I Ran Flodesk Studio Against Claude
Quick disclosure before we get into it: Flodesk is a paid partner on this post. They're not paying me to lie to you, so this is the real version, snags and all.
I love Flodesk, and I've been using it for years. I think the product is super intuitive. It creates beautiful emails, and it's affordable for a boutique agency like my own.
When they came out with the beta for Flodesk Studio, I was intrigued.
I took some time, opened two tabs, and decided to give it a try by putting it against Claude, my most used LLM tool. With two wo tabs open, I got to work. Left tab, Claude, the tool my team and I build with every single day. Right tab, Flodesk Studio. Same brand, same brief, same exact ask for both. May the best robot win.
I've been building with AI for over two years, back when saying that out loud got you a blank stare instead of a LinkedIn follow. I'm not looking for magic. I'm looking for things that I'll put properly the first time and that can probably do a better job than I can in certain aspects. I decided to use the same prompt in both places and see what I got.
First I logged in and set up shop
Getting in was the easy part. I logged into Studio, and before I typed a single prompt I set up my brand, the colors, the fonts, the whole vibe I wanted every email to carry. This is the part people underrate. The tool builds around whatever you feed it, so a lazy setup hands you a lazy result. I gave it the real thing, the way I'd want a designer to have my brand guide open before they touch a pixel.
Then I handed it the assignment.
What I gave it to work with
The onboarding was super simple, and the interface looks very similar to any other LLM tool you'll see on the market.
I wanted to test this chops from the beginning, so I decided to click a recommended prompt. First instinct was that the prompt was really simple, and that worried me. However, I decided to take a chance, give it some context, and see what it came out with.
As a Flodesk user already, the results surprised me.
What came back (and the line that made me look up)
Don't worry, I think this is all good.
When I clicked Go, the LLM took on a personality of its own. I love watching LLMs work, especially when they're processing information, because the engineering teams of these companies do a great job entertaining you. Studio described the founders' work as "punishing responsibility." It cracked me up, and I love the cheeky nature of the tool itself. It tells me that it's going to be a decent writer, at least as a writer myself. That's my hope.
Don't get me wrong, Claude is pretty cheeky on its own, but Studio's Humor is punnier, and more in-your-face in a way.
haha… Come on, this is kinda funny. We've all been there.
What happened next?
Well, here's where the output was pretty awesome.
While studio was working, I gave Claude the same exact prompt. I didn't give it context. I didn't tell it to be an expert email newsletter writer because I felt like that was cheating, and I wanted to see raw output from both tools.
Claude was super underwhelming and did a terrible job. Frankly, I gave up testing it because, again, I feel like it's cheating. I wanted to see what the difference was when I prompt a tool that's actually created for email flows.
Now let's get into what the Studio did
It finished outputting, and I will flag that it took a little bit longer, but patience is a virtue, in my opinion. I came up with three different options for me to choose from!
Here are my thoughts on the three options:
The first option was the prettiest of the bunch. Great to look at. The strategy, though? Not there. It stacked book-a-call buttons on top of one fat block of text and called it done. If you're going for the hard sell, cool. If you're building an audience and letting the selling happen quietly in the background, which is how I run things, didn't quite do the trick.
The second option is my personal favorite! It breathed. It gave me a personal anecdote up top, a quick useful read on a trend moving through the industry, then a soft invitation to work together at the end. Anecdote, insight, invitation. That's almost the exact shape I reach for on my own, and Studio found it without me spelling it out.
The third went editorial. Minimal, text forward, still opened personal, still tucked in an in-case-you-missed-it moment, still closed on how to work with us. Good bones. The writing, though, read the most AI of the three, a little too smooth, a little too anyone-wrote-this. Studio can get you there. You have to be the one who catches that flatness and roughs it back into something with a pulse.
Designing your own aesthetic
Here's where Studio is great. I love the writing. I love the layouts. It makes things easier for you. If you're not a designer, it has placeholders for where to add an image, where to add a link, and that's amazing.
However, if you're design-forward, you may get a little annoyed at the fact that you need to move some things around to make sure they're as aesthetic as you like them, but that's just my personal take. I don't think it's a deal-breaker, and to be honest, for people who maybe don't have the time or are not design experts, this does the job for you.
It's important to add your brand guidelines, your brand colors, your fonts, your logos to make this part of the email editing easier, because you still have to add that in once it generates a newsletter for you.
The Final Verdict
What Studio gets right is the thing I care about most: it's accelerated, not generated. Real designers built the system the AI runs on, so your emails look made, not spat out. You describe what you want, it gets you most of the way, then you finish it by hand, in chat or pixel by pixel. Free while it's in beta, and you can export the design to any platform that takes HTML, so it works even if you never touch Flodesk again. Go try it yourself at studio.flodesk.com.
I will say it makes my job easier. It's a subject matter expert, and I think it's smart to use LLMs that are trained on exactly what you need support with, so you're not left guessing whether or not the LLM is hallucinating.
Flodesk is an amazing company and I'm excited to see what this new product does for their company overall. This product just adds to another reason why you should use Flodesk. That's my two cents. However, don't forget that even though it makes your job more productive and your output faster, the human in the loop and you actually going in there and adding your own taste and flavor are the most critical piece of any sort of newsletter or written article. People pay for your expertise, not Flodesk LLM. Make sure to incorporate your story so that you can have a successful email campaign.
