Beefree blog

Beefree vs Knak: How Beefree and Knak Stack Up in the World of Email Marketing

Beefree team
Beefree team
Apr 4, 2024
Beefree vs Knak: How Beefree and Knak Stack Up in the World of Email Marketing
Beefree vs Knak: How Beefree and Knak Stack Up in the World of Email Marketing

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?

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:

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.

Related posts

How Beefree is Helping Email Makers Scale Their Production

2024 was a banner year for email markers everywhere. From sleek newsletters to interactive promos, you flexed your creative muscle to new heights and did it with a level of speed and efficiency that made crafting award-worthy emails look easy. Let’s dive into the numbers, trends, and stories that made this year unforgettable for email makers like you.
Beefree team
Jan 6, 2025

Design Award-Winning Emails with Beefree

A few weeks back, we kicked off the first-ever 2024 Really Good Email Awards (cue the confetti). Today, we’re taking it one step further and sharing how you can build award-winning emails in Beefree.
Emily Santos
Dec 26, 2024

Simplifying Email Creation for Universities with Beefree

In a recent conversation with Rice University’s Owl Business Analyst, Sonja Fulbright, we revealed all the challenges that led the university to lean on Beefree—not only to bring their decentralized teams together in one platform but also to increase the speed and quality of the university’s emails. 
Stephanie Benoit
Jan 2, 2025

How Beefree is Helping Email Makers Scale Their Production

2024 was a banner year for email markers everywhere. From sleek newsletters to interactive promos, you flexed your creative muscle to new heights and did it with a level of speed and efficiency that made crafting award-worthy emails look easy. Let’s dive into the numbers, trends, and stories that made this year unforgettable for email makers like you.
Beefree team
Beefree team
6 Jan
2025

2024 was a banner year for email markers everywhere. From sleek newsletters to interactive promos, you flexed your creative muscle to new heights and did it with a level of speed and efficiency that made crafting award-worthy emails look easy. 

At Beefree, we’ve had a front-row seat to all the incredible ways you scaled your email production. With templates that sped up creation and workflows that brought your team closer, you’ve redefined what it means to create emails that inspire and deliver.

Let’s dive into the numbers, trends, and stories that made this year unforgettable for email makers like you. 

Total number of emails created: 1,648,180

That’s right—over 1.6 million emails were crafted using Beefree this year, each one a testament to your creativity and efficiency. Everyone from small startups to large enterprises, and teams across the globe harnessed the power of Beefree.

The templates that powered your success

Out of the 1.6 million emails created this year, 178,199 started with a little help from our template catalog.

Our most loved categories included:

  • Templates for Gmail & Mailchimp: Whether you were crafting a campaign or a one-off blast, these platform agnostic templates made it easy to integrate design and delivery effortlessly.
  • Password-reset emails: You proved that even the most utilitarian messages deserve to be noticed.
  • Notification email templates: From order confirmations to system alerts, these templates kept your communications clear, concise, and on-brand.

These favorites highlight a vital truth: even the simplest communications can leave a lasting impression. Templates have become your secret weapon, allowing you to hit the ground running, save time, and focus on the creative flair that makes your emails stand out.

(source)

Total time saved per week: 2 hours

Time is money, and in 2024, Beefree users saved big. On average, 59% of users shaved off at least 2 hours per week on email creation, giving them more time to focus on strategy, creativity, and all the other things that make their emails shine. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

An impressive 81% of users reported being able to design emails at least 3x faster since implementing Beefree. What used to take hours now takes mere minutes with pre-designed templates and built-in collaboration tools. 

(source)

More time saved = more time to design

By cutting down on the nitty-gritty of email production, like formatting, coding, and repetitive edits, Beefree gave you the freedom to focus on what truly matters: design. 

With more time on your hands, you experimented with bold new layouts, fine-tuned your visual storytelling, and perfected those interactive elements that kept your audience engaged.

(source)

84% of Beefree users saw an increase in design quality after implementing our tool and 84% have increased on-brand email creation by 50% or more. 

Think about it: The less time on production meant more time to think creatively and innovate.

New height reached 

With more time on your hands and even more accessible design solutions, 2024 became the year you pushed boundaries and achieved more than ever before. And as your email production scaled, so did your ambitions. 

