EmailTooltester is supported by readers like you. When you purchase through our links, we may earn a commission that helps keep our reviews independent and free.
Do you have a newsletter (or plan to start one), but aren't sure which newsletter tool to use? I know it can be hard to decide on this. There are so many options, each of which comes with its own unique features, dashboards, and pros and cons.
At this point, I can imagine you’ve heard about Substack and Beehiiv as two good possible picks.
Substack has been enjoying a moment in the limelight, but newcomer Beehiiv is quickly gaining traction!
But what are these tools all about?
Substack is an American newsletter platform created with writers in mind, with features reminiscent of old digital journaling. Its creator-friendly features and simple interface blend blogging and newsletters to give it a community-driven edge. It’s simple and great, which is why it now boasts more than 35 million active subscriptions— five million of which are paid subscriptions.
Beehiiv is a relatively new kid on the block, founded in 2021 by a handful of early employees at the hugely successful Morning Brew newsletter (check out our detailed Beehiiv review here). The key thing to note is that it provides newsletter creators with all the tools they need to grow and monetize their email lists in today’s competitive digital landscape.
Today I am pitting these two platforms head-to-head to compare their ease of use, the editor interface, pricing, and unique features to see which one comes out on top.
I will award a point to the winner of each category so, by the end of this post, you’ll know which is best suited to your specific needs.
Beehiiv vs Substack: Summary
- Both Beehiiv and Substack are good options if you want a simple interface with a classic, text-based email editor to regularly send out newsletters.
- Beehiiv is great for segmenting subscribers and creating automated sequences. It’s also working to become the all-around platform for creators who want to grow and monetize their audience.
- Substack really shines with its community engagement features, like discussion threads and reader comments.
- Both platforms have very different pricing models depending on your monetization method.
We’ve also created a video comparing Beehiiv and Substack—check it out for a visual overview:
Ease of Use
Substack was, first and foremost, built for writers. You can see this in its pared-back, straightforward email editor that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of other email marketing platforms.
It feels like I’m writing in a personal journal when I write a Substack email. There are very few distractions in the periphery — no tempting buttons to click and no fancy editing features that, let’s face it, can lead to procrastination.
That being said, you can structure your emails with headers and paragraphs. You can also create simple, custom templates for web posts and save them for future use (not yet available for Notes or on the Substack app). Everyone writes in the same editor and their emails tend to have the same look and feel about them.
Substack’s dashboard is equally simple.
Substack’s dashboard overview
As you can see, the dashboard quickly gives users an overview of subscribers, followers, views, and open rates. It’s limited, yes, but that’s what makes it so easy to use.
Beehiiv, on the other hand, was built with more complex features to monetize your newsletter, such as ad offers and referral programs. The platform aimed to address all of the features lacking in other popular email marketing platforms (that were created over 10 years ago in a very different digital world).
Like Substack, its email editor is also easy to use. It sits alongside a post settings card that lets you choose the author, title, and subtitles.
As well as the classic editor (which doesn’t look too dissimilar to Substack), you can choose from a range of custom templates that help you brand your newsletter and give it personality.
However, there are a few quickstart templates available on Beehiiv’s free plan. You also have the option to create your own.
Beehiiv quickstart templates
Going premium, of course, gives you access to sleeker, more detailed templates:
Long story short?
Both platforms are easy to set up and start using. Both offer a walkthrough of basic features and show you how you can start writing ASAP. That being said…
Winner: Substack wins. Its ease of use and simplicity make the platform a great option for beginners. Behiiv has a lot of advanced features like deep audience segmentation, granular analytics, and automation capabilities, which can be a steep learning curve if you’re just getting started. Having ready-made templates helps users get started on crafting well-designed emails straight away.
Substack: 1
Beehiiv: 0
Subscription and Monetization Options
Both platforms not only support paid subscriptions – they're actually at the heart of their services.
For Substack users, the platform is free to use if you’re under The Support Model, meaning you don’t monetize your content. But converting to The Business Model (putting high-value content behind a paywall, while teaser content remains free) or The Hybrid Model (most newsletters are free, but extras are paid) can make things complicated.
Paid subscription tiers include monthly/annual subscriptions and becoming one of the Founding Members (a more exclusive yearly tier or a premium one-time payment).
And Substack takes quite a large cut from paid subscriptions — a 10% fee + processing fees, which we’ll cover in the pricing and fees section. While it’s super easy to get started on the platform, earning from it isn’t as straightforward.
Substack takes 10% of users' paid subscription revenue
If you plan to monetize your newsletter with ads, you have to do it manually. That means engaging with advertisers or sponsors yourself, agreeing on prices and terms in advance, and then inserting the ad into your newsletter.
