AudienceBench

beehiiv Website Builder vs Advanced Website Builder (2026)

beehiiv now has two site builders. What each one does, which plans can publish them, how switching works, custom page limits, and where beehiiv's docs disagree.

By AudienceBench Editorial · Published · Pricing & docs checked

Since September 21, 2026, beehiiv has two ways to build your newsletter’s website. The Website Builder is a simpler, template-based builder that new publications now start on. The Advanced Website Builder is beehiiv’s original drag-and-drop builder with AI chat. Which one you have, and whether you can publish with it, depends on when your publication was created and which plan you’re on.

This guide is based on beehiiv’s help article on choosing between the two builders (updated Oct 1, 2026), its Website Builder and Advanced Website Builder help articles, and beehiiv’s public pricing page. We re-checked all of them on October 22, 2026.

How we researched this: Everything below comes from beehiiv’s help center and pricing page. We haven’t built a site in either builder ourselves, so we can’t show real screens or tell you how they feel to use. beehiiv’s own articles use the builder names inconsistently and disagree in a few places. We point those out where they matter.

About our links: beehiiv links on this page are affiliate links (/go/beehiiv). That’s the only program we earn from here. Our recommendations would be the same either way.

The short version

QuestionAnswer (per today’s sources)
What’s the difference?Website Builder: pick a template, colors, and fonts, and you’re live. Advanced Website Builder: drag-and-drop editor with AI chat and control over layout, structure, and styling
Which one do I start on?Publications created on or after Sep 21, 2026 start on Website Builder. Older publications start on Advanced Website Builder and don’t have Website Builder yet
Can I use Advanced on Free?New publications (on or after Sep 21) need a paid plan to publish it. The pricing table shows Advanced website builder on Lite, Pro, and Enterprise, not Free. Older publications keep publishing access
Can I switch?Yes, if you have both. Only one design is live. The other stays as an unpublished draft. Nothing is deleted
Can I copy my design?Only from Website Builder into Advanced. There’s no way to copy an Advanced design back
Custom pagesFree 1, Lite 5, Pro and Enterprise unlimited published custom pages
Lowest price for AdvancedLite: $49/month billed yearly or $59 monthly at 1,000 subscribers

Start on beehiiv

Which builder do you have?

beehiiv’s choosing article puts it simply: your publication’s creation date decides where you start.

  • Created on or after September 21, 2026: you start on Website Builder. You can also open Advanced Website Builder, but you need a paid plan to publish a site built in it.
  • Created before September 21, 2026: you start on Advanced Website Builder. beehiiv says these publications “don’t have access to the Website Builder experience yet” and won’t see the switching options “until the full rollout is complete.” beehiiv doesn’t give a date for that. The paid-plan rule for publishing Advanced doesn’t apply to you: beehiiv says you “keep publishing access.”
  • Still on the legacy builder? That’s a third, older builder. beehiiv has a 1-click migration tool and a manual migration guide for moving it to the newer builder. Step-by-step: how to move a legacy beehiiv website to the new builder. If you move, see beehiiv site redirects so old links keep working.

A note on names. Before September 21, beehiiv’s help center called its drag-and-drop builder the “new Website Builder.” Many Advanced Website Builder articles still say it’s “still called ‘Website Builder’ in some accounts,” and several still open with a notice that they cover “the new Website Builder.” Older articles (retention, preferences center) also say “new Website Builder” when they mean what’s now Advanced. If a beehiiv article’s header says “Advanced Website Builder,” it’s about the drag-and-drop builder, whatever the body text calls it.

What the Website Builder does

beehiiv describes Website Builder as a way to get “a great-looking site fast, without needing any design experience.” Its help articles are all marked All Plans. Here’s what they document:

