s what powers all of my email now… the newsletter you’re reading, my automations, my marketing sequences, everything.

It’s self-hosted on my WordPress site. I control every piece of it. And it can do everything BeeHiiv does for a newsletter (and vastly more for actual email marketing) at a fraction of the ongoing cost.

Different tools for different people. But for me, and probably for most business-first people running a WordPress site, FluentCRM is the answer.