Some like Substack user Burk use their creativity to make their ads stand out, relying on tools like CardGen, like so:
Of course, you can also go through ad platforms instead, but either way, it's more manual work for you. Substack's not really built with that kind of strategy in mind, so it can feel quite clunky and time-consuming compared to other platforms.
With Beehiiv, instead of taking a cut, users need to be on the platform’s Scale paid plan (which starts at $49/month) or above to qualify for paid subscriptions. So it’s definitely pricier to get started, though this should pay off quickly if you have enough paid subscribers – making it a better deal over time. While Beehiiv won’t charge any fees for your premium subscription's revenue, its payment partner, Stripe, does apply their regular fee of 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction.
Next to that, there is also the Beehiiv ad network, an easy way to find advertisers and sponsors for your newsletter. See how this Beehiiv user makes up to $4,000/month with his marketing newsletter.
Beehiiv does not charge any fees for your premium subscriptions revenue
Besides the regular monthly/annually paid subscription – which is also what Substack offers – Beehiiv has been investing on very cool monetization features, which truly highlight the platform’s strengths (after all, this is ultimately what it was built for).
They've recently launched:
- a “Lifetime Subscription” option, where readers can choose to pay just once for lifetime access.
- a “Pay What You Want” subscription, allowing readers to support their favorite newsletters with any amount they choose.
- A subscriber's Referral Program, which provides premium access to subscribers as a reward for bringing new readers to the newsletter.
As well as all of this, you can also easily use Beehiiv to monetize your newsletter with premium sponsors through the platform’s built-in ad network, or recommend other newsletters and get paid.
Best part? The Beehiiv email editor makes it easy to integrate advertisements with ease. No workarounds needed, it’s just part of the program.
Winner: Beehiiv’s menu of monetization opportunities easily wins the round for us – there is a reason for it to carry a cost. You can choose a Beehiiv method that best suits your business model or experiment with all three to see what works best.
Substack: 1
Beehiiv: 1
Community Features and Audience Engagement Tools
Substack has introduced tons of engagement features in the last few years — in fact, some users think of Substack as a blogging platform with a newsletter tool.
As well as the ability to write and send newsletters (and upload videos and host podcasts too!), you can enable reader comments and “likes”. This influences which posts appear on your “top posts” leaderboard, but it can also inspire discussions with your subscribers.
Even if you don’t enable the community features on Substack, subscribers can still reply to your newsletters and you'll get those messages in your inbox. It also has a Notes feature, Direct Messaging capabilities, Chat, and Follow features—all of which help you nurture a community, but are also making Substack feel like a new social media channel (something a lot of old users aren’t particularly happy about).
Creators can also control chat access, setting it to free, paid, or Founding Member options.
Substack’s Twitter-inspired feature, Notes, continues to improve since its addition. Not only does it help creators share quick short-form posts, they can also include links, images, and videos. With restacks and threaded replies, it gives Substack the much-needed social dimension that creators and readers can take advantage of.
Substack has also recently added a discussion thread feature that lets you host conversations with your community. You can open these up to anyone on your list or limit it to paid subscribers.
Substack’s Discussion Thread feature
One of Substack’s biggest selling points is its huge, ever-growing creator network. Potential subscribers can explore different Substack newsletters and users can refer their subscribers to other, similar newsletters. Lots of Substack fans pin their growth on this feature.
Beehiiv originally didn’t have a feature to showcase likes and comments. Realizing that both contribute to subscriber engagement, Beehiiv added it in 2024 and has been honing the feature since.
For example, creators can choose where comments appear—either in a sidebar alongside the post or at the bottom of the page. Beehiiv also supports threaded discussions, allowing users to reply directly to comments and create conversation chains with up to five levels of nested replies. On the other hand, readers can also reply to the newsletters and sharing their thoughts privately with newsletter owners.
Beehiiv’s platform also has 3 specific ways you can grow your list:
- The referral program incentivizes subscribers to share your newsletter with their friends and family.
- You can “boost” other newsletters with paid recommendations (and they can do the same for you)
- You can cross-promote your favorite newsletters with the Recommendations feature.
Website popups are also available, so you can turn visitors into subscribers. Content Gate locks your content, prompting visitors to share their emails before they can read the rest. For a less intrusive approach, use Email Capture pop-up to keep your post fully-accessible while giving new readers a nudge to follow your newsletter.
Winner: Both platforms have a decent selection of audience engagement and community features. However, Beehiiv’s features are predominantly geared towards growing your list rather than engaging subscribers, so Substack wins this one thanks to all its community-focused features.
Substack: 2
Beehiiv: 1
Design and Flexibility
Substack’s loyalty to writers and its simplistic email editor means it’s not particularly flexible for newsletter owners who want to grow, expand, and experiment with different techniques.
