Every small-business owner runs this comparison eventually, usually right after they realize the bio link is doing more work than the actual website. Linktree is the default. Beacons is the AI-forward challenger. Both offer a permanent free plan, both let you sell digital products, and both charge a percentage of those direct sales on their cheaper tiers.
We didn’t test either product hands-on for this piece. This is a documentation and pricing comparison done against each company’s current official pages as of September 2026. Where a claim is a number, it comes from that product’s own pricing page or help center. Where a claim is a judgment, we say so.
Where Linktree wins
Linktree wins on marketing plumbing and on the size of the ecosystem a small business is already inside.
On Pro and Premium plans, Linktree connects Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Kit, or Google Sheets to sync contact-form, digital-product, and course-signup data automatically. Pro and Premium also add the Meta Custom Audience Pixel for retargeting, UTM parameters across links, and a Google Analytics integration.
If your small business already runs Meta ads and reports on GA, Linktree Pro drops into that stack without a rebuild.
Pro is the tier most small businesses actually land on, and it’s the one we’d recommend for owners whose main use case is routing bio traffic to a store, a booking page, or a newsletter.
Free is genuinely usable, too.
Linktree Free includes a hosted linktr.ee page with unlimited basic links, and up to 1,000 Instagram auto-reply DMs per month.
If your bio link is a signpost and not a storefront, Free is the honest recommendation.
One thing worth noting: Linktree’s paid plans also expand your analytics window meaningfully, Starter covers the last 90 days, Pro the last 365, and Premium your full account lifetime. If you care about year-over-year comparisons, that alone justifies the step up.
Where Beacons wins
Beacons wins the seller-fee round, cleanly.
Beacons’ commerce-focused tier, Creator Plus, costs $30 per month billed monthly, or $300/year ($25/month billed annually), and its headline feature is a 0% Beacons seller fee.
The equivalent tier on Linktree is Premium. For a small business that has already decided the bio link is the storefront (templates, presets, one-off downloads, a small course), Beacons Creator Plus at $25/month annual comes with more commerce features baked in at the same 0% fee.
Creator Plus adds unlimited marketing emails, courses with multi-module content, memberships, buy now pay later, order bumps, custom product URLs, and removal of the Beacons logo.
That’s a real difference from Linktree Premium, which is priced against Linktree’s link-in-bio feature set rather than a small commerce toolkit.
Beacons also charges less on its cheaper tiers if you insist on staying there.
Beacons charges 0% seller fees on Creator Plus and Creator Max, and 9% on Free and Creator. If you plan to sell even a few items before upgrading, that transaction rate matters.
Two caveats. Beacons is built for creators and creator-shaped small businesses.
It earns its price for creators whose main monetization is selling digital products, courses, or memberships through the page. For a coach, therapist, or consultant who primarily works 1:1 and just needs a credible professional site, Beacons is built around commerce features most service pros don’t use.
And the free-tier email allowance is metered, 50 email sends per month on Free, 500 on Creator, and unlimited on Creator Plus, so heavy email marketers should plan on the paid tier from day one.
Who should pick which
Pick Linktree Pro if your bio link is routing traffic to a Shopify store, a Calendly, a newsletter, or your own site, and you want the Meta Pixel, Google Analytics, UTMs, and Mailchimp or Klaviyo sync without stitching a stack together.
Pick Beacons Creator Plus ($30/month, $25/month annual) if you plan to sell digital products, courses, or memberships directly from the bio link and want the platform seller fee at 0% for the lowest possible price.
Pick either free plan if you’re just starting and mostly linking out. But if you plan to sell anything at all, Beacons Free’s documented 9% transaction fee is a clean starting point.
Small-business owners who need something adjacent should probably look elsewhere. For in-person B2B lead capture, our roundup of AI digital business card and event lead capture apps covers the near-neighbor category. For Pinterest as a traffic source into whichever bio link you pick, see the AI Pinterest marketing tools guide. And for a small DTC brand weighing TikTok Shop affiliates instead of a bio-link storefront, our TikTok Shop affiliate software roundup is the more relevant piece.
One thing to watch: both companies revise pricing yearly. Confirm the current numbers on each pricing page before you commit to an annual bill. The shape of the plans holds, but the digits move.
