When deciding between Beehiiv vs Arena Community, it’s essential to consider your primary goals as a creator or brand. Beehiiv excels in providing a streamlined platform for building, distributing, and monetizing newsletters, ideal for those focused on content publication rather than community engagement.
On the other hand, Arena Community is designed for those who want to foster active, real-time engagement with their audience. It offers a wide range of tools like live chat, forums, and real-time blogs that help transform websites into interactive communities.
Determining your community-building goals is essential to understanding which is the best fit. It’s equally important to have a thorough understanding of each platform’s features, uses, and limitations to make an informed decision.
Keep reading to understand the key differences between Beehiiv vs Arena Community.
Overview: Beehiiv vs Arena Community
What is Beehiiv?
Founded in 2021, Beehiiv is primarily an email newsletter platform that allows customers to create newsletters, send them, and analyze them seamlessly.
With a no-code interface and AI capabilities, Beehiiv focuses on simplicity, and it is ideal for niche creators who want to start their journey, grow, and monetize their audience without technical complications.
The platform combines newsletter and blogging capabilities, allowing creators to explore diverse publishing options. Customers have the flexibility to publish the newsletter on their customized website, send it via email, or choose to do both. They can opt to publish the content exclusively on the web or send it solely through email.
Additionally, Beehiiv allows creators to their websites into an app. On mobile devices, readers can add websites created on Beehiiv to their home screen, creating an app-line experience.
Although Beehiiv offers a free plan for newsletters with up to 2,500 subscribers, it is important to note that advanced customization options and complete design flexibility are limited for users on paid plans.
What is Arena Community?
Arena Community is an all-in-one engagement platform designed to help you seamlessly transition your audience from social media to your website or app. The no-code platform empowers brands, creators, and organizations to build stronger connections with their audiences through enhanced engagement and interaction.
While Arena Community doesn’t currently offer newsletter capabilities, it provides a wide range of engagement tools that integrate directly into your website. Features like real-time group chat, dynamic live blogs for multimedia content updates, interactive polls and Q&As, and forum discussions all foster active participation.
Besides giving creators and brands full control and ownership over their communities, Arena Community includes AI-powered features such as content moderation and writing assistant, as well as AI Feed Search and Summary, which helps fans find what they need on your feed.
Finally, the platform helps boost website revenue by optimizing ad placements, enabling subscription models, and creating opportunities for sponsored content partnerships.
What are the Main Differences Between Beehiiv vs Arena Community?
Pricing in Arena Community vs Beehiiv
As detailed above, Beehiiv and Arena Community cater to different needs, bringing various benefits to creators, according to what they want to achieve with their marketing efforts.
Both Beehiiv and Arena Community offer free plans for customers who want to start small or test the waters before choosing which solution works best for them.
Let’s see the price breakdown of each platform below:
Beehiiv Pricing
Customers can start with a free plan or opt-in three annual billing plans:
- Enterprise (custom): Suited for creators and brands with a large following, the Enterprise plan comes with everything from the aforementioned plans, plus concierge onboarding, dedicated account management, dedicated IP addresses, and infinite subscribers.
- Launch (free): Focused on creators with up to 2.500 subscribers, the entry-level tier includes up to 3 newsletters in one account, a custom domain for your website, and API access.
- Scale (from $34/month): The plan starts at $34/month for accounts with up to 1.000 subscribers, unlocking features such as Email automation, ad network access, paid subscriptions, and more. With a pay-as-you-go system, the fee is adjusted as your newsletter grows.
- Max (from $86/month): The Max plan counts with everything available on the “Scale” plan, plus perks such as removing Beehiiv branding, allowing up to 10 newsletters per account, and gaining priority support.
Arena Community Pricing
Similar to Beehiiv, Arena Community offers three annual billing options:
- Free: Designed for individuals and small teams that are just starting their online communities and come with basic live engagement features, such as live blog, group chat and auto RSS feed.
- Starter Plan ($39/month): Perfect for communities with up to 200,000 monthly pageviews. Includes auto RSS feed, group chat, live blog, social network content stream, AI summary, AI polls, AI search, AI moderation, Q&As, ads monetization, and more.
- Professional Plan ($199/month): Tailored for brands and creators exceeding 2 million monthly pageviews. Includes all Starter plan features, plus UI customization, conversion cards, ads revenue share, AI post enhancement, live support from Arena’s team, and additional benefits.
- Enterprise Plan (custom): Custom pricing based on specific needs. Designed for large communities, brands, and creators. Includes all features from the previous plans, along with data exportation, white label, full API access, a dedicated Account Manager, private server, and more.
Beehiiv vs Arena Community: Which Platform Should You Choose?
Both Beehiiv and Arena Community come with a robust toolkit that helps brands and creators straighten their communication with their online communities, but they differ in several aspects.
Beehiiv offers newsletter and blogging capabilities, allowing creators to publish content via a website, email, or both. However, the platform is best suited for those focused on creating a specific publication rather than building an engaged community. The lack of real-time engagement features, such as group chat, might be an obstacle for creators looking to engage with community members in real-time.
Arena Community, on the other hand, does not offer newsletter capabilities but comes with several engagement features that help transform brands’ and creators’ websites into complete online communities. Tools such as live chat, live blog, forums and polls ignite real-time conversations and provide up-to-the-minute updates on topics that are important for community members.
All things considered, before making a final decision, its worth revising your community-building strategy to understand what resonates with your goals the most. To understand more about how Arena Community works, take a look at our complete guide.