This surge in productivity and creativity signaled that you were ready for the next step—a plan that could grow alongside you and offer even more tailored support for your evolving needs. Recognizing this, we launched our Business Plan in May, designed specifically to meet you where you’re at. 

This plan was crafted to offer the advanced features and scalability that busy teams need, like enhanced collaboration tools and more customization options. 

Is the Beefree HTML Email Builder Right for You? >

After upgrading to a paid plan, 41% of Beefree users saw an ROI in just under a month! 58% report that Beefree has been a KEY part of scaling their email programs. 

(source)

Beautiful design matters 

A well-crafted email design does more than look good; it communicates your brand’s personality, values, and message in a way that’s instantly recognizable and engaging. It draws the reader in, guides their eyes through the content seamlessly, and encourages action, whether it’s clicking through to a website, signing up for an event, or making a purchase.

In 2024, you embraced the power of beautiful design like never before, and you were rewarded for it. Beefree users increased their CTR by an average of 25%.

The marketing ROI on the one email alone was immeasurable. Open rates increased by over 20%, engagement rates by 31%, and best of all, the subscribers fell under a healthy .1%. All are driven by the creative firepower of Beefree. 

Aimee Meester
, Founder and CEO, Madison Taylor Marketing 
Read the case study

In a digital landscape where first impressions are everything, beautiful design isn’t just nice to have—it’s a necessity. And with Beefree, creating visually appealing emails has never been easier, empowering you to continue delivering designs that captivate and convert.

We can’t wait to see what you create next.

Design Award-Winning Emails with Beefree

A few weeks back, we kicked off the first-ever 2024 Really Good Email Awards (cue the confetti). Today, we’re taking it one step further and sharing how you can build award-winning emails in Beefree.
Emily Santos
Emily Santos
26 Dec
2024

A few weeks back, we kicked off the first-ever 2024 Really Good Email Awards (cue the confetti). The “award show” was paired with downloadable resources sharing the ins and outs of what made these emails winners. Today, we’re taking it one step further and sharing how you can build award-winning emails in Beefree.  

But first, what is an award-winning email? 

Winning emails like Miro’s welcome series and the AllTrails x Calm collab didn’t just meet expectations—they redefined them. Besides being the most loved by the RGE community, the winning emails beautifully balanced creativity, trends, and best practices. They gave us insight into the future of email design and how to break the rules intentionally. 

While each email was different in its own unique way, we noticed a consistent pattern in them all: On-brand, but never boring. Let’s take the emails by Sundays as a really good example of staying on brand. Everything from their Black Friday emails to their order confirmation emails follows the same brand guidelines, ensuring a cohesive experience at every touchpoint. 

Resource from our Award Ceremony

This realization was validating! As marketers, we know how important presenting a cohesive experience is for brand recognition, awareness, and loyalty. But as passionate designers, we're always looking at the next cool design trend. This pattern of "on-brand, yet never boring" pushes us to explore new and creative ways to showcase our branding and spread our message.

Designing on-brand, never-boring emails with Beefree

Beefree makes balancing creativity with your brand guidelines seamless. Its combination of brand management, productivity solutions, and a no-code drag-and-drop editor enables everyone to create beautiful designs that inspire people to action and drive results. 

uevi.co/4075ZNTX

Step 1: Set your brand guidelines

Your brand, your rules. Lock in colors, fonts, and logos so your emails look like you —even if Greg from accounting gets a little too creative with the copy. 

There are several ways to set your brand guidelines in Beefree, but our favorite is to use our “Get Brand Styles” feature, which can be accessed in your workspace’s style settings.


Once you’re in your settings, click on “Get brand styles” and input your website’s URL. From there, Beefree will retrieve your brand’s colors, fonts, and social links. You can learn more about this feature here

Once you import your brand’s essentials, you can continue to add brand elements. You can get as granular as you’d like. From a predefined width for emails and pages, to the appearance of your CTAs. 

With our Advanced Style Kit, you can even set predefined background colors, set the appearance of lists, and tables. 

Once you add your style settings, every email your team creates with Beefree will have the same brand colors, icons, links, fonts, and whatever else you decide to assign. Now, let’s say you want to take things one step further. 

Step 2: Create re-usable content blocks 

Beverage brand and winner of our Endless Cheer Award, “Athletic Brewing,” is a great example that following a template doesn’t have to be restrictive. 

