Substack vs Beehiiv vs Ghost
A comparison after using all three.
I’ve used all three of these platforms. Not briefly, not as a test. I run publications on each of them right now and have for a while. I was recently looking for an in-depth comparison online and honestly couldn’t find one that wasn’t surface level or written by someone who tried each platform for any longer than a week. So here’s mine.
This isn’t a feature-by-feature breakdown. It’s what I’ve actually experienced with each of these platforms over the past few years.
Substack
Substack was the first platform I used. The social features are genuinely good and if your content catches fire, the growth potential is higher than anything beehiiv or Ghost can offer. The problem is that’s a big “if.” It works like any social platform. Post consistently, engage with others, and your odds go up. But engagement farming is a growing problem like any other social platform. More people are starting to treat it like a second Twitter.
I constantly see posts of “Hey Substack, connect me with people under 1,000 subscribers”, knowing damn well they won’t read anyone else’s content.
What Substack does better than anyone is put content in front of readers who are already in a paying mindset. Their discovery engine and social layer create a network effect that the other two platforms simply don’t have. If you write something great on beehiiv, it goes to your list. If you write something great on Substack, it could find its way to thousands of people who’ve never heard of you.
Monetization
Monetization on Substack is more limited than the other two in terms of channels. They take a 10% cut on paid subscriptions, which sounds steep but I actually don’t think it’s unreasonable when you consider they handle email sending for free for everyone. That’s expensive infrastructure and someone has to pay for it. I’ve heard they’re experimenting with an ad network similar to beehiiv, which could change the equation significantly if it materializes.
Here’s my take though: the conversions on Substack are fundamentally different and better. People on Substack are more inclined to pay. We’ve been in the market recently looking at Substacks to potentially acquire and the numbers are surprising. One guy was making $400K ARR charging $60/month, with basically no systems or processes in place. Just writing his thoughts whenever he felt like it. That kind of thing doesn’t really happen on other platforms. Survivorship bias, granted. But the point stands.
The reason is that paid content subscriptions don’t work like SaaS. A lot of people convert because they found one article they really wanted to read and thought “I don’t mind paying 20 bucks for this.” Others subscribe as a way of committing to content they enjoy. Unless your newsletter is consistently delivering something actionable, most of those subscribers won’t stick around forever. But the initial conversion is easier on Substack than anywhere else.
So the 10% fee looks different depending on your situation. If you already have strong distribution and can drive paid conversions on your own, 10% is indeed a cost. But if Substack’s ecosystem is the reason people are finding and paying for your content in the first place, it’s more like a distribution fee. And a reasonable one at that.
Branding
My biggest frustration with Substack is that it’s not a platform for building a strong media brand. It’s a platform for publishing content with minimal friction and putting it in front of readers. Every Substack looks the same. You can’t even add a profile picture to your emails so they stand out in someone’s inbox. And because readers tend to subscribe to a lot of newsletters on Substack, even when they open your email, the odds of them actually reading it carefully are lower.
Believe me, I’ve tried to find a work around. I even found a loop hole to add profile pictures to your emails on Substack through email aliases and wrote a popular guide on it, but it no longer works.
This is a strategic issue if you’re thinking long term. A media brand is more than content. It’s how the content is packaged, how it feels to interact with, how recognizable it is across channels. Substack collapses all of that into a standardized template. That works fine for personal writers who are the brand themselves, but if you’re building something bigger than your own name, it becomes a limitation pretty quickly.
Especially given how easy it is these days to produce content, branding matters more than ever. People need to remember who you are and why they should care. Substack currently provides a killer social platform: get seen and own your audience. But it’s arguably not for serious media brands.
Some of these are easy fixes. But I’m not too hopeful because Substack has an incentive to keep people inside their own app. They can’t afford to offer full customization. That said, if someone at Substack reads this: adding an API, enabling custom sending domains, and giving publishers more control would go a long way. Those features are a necessity at this point. We publish content focused on startups and venture capital, and Substack’s audience is highly relevant to that. If I could configure a custom sending domain or use their API, I probably would have chosen Substack over Ghost or beehiiv when we launched our company newsletter, even with weaker monetization options.
Use Substack if you want to get your content out there without worrying about much beyond publishing.
beehiiv
beehiiv is my favorite of the three. I’m on their max plan with multiple newsletters running on the platform. The growth features are solid if you’re thoughtful about how you use them. Recommending random newsletters to your subscribers won’t drive quality growth, but picking the right ones through their recommendation network actually works.