  • Setup: Go to Website → Create your website. Pick a template, then colors, then fonts, review it in desktop and mobile, and click Start building. You can use Generate with AI for a color palette or a font pairing, or pick from presets. Full walkthrough: how to set up your beehiiv website step by step.
  • Your site goes live automatically. beehiiv says finishing onboarding publishes a simple version of your site. After that, Save changes keeps a draft, and Publish changes pushes edits live.
  • Themes and templates. A theme is your colors and fonts. A template is your structure and layout. The Theme panel has a library of themes (Minimal, Bold, Playful, and more), and you can save your own theme to reuse.
  • Limited typography control. You pick fonts for headings, body text, and buttons, but beehiiv says font size and color are set by your theme, not per element. If you need that, beehiiv points you to Advanced.
  • Five color roles: Background, Text on background, Primary, Text on primary, and Border.
  • Globals. The navbar and the subscribe form are shared across the site. You can switch their layouts, edit nav links and button labels, and add an optional subscribe flow.
  • Pages. Each page shows as Live or Needs action. Feature pages (Upgrade, Product, Podcast, Author, Tag, Survey) go live once the thing they depend on exists. For example, the Upgrade page goes live once you create a paid tier.
  • Preview. A private Draft Preview shows unpublished changes.

Watch out when swapping templates. beehiiv’s “Choosing a look” FAQ says switching your overall template replaces your navbar and footer with the new template’s defaults. Your logo and publication name come back, but custom nav links, footer groups, and social links don’t. To change only the navbar or footer design, beehiiv says to use the template picker inside Globals instead.

Custom pages in Website Builder are custom HTML

Website Builder’s Pages article lists one kind of custom page: Custom HTML. You write or paste your own code. beehiiv’s custom HTML article (updated Oct 4, 2026) says:

  • A custom HTML page can’t be converted to a regular builder page later, or the other way around.
  • It doesn’t include your navbar or footer. Add your own navigation in the HTML if you want readers to get back to the rest of your site.
  • Avoid global styles (like resetting all headings), because they can affect more than that page.
  • The limit is 512 KB of content per page.
  • beehiiv support won’t help maintain or troubleshoot custom code.
  • Custom HTML pages count toward your plan’s custom page limit: Free 1, Lite 5, Pro unlimited, Enterprise unlimited.

What the Advanced Website Builder adds

beehiiv describes Advanced as “a flexible, drag-and-drop editor with AI assistance.” Its help articles are marked All Paid Plans (see the conflict below). They document:

  • Drag-and-drop editing with a canvas, a layers panel, and a design panel for layout, spacing, colors, fonts, and borders.
  • AI chat. Describe a change (“add a features section with three columns”) and the AI builds editable sections. Changes auto-apply by default, or you can set it to Review first and accept or discard each one.
  • Version history. Restore your whole site (published versions only), a single page (including unpublished changes), or global elements like the navbar, footer, and login and signup modals.
  • Custom pages from a template library or from scratch, plus default pages (Home, Subscribe, Upgrade) and dynamic pages (author and tag pages).
  • Content gates and email capture popups on posts, plus conversion blocks you can place on other pages.
  • A contact form block. Submissions go to an email address you choose and a contact requests view. They aren’t added to your subscriber list.
  • Page-by-page publishing. Unlike Website Builder, Advanced publishes only the page you have open unless you pick All pages or Select Pages. beehiiv’s publishing article says this is a common reason changes don’t show up.

beehiiv’s own comparison sums it up:

Website BuilderAdvanced Website Builder
Best forGetting a polished site live fastFull, hands-on customization
SetupGuided template and theme selectionDrag-and-drop editor with AI assistance
Design experience neededNoneHelpful, but not required
Customization depthColors, fonts, and layout options within your templateComplete control over layout, structure, and styling

Source: beehiiv, “Choosing between the Website Builder and Advanced Website Builder,” updated Oct 1, 2026.

How switching works

These steps only apply to publications that have Website Builder (created on or after September 21, 2026).

Website Builder → Advanced:

  1. Go to Website. The Website Builder Overview page opens.
  2. Under Want a more custom design?, choose Copy your existing design (brings your current look over as a starting point) or Start with a new template.
  3. Your Advanced site stays a draft until you publish it. Your Website Builder site stays live the whole time.

Advanced → back to Website Builder:

  1. Go to Website. On the Website Builder Overview page, find the Draft design card and click Edit design.
  2. Click Publish changes. beehiiv warns that this replaces your live design and moves the current one to an unpublished draft.
  3. Click Publish design to live.

Three rules to remember:

  • Copying is one-way. You can copy a Website Builder design into Advanced, but not back. To return, you rebuild in Website Builder or start from one of its templates.
  • The two designs are separate. beehiiv says edits in one “won’t carry over to the other,” so a change you want everywhere has to be made in both.
  • Nothing gets deleted. The design that isn’t live stays saved as a draft.

