There's a multitude of factors contributing to successful email marketing, spanning from your subscriber list to segmentation, personalization, and notably, your email design. In fact, according to Hubspot, 20% of marketers witness enhanced email engagement as a result of enhancing their email design.
However, when it comes to email design, often times email builders in your ESPs can often feel limiting. To help you find the right fit, let’s compare two favorites in the field: Beefree vs Knak.
Beefree vs Knak: An in-depth comparison for digital marketers
Before we put Beefree and Knak head to head to see how they compare to meet the needs of your business, let’s get to know each of these tools.
What is Beefree?
Beefree is a web-based SaaS tool enabling email creators to design emails and landing pages without code. The application features an easy-to-use interface and translates your design choices to HTML, assembling a responsive email that displays smoothly across all email client like Gmail, Outlook, and more. The ultimate goal of Beefree is to make efficient email design accessible to all, not just experienced coders. The drag and drop builder enables organizations including small businesses and freelancers to elevate their email marketing potential.
Knak at a glance
Like Beefree, Knak is a web-based platform that helps organizations develop professional emails and lancing pages without the need for coding or a design background. Knak’s core focus is streamlining email marketing for larger marketing teams and enterprises. Its features center around collaboration and brand control, allowing administrators to set clear limits so that emails always align with your organization's guidelines.
Feature comparison
How well an email design platform works for your business will largely depend on the features it offers. Which one has the feature lineup you need: Beefree or Knak? Let’s compare.
User interface and ease of use
Making email design easy and accessible for non-coders is the key purpose of both Beefree and Knak, so unsurprisingly, both offer an excellent ease of use. The design interfaces on both platforms are made to be intuitive and to make email design more efficient.
There are some user experience features that differ between the two platforms.
Email testing:
- Beefree: Users can test how emails will look directly in-app across different devices. You can also test how your email will render in dark mode, send tests, or scan a QR code to easily see how it will look on your mobile device.
- Knak: Offers an email testing center where users can see how emails will render across different devices and email clients.
AI capabilities:
- Beefree: In-app AI writing assistant to support copy, image ALT text, and CTAs.
- Knak: AI capabilities for email translation.
Multi-language content:
- Beefree: Beefree offers users with the ability to create emails and pages in one primary language and set additional language localizations directly in-app.
- Knak: As mentioned above, Knak's translation feature is powered by AI. Users can easily create up to 75 variants of your campaigns in different languages.
Integration capabilities?
- Beefree: Yes with a comprehensive list of integrations.
- Knak: Yes with a comprehensive list of integrations
Template design
Email templates enable professionals to quickly create and send campaigns without the need to start from scratch. Beefree's catalog is the largest in the market with over 1,700+ free email and page templates spanning across a wide range of industries, purposes, and seasons. Even if you prefer to start from scratch, the catalog is a great place to fuel your creativity.
Knak, on the other hand, takes a different approach to providing inspiration. Their Email Gallery showcases 50+ emails from different brands and categories with tips for users to implement into their campaigns. Additionally, to redeem a free template from Knak, there are some prerequisits:
1. Your company must have an annual company revenue of more than $500M
2. You must schedule a 30-minute demo with a Knak expert.
Knak takes a different approach that centers on brand consistency. This platform features an Admin Control Hub which allows administrators to limit users to only specific modules, colors, fonts, images, and customizations.
This way, especially on large teams, administrators will know that every email is on-brand because team members can’t use non-brand colors or design.
As a result, Knak relies less on pre-made templates and more on allowing administrators to create their own templates for internal use.
Customization
As mentioned previously, a downfall of many email builders, specially those in ESPs, is their rigidity. Both Beefree and Knak understand this clearly and aim to provide users with the in-depth customization capabilities.
Dynamic content capabilities?
- Beefree: Yes
- Knak: Yes
Brand control:
- Beefree: Yes with advanced style kits, reusable content blocks, and templates.
- Knak: Yes with an approved image library, custom colors and fonts, and modules and themes.
Collaboration
Collaboration features also allow both Knak and Beefree to fit smoothly into your workflows. They both allow team members to leave comments in the builder, request for approval, and apply user roles and permissions. Additionally, both solutions allow for integration with project management tools.