It includes the core content creation tools you’d expect from a modern newsletter platform, such as:
- Rich text editor
- Pull quotes/callout blocks
- Image galleries and Unsplash integration
- Audio and video embeds
- Poll, survey, paywall insertion
However, there are very few (read: zero) email templates to work from—instead, all emails tend to look the same. Everyone has the same welcome page with a short blurb and a sign-up form, and your “unique” homepage is just a collection of past newsletters presented in a newspaper-style format. While it’s pretty basic, users can play around a little bit with the design by adding a logo and changing the background color.
Users can edit their Substack homepage by adding a logo and changing the background color.
Beehiiv’s design functionality is also pretty limited compared to other email marketing platforms with libraries of pre-made templates. However, they offer more options than Substack, including a few newsletter and website templates. Beehiiiv’s Newsletter Editor lets you choose your primary fonts, header styles, and email background colors, which provides an element of customization.
Beehiiv's email editor
The editor also comes with a few interesting extras that can be useful, such as a table feature that lets users build and create tables within the editor with just a few clicks. Blocks with your customized framework, including images, buttons, tables, and social media embeds are also available.
On top of that, Beehiiv has been busy incorporating AI tools to improve its visual editor. There’s an interactive AI chat assistant that can make changes to design elements like layouts, styles, and colors using simple requests like “make the buttons more rounded” or “increase the spacing between sections”.
Not design-related, but I think it's worth mentioning that some of the AI tools focus on improving content. They can tweak headlines, suggest topics, and arrange content effectively.
Truth be told, neither platform lets you create fancy, well-designed emails. This could either be a drawback or a blessing. The simplicity means you can focus on writing without getting bogged down in complex code or hundreds of design widgets.
Winner: Beehiiv wins this round. It has more customization options and AI support than Substack. Plus, you get a free website when you create an account.
Substack: 2
Beehiiv: 2
List Management
Substack has very limited subscriber data. You can see how many emails individual subscribers have opened, but not how they found you or where they subscribed.
There are no other segmentation capabilities other than subscription tiers. Instead of focusing on complex segmentation, Substack operates on the basic principle that only part of the content will be available for free users, while full content will be exclusively available to paid subscribers. You can’t send personalized messages to subscribers based on their interests or past interactions.
Tags can be used to sort out your readers, matching the messages they receive based on their interests. But, this involves a lot of manual work.
It is definitely not the right place for newsletter owners who want to build out automated sequences over time or nurture relationships with different types of subscribers.
On the other hand, Beehiiv has quite powerful segmentation capabilities!
You can group subscribers based on attributes and engagement, the form they signed up with, or even whether they responded to a survey with a particular answer. Criteria include location, engagement levels, and subscriber tags.
Once you’ve created segments (which you can update automatically or manually at set intervals), you can send emails to specific segments.
Beehiiv lets users segment subscribers based on attributes and preferences.
Segment-specific analytics is also available, which can help improve further audience segmentation.
Winner: There’s no doubt who the winner is here. Beehiiv wins hands down with its segmentation capabilities. It's definitely the right choice if this feature is relevant to you.
Substack: 2
Beehiiv: 3
Reporting
Substack offers a general stats tab that shows the most popular sources for subscribers (but not how each individual subscriber found you), and a top-level view of your previously sent emails.
On a newsletter level, Substack offers quite limited analytics compared to other tools. You can see three core stats: engagement rate, open rate, and click-through rate.
Then, you can also see a breakdown of who read your email, how they read your email (desktop vs mobile), and what links they clicked. But, for any newsletter owner who wants to grow and make data-led decisions, these are pretty rudimental.
Notes has its own stats to help you measure your engagement metrics. Podcasts and live streams also come with foundational analytics.
Beehiiv on the other hand offers far deeper reporting options.
As well as the standard metrics like open rates and click-throughs, you can dig deeper into more specific information about different groups of readers.. For example, you can see how many people who originally found you on X or Instagram opened your email, or how many people opened your email in different countries.
Engagement metrics are also pretty advanced, as it also includes important data such as read-time analytics. And since Beehiiv has a more robust monetization toolkit, its revenue analytics include ad performance, subscription revenue, and other monetization metrics that help creators identify growth opportunities and maximize earnings.
Last but not least, in keeping with the platform’s emphasis on AI, Beehiiv’s predictive analytics are useful for spotting trends and forecasting audience behavior.
Winner: Again, there’s a clear winner for this category. While Substack does give you all the basic analytics you need to see who’s opened and read your emails, Beehiiv’s advanced reporting feature dives much deeper into where your subscribers come from, helping you pinpoint your top performing channels.
Substack: 2
Beehiiv: 4
Pricing and Fees
Publishing on Substack is completely free, regardless of how many subscribers you have. However, once you start offering paid subscriptions, you’ll notice the fees are quite steep.
As mentioned before, the platform takes a 10% cut of each subscription as well as a transaction fee (usually 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction depending on the payment provider) and a billing fee for recurring subscriptions (which has actually gone up to 0.7% in the past year!). This is quite a hefty chunk of change but it can eventually be worth the payoff if you’ve managed to build a large audience on the platform.
