Beacons and Raydar look similar from the outside and are built on genuinely different bets. Beacons bets that a creator wants their whole business in one account. Raydar bets that the click is the part worth understanding. Which is right depends on what you do after someone taps your link, so that is what this compares. We build Raydar, so weigh the closing section accordingly; everything about Beacons here is capability-level and checkable.
The short answer
- Pick Beacons if you want one account that does the link page, the media kit, the email list, the digital product sales and the invoicing. Breadth is the product, and for a solo creator monetising several ways that consolidation is worth real money.
- Pick Raydar if the traffic hitting your bio is expensive or hard-won and you want to see each click in detail rather than in aggregate. Depth on one thing is the product.
Where Beacons is genuinely strong
Beacons has spent years building out the surrounding creator business, and it shows. Media kits that pull your own stats together for brand deals, an email tool, storefronts for digital products, invoicing, and an AI-assisted setup that gets a decent page live quickly. If your alternative is stitching four subscriptions together, one account covering all of it is a real simplification and probably cheaper.
Its analytics are solid at the level it aims for: views, clicks, click-through rate, sources, trends over time. For a lot of creators that is genuinely enough, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
The difference that decides it: aggregate versus per click
Beacons answers "how is the page performing". Raydar answers "who is arriving and are they real".
Every click on a Raydar page lands in a logbook you scroll through, carrying location, device, referrer and time, plus flags for VPN, proxy and datacenter traffic. That last part matters more than it sounds. If you run paid traffic, an aggregate chart cannot tell you that a fifth of yesterday's clicks came from a datacenter in a country you never targeted. A per-click log can, and that is the difference between optimising a campaign and optimising a number.
If you have never wanted that, it is machinery you will not use, and Beacons is the better fit.
Qualifying before the click
Raydar pages can run qualifier flows: a short question funnel that segments a visitor before showing them links, so a coach can split "just browsing" from "ready to book" and route each somewhere different, with the answers stored next to the click data. Beacons keeps the page as a page and puts its energy into what you sell from it. Neither is wrong; they are answers to different questions about what a bio link is for.
Selling directly
Worth being blunt: if your main need is selling digital products straight off your bio, Beacons is further along than we are. It has the storefront, the checkout and the surrounding tooling built for exactly that. Raydar's paid tiers are about measurement, custom domains and business cards rather than commerce. Buying Raydar hoping it becomes a storefront would be buying the wrong tool.
Business cards and offline traffic
One thing Raydar does that a creator suite generally does not: the same profile works as a digital business card by QR or NFC tap, and every scan lands in the same logbook as your social clicks. For anyone who meets people at events and wants that to be measurable rather than a stack of paper, it collapses two tools into one.
How to choose without overthinking it
Ask what you did the last time your bio link had a big day. If you went looking for what sold, Beacons is built around that answer. If you went looking for where the traffic came from and whether it was real, that curiosity is the product we sell, and there is a free tier to test it against your own traffic rather than against a comparison post.