What separates beehiiv from the other two is that it feels like it was built by people who actually run newsletters. The feature set makes sense for operators. Things like Sparkloop integration, a proper API, segmentation tools, and a referral program that works out of the box. On Ghost and Substack, I kept running into walls when I wanted to do things that felt basic for a newsletter business. On beehiiv, most of those things just work.
Ad network
What beehiiv offers that no other platform does is the ability to monetize from day one with just a handful of subscribers. Their ad network is a game changer.
To give you some numbers: you’re looking at roughly $1.50 to $2 CPC and around $8 CPM on average, with higher offers coming through occasionally. Those payouts are considerably lower than what you’d earn negotiating sponsors directly. A self-sold sponsorship in a decent niche could easily bring in 2 to 5x that. But here’s the thing: selling your own ads requires an audience large enough to attract sponsors, time to manage those relationships, and consistency in your send schedule. beehiiv’s ad network removes all of that friction and means you never have to send an email that generates $0 in revenue.
They used to send ad opportunities every Sunday within a specific booking window, which was fine but a bit rigid. Just recently they shipped the ability to insert ads on demand, which makes the whole thing much more flexible and means you can match ads to relevant content more naturally.
If you’re thinking about building a media business, the math here is worth thinking about carefully. beehiiv’s ad network probably isn’t your long-term primary revenue source. But it’s an incredible starting point. It generates revenue while you’re growing to the point where direct sponsorships make sense, and it fills the gaps on weeks when you don’t have a direct deal lined up.
API
Their API is really powerful and this is honestly what makes beehiiv work for more advanced setups. You can build a fully custom front end and handle email sending through beehiiv’s infrastructure. That’s exactly what we’re doing now. Your readers see your website, your brand, your design. But behind the scenes, beehiiv handles the email operations, growth tools, and monetization. It’s the best of both worlds if you’re willing to invest in a custom site.
beehiiv also integrates with platforms like Sparkloop for paid referrals, which I couldn’t easily set up on Ghost or Substack. These integrations matter more than they sound. When you’re trying to grow a newsletter, every additional distribution channel is worth something.
The team behind it
I want to mention their team specifically because it also matters when you’re building on someone else’s platform. When we acquired a newsletter that was already on beehiiv, their support team helped us with the entire transition in under 24 hours. That’s not normal. More recently, I wrote them a support ticket asking about improving deliverability and open rates. Within 12 hours they came back with a 758-word response, packed with specific suggestions and links, clearly written for my situation. Not a template, not AI-generated, someone on their team actually sat down and thought through my questions. In general, whenever I have a question about their ad network or run into a technical issue, they’re quick to respond. You can tell the team actually pays attention to their users and engages with them regularly.
They’ve also always engaged with any social posts I’ve seen that mention beehiiv. I wouldn’t be surprised if their team reads this article before Substack or Ghost.
What’s not great
A few things that still need work. The editor isn’t smooth, though they’ve said they’re focused on improving it. The website builder looks decent in concept but the output is slow and the SEO is poor. If your web presence matters to you, you’ll want to build a custom site and use beehiiv for the email side. And migrating paid subscribers away from beehiiv is more painful than it should be, which is worth knowing before you commit.
Use beehiiv if you’re building a media brand with advanced needs around growth, monetization, and integrations, but still don’t want to reinvent the wheel on everything.
Ghost
Ghost is actually incredible in a lot of ways. But it originally started out as a “simpler WordPress” and you can feel that in how it works. It’s not newsletter-first. The whole architecture is built around the web experience and email is bolted on, competently, but bolted on. Even something like custom sending domain configuration was confusing because they apparently send from a ghost.domain.com subdomain, which wasn’t clearly stated anywhere obvious. I spent time thinking they were sending from my root domain, which would be bad practice.
The SEO is excellent out of the box. The structured data, meta handling, and overall web performance are noticeably better than what beehiiv’s website builder produces. You can also customize the look of your site down to the pixel if you’re willing to dig into the theme layer. You need some technical ability for that, but with AI tools being what they are now, most people could manage it.
Ghost is built for a technical audience though. It’s open-source but it also just feels technical. Even something as simple as releasing major updates in a version format (Ghost v6, v5, etc.) seems unintuitive for the average user. I definitely do think this plays a role in their general adoption.