As part of their collaboration features, Beefree highlights the importance of organization for large teams. By offering dedicated workspaces for multi-brand businesses where you can add different brand assets, keep campaigns organized by folders, and integrate varying ESPs - Beefree understands the importance of not only seamless collaboration, but increasing productivity.
Cost-effectiveness for email marketing: Pricing structure overview
The Beefree vs Knak pricing is difficult to compare because they’re structured very differently. The pricing of each solution reflects their users. Knak is designed solely for enterprises while Beefree is designed for a wide range of organizations, freelancers, and small businesses. The cost-effectiveness of each solution will depend on your business structure.
Beefree Pricing
Beefree has four plan tiers:
- Starter: Great for occasional projects.
- Professional ($25 per month with a 15 day free trial): Best for solo creators or teams of two to three.
- Business ($134 per month with a 15 day free trial): A self-service solution for scaling organizations.
- Enterprise (custom): Great for larger organization with complex email needs.
For more on Beefree's capabilities and customer reviews visit: https://www.g2.com/products/beefree-beefree/reviews
Knak Pricing
Unlike Beefree, Knak only offers customized pricing plans so you’ll need to work with a representative to find out your pricing. TrustRadius and SourceForge both report a cost of around $10,000 per year with Knak, but this will, of course, depend on your organization. Knak does offer a free trial of 5-14 days, but you must request it through a representative.
For more on Knak's capabilities and customer reviews visit: https://www.g2.com/products/knak/reviews
Building trust with email marketers
Beefree and Knak both have excellent track records of fostering customer success, ensuring security, and offering their communities with resources with premium support.
Support and client success stories
Due to their difference in users, Beefree and Knak offer different approaches to customer support. For Knak, each customer has an assigned customer support manager. Additional support is available online 7 days a week or you can find answers to FAQs via their Knowledge Base
For Beefree's Business and Professional plans, users receive access to their Beefree CX team and Enterprise plans receive a Dedicated Success Manager for onboarding, training, and success-driven best practices. Free users on the other hand rely on Beefree's Help center and their myriad of resources to help find answers to their needs.
As for client successes, both Beefree's and Knak's customers are proud to share their stories.
One of Beefree’s happy customers is Folderly, an email solutions and organization tool. Folderly had been using HubSpot but wanted more design capabilities, so they chose Beefree to integrate with HubSpot. After investing in Beefree, Folderly saw a fantastic 36% open rate - a 15% increase.
Similarly, Knak proudly serves Foursquare, a location data company formerly known as Factual. The Factual marketing team chose Knak for its smooth integration with Marketo and its email design process quickly simplified. It found that its former 1-to-2-week design process dropped to around ten minutes of work.
Resources and community
Both solutions offer a range of resources to help support and nurture their communities.
Beefree:
- Community: A space for users to connect, collaborate, find design work, and get advice from other users.
- Beefree Academy: Real-world examples and tutorials to help you and your team optimize email campaigns, increase productivity, and follow email design best practices.
- Email Design Blog & More: Go-to resource for all things email creation. From design inspiration, tips, to industry specific solutions.
- Webinars: Live and recorded sessions to learn and discover the power of Beefree's design suite.
Knak:
- Unsubscribed! Podcast: Guests join Knak to discuss marketing, technology, career, and life in general.
- Inside Marketing Blog: Written by Knak's COO, this blog helps "marketing leaders and marketing ops teams up their game."
- The Knak Blog: Ranges from events, email marketing news, to trend insights and more.
Security and compliance
Beefree and Knak have both done their due diligence when it comes to compliance and information security.
Both applications are SOC 2, GDPR compliant, ISO 27001 certified. In addition, Beefree is AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and an AWS Certified Solutions Architect.
The better choice for your business depends on the security certifications you prioritize.
You can learn more about Beefree's security measures here and learn more about Knak's here.
Making the right choice for your email marketing needs
Ultimately, the decision between Beefree and Knak hinges on the needs and preferences of your organization regarding your email design platform. Will you prioritize the flexibility and creativity of Beefree or opt for the structured brand uniformity provided by Knak? Selecting the right option will enable you to either kickstart or enhance your email marketing initiatives.
To learn more about Beefree, sign up for a Beefree trial.