All of their holiday templates follow a similar layout: A hero section with a standout image, a large title, body text, and a CTA followed by a similar content block below. 

Resource from our Award Ceremony


Beefree’s Saved and Synced Rows are an easy way to build out templated layouts for your emails. Most users turn frequently used content blocks, such as headers or footers, into Saved Rows so they can easily use them in other designs. You can also save rows as “Synced” when you want to apply any changes made to a row to all of your other email templates. 

You can find all of your Saved and Synced Rows in the builder's Rows tab by selecting “My Saved Rows.”

Templates and re-usable content blocks aren’t just made to help you speed up creation time; they’re about allowing you and your team more time to be creative. The less time you spend worrying about what layout to create, the more time you can spend coming up with clever messaging or taking high-quality product shots. 

uevi.co/1491YKUH

Let’s get to the fun stuff.

Step 3: Bring your visions to life 

In our downloadable resource, we shared the characteristics of each email that made it stand out. We highlighted key elements such as persuasive copy, value-driven content, actionable CTA’s, interesting layouts, and so much more. 

We could spend hours sharing tips and tricks to emulate the award-winning characteristics of an email, but for now, we’ll share some of Beefree’s features that can help take your emails from “meh” to “Why didn’t I think of that?” 

Display conditions

Why settle for one-size-fits-all when you can design emails that feel like a direct DM to each recipient? Beefree’s Display Conditions feature allows you to pick a condition (or write one from scratch if you are technically savvy), apply it to a row, and thus show different content based on the recipient. 

We can see a great example of how Display Conditions could be used in Rael’s award-winning email below: 

Really Good Email Awards Deck

The “Hook, Line, and Sinker” Awards goes to Rael for its charming abandoned cart email that feels like a warm reminder rather than a hard sell.  Instead of just pushing one product, the thoughtfully curated product suggestions make it easy to explore complementary items. 

uevi.co/7663GXCO

Interactivity

Throughout all winning emails, we saw brands bring their message to life with movement. Whether they used videos, gifs, icons, or crafted visually interesting layouts – making their emails interactive was crucial in getting our attention. 

Resource from our Award Ceremony

With Beefree, you can turn your designs into playgrounds. Easily add videos, GIFs, countdown timers, surveys, hover effects, and more. To see what’s possible, we recommend browsing through our template catalog! 

Mobile design mode 

Part of crafting a truly on-brand experience is ensuring that your brand looks good anywhere. Beefree takes responsiveness and dynamic design to the next level by allowing you to create custom mobile experiences. With Mode Design Mode you can re-arrange, re-size, and remove elements for smaller screens. 

uevi.co/2498UJQM 

Step 4: Let AI take care of the little things 

Creating award-winning emails takes vision, creativity, and time. But let’s be honest—sometimes, the little tasks, like tweaking ALT text or sourcing the perfect image, can slow you down.

With Beefree’s AI-powered solutions, you can let your eager intern handle the busy work while you focus on making your emails unforgettable.

AI Image Generator

Struggling to find the perfect image? Beefree’s AI Image Generator lets you create custom visuals that enhance your email’s message. Just add an image block to your email and in the Content Properties panel on the right, click “Create with AI,” then fill out the details. For additional prompt suggestions visit this support page

Alt Text Generator

For us, alt text isn’t just a best practice—it’s essential for creating accessible emails. But crafting the perfect descriptions for every image can feel like a chore.

 Beefree’s AI ALT Text Generator takes care of it for you, automatically generating accurate and descriptive ALT text for your images, gifs, icons, and stickers. 

AI Copy Assistant 

When Greg from accounting gets a bit of writer’s block or when you need a little help writing a catchy CTA, AI is here to help generate bold and fresh ideas. 

Ready to start designing? 

A really good email involves a balance of best practices and bold moves. The winning emails didn’t just make an impact; they set the standard for what’s possible in email marketing. Now, it’s your turn to take the lessons, insights, and inspiration from these campaigns and channel them into your next great idea. Start designing with Beefree for free!

If you’re looking for even more inspiration or tactical takeaways, don’t forget to download the deck or watch the Award ceremony replay! 

Stay informed on all email trends

From the latest creative design strategies that inspire your next campaign to industry best practices and tech advancements, our newsletter is the go-to for all things creation.

By clicking Subscribe you're agreeing with our Privacy Policy