It also has certain features like the social web which means precisely nothing to most people, but it’s interesting if you take the time to understand it.
Double opt-in
Ghost is opinionated. More opinionated than I’d like. The most frustrating example: you can’t turn off double opt-in. They believe it’s the best practice for deliverability and they enforce it across the platform. I understand their reasoning and I respect it, but my platform shouldn’t make that decision for me. I can’t even customize the double opt-in email.
When we switched our company newsletter away from Ghost, our signup conversions jumped by at least 50%. And that’s with several anti-bot checks on the new site, so these are genuine signups with strong open rates. The double opt-in was just filtering out real people who missed or forgot about the confirmation email. Maybe you think that’s a small number, but we wouldn’t have known either way because Ghost doesn’t give you visibility into how many people start the signup process and never confirm.
In Ghost’s defense
Now, to be fair, their strictness does come with some upside. Ghost ensures very high deliverability and list quality. When we imported an email list into Dutch Brief, which runs on Ghost, they actually paused email sending until they could verify the list was legitimate. At first that was frustrating. But looking back, it’s the kind of thing that protects your sender reputation in ways you might not appreciate until something goes wrong.
If mass email growth isn’t your primary focus and you care more about maintaining a clean sender reputation, Ghost’s opinionated approach might actually work in your favor. It’s a trade-off. You give up control and flexibility, but you get a platform that actively prevents you from hurting your own deliverability. For some publishers, that’s exactly right.
Growth tools are limited
The growth features are limited compared to the other two. I couldn’t integrate with newsletter-focused tools like Sparkloop, the recommendation network is not as effective, and there’s not really a discovery mechanism if your brand doesn’t already have distribution figured out. Ghost basically assumes you’ll bring your own audience. If you can, great. If you can’t, you’re going to feel the absence of the growth infrastructure that beehiiv and Substack provide.
Paid subscriptions and the CMS
I haven’t tried paid subscriptions on Ghost but from what I’ve seen, it’s the best of both worlds mechanically. Smooth process and no 10% fee. That said, I still think you’d convert more paid subscribers on Substack than Ghost, making the commission worth it, unless your own distribution is already strong.
One more thing. Ghost is clearly built for technical people. The CMS feels limited unless you get creative with internal tags and theme configuration. For a platform that positions itself as a publishing tool, the content management side still has some catching up to do. There’s a saying around it that Ghost is as good as you are creative. You need to be comfortable to roll up your sleeves to customize the setup, or just accept their opinions.
Use Ghost if your distribution is already strong and you care about your web presence just as much as your emails.
So what do we actually do
As I said, we have publications on all three of these platforms, and we’ll likely continue to do that. They each have their strengths and it’s good for us to be aware of what’s in the market. But I’ll tell you what we ended up doing for Letters by Evernomic, the newsletter that you’re currently reading.
When we launched our company newsletter at Evernomic, I chose Ghost because of the web experience, customization, and SEO. I wanted our landing page to be premium. But the limitations on growth tools and the strong opinions on things like double opt-in made it not worth the trade-off for a newsletter that needed to grow.
We ended up migrating the website to a custom Next.js deployment with Payload CMS and using beehiiv’s API for email sending. That gives us full control over how the site looks and performs, with the SEO and speed you’d expect from a modern web stack, while still getting access to beehiiv’s growth and monetization tools. It’s more work to set up, but for a media operation that takes both the web and email seriously, it’s the setup that made the most sense. We get. the best of both worlds, literally.
Dutch Brief stays on Ghost because it doesn’t need the same growth infrastructure. It has strong distribution through its social channels and the web experience Ghost provides is exactly what it needs. It’s also a local newsletter so the growth tools of Substack and beehiiv are not as effective since they’re good at pushing you in front of the whole world, not just a particular country.
Each platform has earned its place for a different reason for us.
All three of these platforms are actively improving and I’d expect each of them to address some of these gaps over time. beehiiv ships features faster than most startups I’ve seen, Substack is experimenting with new monetization channels including what sounds like an ad network, and Ghost continues to refine what’s already a really solid product. The competition between them is probably the best thing happening for independent publishers right now.
The reality is that no single platform does everything well yet. Picking the right one depends entirely on what you’re actually trying to build. And if you’re serious about building a media company, you might end up like me, using all three and stitching together the best parts of each.
A great read with a genuine, multifaceted review!
Love the fact that you actually give an honest review, with no filler or fluff