Plans and pricing

From beehiiv’s pricing table (checked October 22, 2026):

Website featureFreeLiteProEnterprise
Website builderYesYesYesYes
Advanced website builder—YesYesYes
Custom pages15UnlimitedUnlimited
Advanced blocksBasicStandardAdvancedAdvanced
Website analyticsBasicAll dataAll data + filtersAll data + filters
Site redirects—10UnlimitedUnlimited
Custom domains—YesYesYes
Custom robots.txt and AI bot control——YesYes
Remove beehiiv branding——YesYes

Templates, web hosting, subscribe forms, advanced email capture, and link-in-bio show on every plan.

Monthly prices from the pricing page slider (yearly billing / monthly billing):

SubscribersLitePro
1,000$49 / $59 per month$95 / $109 per month
2,500$69 / $79 per month$129 / $149 per month
5,000$95 / $109 per month$169 / $199 per month
10,000$119 / $139 per month$199 / $239 per month

Free costs $0 up to 2,500 subscribers. beehiiv’s FAQ says Lite and Pro include a free trial with no credit card. beehiiv’s Advanced Pages article says that during a free trial you can publish unlimited custom pages, but when the trial ends they’re unpublished and you’d need to upgrade to publish more than one. These prices were unchanged from our October 21 check. Full plan breakdown: beehiiv pricing explained.

Where beehiiv’s docs disagree

  • Who can publish Advanced. Advanced Website Builder articles say “All Paid Plans” and “Available on paid beehiiv plans.” The choosing article says the paid-plan rule only applies to publications created on or after September 21, 2026, and older publications keep publishing access. The Advanced Pages article also still lists what the Free plan can publish there (one custom page). We’d go with the choosing article: it’s the one that explains the split.
  • Which builder “Website Builder” means. See the note on names above. Several Advanced articles still say they cover “the new Website Builder.”
  • Visual custom pages in Website Builder. Website Builder’s Pages article lists only Custom HTML under custom pages, but the custom HTML FAQ says “custom HTML pages and visual builder custom pages share the same limit.” It’s not clear whether Website Builder offers visual custom pages.
  • Custom HTML on Free. The pricing table shows Custom HTML as not included on Free, but that row sits in the newsletter section, so it likely means custom HTML in emails. Website Builder’s custom HTML page article says “All Plans” and lists one custom page on Free. We couldn’t confirm whether a Free publication can publish a custom HTML page.
  • Theme button label. Advanced’s template and theme article tells you to click Save theme in one place and Apply site-wide theme in its FAQ. Expect one or the other.

What we couldn’t confirm

These aren’t answered in today’s official docs. Ask beehiiv support if they matter to you:

  • When publications created before September 21 will get Website Builder.
  • Whether a new publication on a Lite or Pro free trial can publish an Advanced site, and what happens to a published Advanced site if a new publication drops to Free.
  • Whether Website Builder has version history, content gates, contact forms, or the retention flow. Its help articles don’t mention them. That doesn’t mean they’re missing, just that we found no documentation.
  • Whether feature pages (Upgrade, Podcast, Tag, and so on) count toward the custom page limit.
  • How to show the Group option on an upgrade page in Website Builder, since beehiiv’s Pricing block article covers Advanced. See group subscriptions.

Which one should you use?

Start with Website Builder if you’re a new publication, you’re on Free, or you just want a clean site that collects subscribers. It goes live as soon as onboarding finishes, and you aren’t locked in. Its limits are real, though: no per-element font sizes or colors, custom pages only as hand-coded HTML in the docs, and a template swap that wipes custom nav and footer links.

Move to Advanced when you need layouts the templates can’t do, AI-assisted page building, version history, content gates, or a contact form, and you’re on a paid plan (or your publication is older than September 21). Copy your Website Builder design over as a starting point. Just remember the copy only goes one way, and the two designs don’t stay in sync.

For most new newsletters, the plan matters more than the builder. Lite gets you Advanced publishing, a custom domain, 5 custom pages, and 10 redirects. Pro adds unlimited pages and redirects and removes beehiiv branding.

Try beehiiv · beehiiv pricing explained · Set up a custom domain · beehiiv site redirects · Embedded subscribe forms

Sources

All sources below were checked October 22, 2026.