Social media, YouTube and blogs have already made it easy for anyone with a smartphone to publish content and even get paid for it. But the visibility of that content relies on algorithms and search, meaning you ‘rent’ rather than ‘own’ your audience. And to make money on these platforms, scale is essential.
Newsletter platforms like Substack, on the other hand, let you build a list of readers, and forge deeper personal connections with them over time. Even with a relatively small list (of hundreds of people) journalists can make money from paid subscriptions, sponsorship, ads or affiliate sales. The more unique and valuable your newsletter content, the easier it is to monetise.
Major newsrooms like The Times or The New York Times usually have customised, enterprise-grade CRM tools. They’re expensive, but have also been specced to do exactly what the company needs.
Smaller publishers and independent journalists, however, who don’t have access to CRMs or development teams, have flocked to Substack in their droves in recent years. But key rivals, such as Ghost, Beehiiv, and Kit, offer many of the same benefits (or more) of Substack, and could be a better choice for your newsletter – especially if it really takes off.
Here’s the need-to-know for anyone looking to launch or migrate a newsletter in 2025.
Major newsletter platforms compared:
Substack
Substack is still the largest of the major newsletter publishing platforms and hosts more than half a million publications across anything from politics and news, to tech, media, entertainment, culture and sport. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie recently told the Washington Post that more than five million people now pay for a subscription to one or more newsletters on Substack – up from 3 million a year ago.
Substack is rightly proud of this figure, given its heavy focus on paid newsletters. The other newsletter platforms we’ve compared here also let you charge for your newsletter, but offer more diverse revenue models – and running costs – as we’ll explore below.
What is Substack?
Started just eight years ago in San Francisco, Substack has become the go-to destination for writers and journalists looking to start a newsletter from scratch. It takes minutes to set up an account and is completely free to use, unless you charge for your newsletter.
Some publishers use it simply as a free newsletter distribution tool. Press Gazette and sister title The New Statesman for example, moved their newsletters onto Substack in 2023 for this reason.
However, Substack’s raison d’etre is to encourage more publishers from the micro-culture (as thoughtfully articulated by Ted Gioia on his popular ‘Honest Broker’ Substack) to create unique newsletters that they can ultimately charge money for. And when they do, Substack takes 10% of the subscription revenue as its fee.
What’s good about Substack?
- Simple to set up and use. Clean reading experience, uncluttered by ads or sponsorship.
- Completely free, unless you decide to charge for your newsletter.
- Newsletters are sent via email and also published to a website (for which you can choose a custom domain).
- The Substack app – a key difference to other rivals. Many users read their newsletters via Substack’s phone app (or web ecosystem), which helps to limit inbox clutter. These also contain the social-like ‘Notes’ stream, and features such as article voiceovers (whether read in person or by AI).
- Awareness continues to rise and it offers strong network growth. Because Substack has a large user base (globally, but strongest in the US), newsletters can quickly grow via recommendations from others on the platform.
- List management, analytics and payment processing (via Stripe) are all built in. You get to keep 86% of your paid newsletter earnings (after Stripe has also taken its cut).
What’s not so good about it?
- Limited design choices and customisation. Most Substacks look and feel similar.
- Fewer integrations and marketing automations than some rivals.
- Analytics and audience profiling are adequate for smaller newsletter creators, but limited for more sophisticated publishers.
- Takes 10% of your subscription revenue (and Stripe takes around 4% as a payment processing fee). This is fine for smaller newsletters, but becomes expensive as your audience scales.
- While some publishers create their own in-newsletter sponsorship/banner ads, Substack isn’t optimised for this approach.
- Substack like to emphasise that it is far more than a newsletter platform. For some brands, like The Ankler and The Free Press, it is pretty much their entire publishing tech-stack including website, podcast and video platform.
Best for
- Publishers looking for a free newsletter platform (if their content is free, or monetised on their own site, such as Press Gazette).
- Journalists and writers starting their first newsletter. Growth via the Substack network is worth the 10% premium in the early days and maybe longer.
Major newsletters using Substack:
Far too many to list here. Check out Bron Maher’s recent digest of some of the major Substacks.
Ghost
What is Ghost?
Launched in London in 2013 with an initial focus on blogging, Ghost has evolved into a broader tool for independent publishing, including paid memberships and newsletters. It’s open source, which means it offers more flexibility and control than Substack, and is ideal for publishers wanting to build a business beyond just newsletters.
What’s good about Ghost?
- Highly customisable. Good for publishers looking to create a consistent look and feel with their other brand assets.
- Integrates with most other platforms and tools that you’re likely to need.
- Plenty of membership and subscription options. Sophisticated analytics.
- Operates flat-fee pricing, based on your list size. Even with a newsletter approaching 400,000 readers, and unlimited users, the fee is less than $2,500 per month. Ghost takes no commission, but Stripe takes its standard transaction fees (2.9% + 30 cents per transaction). This means Ghost is much cheaper to run than Substack as your newsletter grows.
- Ghost is also a non-profit foundation and carbon neutral.
What’s not so good?
- Harder to get up and running than Substack, and you’ll need to pay a monthly fee (starting from $9/month) after the initial trial period ends.
- Some options and integrations require more technical know-how or decision-making. Less suited to technophobes.
- Positioned more as a publishing tool than an ecosystem of writers and journalists.
