There have been a lot of new email newsletter software launched in the past few years trying to make it cheaper and easier to use for beginners. In this article, I’ll be comparing two popular options: Beehiiv and Ghost.
Both Beehiiv and Ghost are relatively new to the market and offer a variety of features to help businesses and creators to create and send engaging email newsletters. In my opinion, Beehiiv is easier to use if you just want to get writing an email newsletter and Ghost is better if you also want to start a website.
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Overview of Beehiiv and Ghost
In this section, I will provide an overview of two popular email newsletter platforms: Beehiiv and Ghost. Both platforms have their unique features and advantages, so let’s dive in and explore them.
Beehiiv
Beehiiv is a newsletter platform built for growth, offering tools and features that cater to the needs of successful newsletters. One of the main advantages of Beehiiv is its affordable and predictable pricing, which allows users to know their monthly rate without any surprises or overage charges. Beehiiv also charges no platform fees on revenue generated from subscribers.
This platform is trusted by some of the top newsletters and provides an all-in-one solution that includes simple campaign creation, list building, and analytics. Beehiiv’s simplicity makes it an excellent choice for writers and content creators who prefer a no-nonsense approach to their email marketing efforts.
The beehiiv dashboard above makes it easy to see your signups and write your emails in the “write” section.
Ghost
Ghost is a content management system (CMS) that is specially designed for creating and managing email newsletters, blogs, and podcast websites. It is a powerful platform that is easy to use and provides a wide range of features and tools to help users create professional-looking newsletters. Ghost CMS is also great for SEO and makes it super easy to focus on creating content to monetize via memberships. This makes it best suited for people who want a blog and a newsletter.
One of the key features of Ghost is its ability to create and manage email newsletters. With Ghost, users can create beautiful HTML templates that are standardized for the most popular email clients. Ghost sites have a single newsletter by default, but additional ones can be created and customized. Newsletters can be scheduled and delivered to free and paid members, or a segment of free or paid members.
Ghost also offers a wide range of tools for creating and managing blogs. Users can easily create and publish articles, and decide whether to turn on the membership or not. Ghost provides a clean and simple interface that is easy to use, even for beginners. The platform is also highly customizable, allowing users to create a unique look and feel for their blog.
Overall, Ghost is a great platform for anyone looking to create and manage email newsletters and a blog.
Pricing Comparison
In this section, I will compare the pricing of Beehiiv and Ghost to help you decide which email newsletter software is best suited for your needs.
Beehiiv Pricing
I found that Beehiiv’s pricing is simpler, more straightforward, and significantly more affordable than Ghost’s. Beehiiv offers three plans, each with a flat monthly price, dedicated features, and capabilities. Each plan has a maximum subscriber count but allows unlimited sends.
The plans are as follows:
- Launch Plan – Free
- Growth Plan -$42 a month
- Scale Plan – $84 a month
Ghost Pricing
Here is the current pricing of Ghost:
| Plan | Price | Staff Users | Members | Custom Themes | Integrations |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free | 1 | 0 | No | Standard |
| Creator | $25/month | 2 | 1,000 | Unlimited | 1,000+ Zapier |
| Team | $50/month | Unlimited | 1,000 | Unlimited | 1,000+ Zapier |
Ghost offers three pricing plans: Starter, Creator, and Team. The Starter plan is free and includes one staff user, no members, no custom themes, and standard integrations. The Creator plan is $25 per month and includes two staff users, 1,000 members, unlimited custom themes, and 1,000+ Zapier integrations. The Team plan is $50 per month and includes unlimited staff users, 1,000 members, unlimited custom themes, and 1,000+ Zapier integrations.
The Starter plan is ideal for individuals or small teams who are just starting out with Ghost. It provides basic features and tools to get started with creating and managing content. The Creator plan is best suited for individuals or small teams who want to monetize their content and grow their audience. It provides advanced features and tools for creating and managing newsletters, blogs, and podcast websites. The Team plan is ideal for larger teams who need more advanced features and tools for managing multiple websites or projects.
All plans include free, official Ghost themes, SSL encryption, and automatic backups. Ghost also offers a 14-day free trial for the Creator and Team plans, so users can try out the platform before committing to a paid plan. Overall, Ghost’s pricing plans are competitive and provide a wide range of features and tools to help users create and manage professional-looking content.
Features and Functionality
The features of Ghost include:
- Customizable URLs for SEO optimization.
- Structured metadata is automatically added to every page for Google, Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter Cards based microformats, no matter the theme.
- Automatic generation of a Google sitemap including every page on your site, to make sure search engines are able to index every URL.
- Built-in support for memberships.
- Built-in support for newsletters.
- A clean and simple interface that is easy to use, even for beginners.
- Highly customizable, allowing users to create a unique look and feel for their blog or newsletter.
- A wide range of integrations with other tools and services, including Zapier, Stripe, and more.
- A powerful API for accessing content in and out of Ghost programmatically.
- Built-in support for Markdown, a lightweight markup language that makes it easy to format text.
- Automatic backups and SSL encryption for added security and peace of mind.
- Responsive design that looks great on any device.
Meanwhile, some of the features of Beehiiv include:
- Easy-to-use email editor with customizable templates
- Advanced automation workflows with triggers and conditions
- Landing pages and popups for lead generation
- Integrations with popular tools like Zapier and Google Analytics
- Detailed reporting and analytics on email performance
Final Verdict
After extensively researching and comparing Beehiiv and Ghost for email newsletter software, I have made some observations. Beehiiv is my email marketing platform for just getting started and also want to have your emails published as a blog. Ghost is better if you want an email newsletter and also a CMS alternative to WordPress. But be careful, you can have much more customization with WordPress as you have thousands of plugins that can do almost anything.
Beehiiv is an excellent option for content-focused newsletters and publications, as it offers an all-in-one solution for website, email, data analytics, and growth tools. It is the best platform for you if you just want to get started and write emails. Beehiiv provides ownership of your audience and custom aesthetics. The platform is free for lists with 2,000 subscribers or fewer and becomes more predictable in terms of costs as you grow.
In summary, if you are a content creator or publisher looking for an all-in-one solution with affordable pricing and predictable costs, Beehiiv is to be the better choice.