- Doesn’t offer Substack’s built-in growth and recommendations engine, so makes less sense if you’re starting out. There’s no app or contralised Ghost community, for example.
Best for
- Newsletters that have already built a large list on Substack and no longer want to pay 10% commission on paid subscriptions. This is one reason why Mill Media has moved its titles on to Ghost.
- Medium to large publishers wanting a newsletter and publishing platform that can integrate with their wider tools and business model.
Major newsletters using Ghost:
Tangle, The Lever, The Browser, Hearing Things, and Platformer are some of Ghost’s better-known newsletters (some of which migrated from Substack). Mill Media set up The Londoner and The Glasgow Bell on Ghost, and has recently moved over its other four local newsletters from Substack.
Beehiiv
What is Beehiiv?
Spellcheck-goading Beehiiv is a relative newcomer which was started in 2021 by three former employees of the Morning Brew. The New York-based company sees itself as a platform built “by newsletter people, for newsletter people”, with a heavy focus on growth tools and customisation. It’s cost-effective for paid newsletters.
What’s good about Beehiiv?
- You can start a newsletter for free, on the Launch plan, and grow it to 2,500 subscribers before you need to pay a subscription (starting from $40/month).
- Offers more ways to monetise newsletters than Substack (paid subscriptions, an ad network, paid referrals, one-off payments etc).
- Lets you run A-B tests, and get deep insights into what your audience is clicking, and buying.
- Like Substack, it has a network of other newsletters that can promote yours, either freely or via paid ads.
- No commission fees (just Stripe’s transaction fees of 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction). Crucially, if you build a large list of paying subscribers, it becomes much cheaper to run than Substack.
What’s not so good?
- Not as well known as Substack, especially with journalists, but gaining ground.
- Slightly trickier to use than Substack, but mainly because it offers more advanced features.
- More customisable than Substack; less customisable than Ghost.
- Some features (eg paid subscriptions and access to the ad network) are only available if you pay a monthly subscription, which is tiered according to features and list size.
Best for
- Publishers with large numbers of paying newsletters subscribers, looking for something with lower overheads than Substack.
- Newsletter creators who want to build a newsletter list and have more ways to monetise it than just paid subscriptions – eg via ads or affiliate referrals.
Major newsletters using Beehiiv:
Milk Road, Morning Brew, There’s an AI for That, The Wolf on Wealth (yes, that’s Jordan Belfort’s newsletter), Time, Cult of Mac, and more.
Kit
What is Kit? Idaho-based Kit was previously called ConvertKit, and has been around since 2013, helping bloggers and content creators to start newsletters they could convert into revenue. It rebranded simply to ‘Kit’ in late 2024.
What’s good about it?
- Kit is really aimed at multimedia creators with something to sell beyond just their writing – think courses, books, music, merchandise and services.
- It pitches itself as a ‘newsletter-first’ ecosystem that’s designed to help you build a community (and sales opportunities) around your newsletter.
- As an individual user, you can get started for free, and build a hefty 10,000 subscribers before you have to pay a subscription fee. But like Beehiiv, you need to pay to access some premium features, or for more team users.
- Like Substack and Beehiiv, it has its own creator network, which lets you pay other newsletters to promote yours, or vice versa.
- Slick marketing capabilities, eg automated onboarding programmes, or targeted sends to certain reader segments.
What’s not so good?
- Less well known with journalists and publishers, and particularly so in the UK. But it’s growing rapidly.
- Kit’s subscription cost, plus the 3.5% + 30 cents per transaction fee on paid subscriptions, make it slightly more expensive than Ghost or Beehiiv for larger (paid) audiences. It’s still much cheaper than Substack at this scale, though.
Best for
- Creators or publishers who usually have something to sell beyond journalism.
- Smaller e-commerce businesses, where the newsletter and Kit’s retargeting tools can be a powerful way to convert sales.
Major newsletters that use Kit:
The Saturday Soloprenuer by Justin Welsh, Nudge Newsletter by Phill Agnew, The 3-2-1 Newsletter by James Clear, plus various authors, Youtubers, actors and musicians.
Which publisher newsletter platform is best for your business?
Substack undoubtedly has the most traction with journalists at present, and offers a whole ecosystem of different writers, publishers and creators. You can become part of its large network for free, and its recommendation engine will certainly help your newsletter to grow organically, especially in the early months or years.
As soon as you start to charge for your newsletter, though, Substack begins taking its 10% commission, and Stripe’s payment processing fee. These are tolerable but can really start to add up for bigger newsletters, compared with paying a tiered subscription fee to any of the other tools reviewed here.
As an example, we ran a slightly simplified cost comparison for a newsletter using the following scenario:
- 100,000 total subscribers
- 10,000 paid subscribers at £60/year (£5/month)
- Weekly newsletter (4-5 emails per month)
- Team of at least three people
- Total annual subscription revenue: £600,000
In this scenario, using Substack costs at least £50k a year more than the other platforms – enough for another staffer for your publication, or a decent freelance budget. This is why we’re likely to continue seeing publishers like Mill Media moving away from Substack when they really start to grow their paid newsletter bases.
However, this brings us right back to where we started, and one of the key benefits of growing a newsletter in the first place.
You build your own audience, and you own your subscriber list. These are your customers to keep, not ‘rented’ social followers. And that’s true whichever of these tools you use.
So if you want to up sticks and move from one platform to another, the good news is you absolutely can.
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