For non-credit card payments, alternative methods apply. Stripe’s billing fee will still apply, depending on the country of registration. For example, with a US-based Stripe account, payments made through iDEAL incur a fee of 80¢ per transaction.
Beehiiv offers tiered pricing similar to other email marketing platforms.
Beehiiv pricing and plans
You can get a feel for the platform with the free Launch plan that generously allows up to 2,500 subscribers. You can access the majority of features on this tier except for the monetization capabilities, which include the ad network and referral program.
For growth capabilities and automations, you need to at least be on the Scale subscription ($49 per month for 1,000 subscribers, increasing to $69 for 2,500 subscribers, $89 for 5,000 subscribers, and $109 for 10,000 subscribers).
The Max and Enterprise subscriptions are best for companies with multiple newsletters, huge audiences, and the need for a dedicated account manager.
Winner: The platforms offer two very different pricing models and your choice really depends on what your goals are. That being said, I think Beehiiv pips Substack to the post with its free Launch tier that allows 2,500 subscribers and gives access to a ton of features. It's a better fit for creators who are serious about growing their audience immediately.
Substack: 2
Beehiiv: 5
Extras
Despite Substack’s simple interface and pared-back nod toward traditional journaling, it’s safe to say they are no longer “just” a newsletter or writing platform. The platform is becoming a complete creator ecosystem, continuously introducing new features.
You can add podcasts and livestream to your Substack account, record episodes directly in the editor and give readers the option to listen to your newsletter text instead of reading it. You can also add a discussion forum, integrate the Reader app which reads and summarizes longer articles and more.
Most features are still in their infancy and are, at the moment, still pretty basic, but they sure give us a glimpse of what Substack is aiming for in the future!
Beehiiv has also just launched a new feature for audio, so you can upload audio files to their editor. I’ve mentioned a few of other Beehiiv’s extras throughout this article, including its referral program (which is the only one that’s built into the platform and doesn’t need a third-party integration). There's also a library of useful guides and content on Beehiiv’s very active YouTube channel.
However, one of the most impressive bonuses is that users get an SEO-optimized website when they sign up, which takes seconds to set up (thanks to Beehiiv's AI). Its visual editor lets you build pages with sections for gated content, lead capture forms, YouTube videos, podcasts, and digital products, all tightly connected to your newsletter audience. Just keep in mind that it's designed less for traditional websites, and more for creator-led publications, newsletters, and media brands.
A website built with Beehiiv
Perhaps the most important extra for newsletter creators is the ability to automate email sequences. As we know, Substack doesn’t allow this, but Beehiiv on the other hand lets you create email flows for different situations. For example, if someone signs up for a certain form, you can send an automated welcome sequence based on that form.
In the visual editor, you can build out complex workflows based on specific triggers.
Beehiiv’s workflow builder lets you create automated email sequences.
Lastly, Beehiiv's growing suite of AI tools adds another layer of value to the platform. They will never replace a creator’s expertise and creativity, but they sure will help work more efficiently and make better-informed decisions.
In short, the additional extras on both platforms are very different.
Substack’s add-ons revolve around the community and building a creator platform, while Beehiiv’s are focused on growing and optimizing your email list.
Winner: It’s difficult to say who wins out here, but I have to choose Beehiiv, simply because I know how valuable automated sequences can be for creators — especially if you plan to sell products or services in the future.
Substack: 2
Beehiiv: 6
Who is the winner?
Beehiiv is our clear winner, with a 6-2 score!
Beehiiv is undoubtedly more technically advanced and powerful as a newsletter tool. Its features clearly feel more advanced and in line with other email marketing platforms while still offering the simplicity of a basic email editor. There are automation, segmentation capabilities and monetization features that Substack just doesn’t have. While Substack doesn't offer these because they don't make sense for the majority of its audience, it also makes it challenging for them to compete with Beehiiv’s features when comparing both tools directly.
> Read our detailed Beehiiv Review
On the flipside, remember Substack is still a popular option and good tool for sharing stories, and generating a discussion around your newsletter, which is awesome if you want a quick way to start sending emails and also interact with readers and fellow writers. However, keep in mind that it comes with important limitations, which we outline in more detail in our Substack alternatives guide. On top of that, many Substack users have been put off by the platform’s constant changes and social-style features. To make matters worse, some creators have reported bugs with serious consequences. Lucy Werner — who we interviewed a while ago — shared how she lived through a Substack nightmare, losing all her content and subscribers due to a major slip-up on the platform’s end.
Ultimately, the platform you choose truly depends on your goals. Everyone has different needs and they offer very different features.
But if you’re looking for a safe email marketing tool that offers more than just the ability to create an email newsletter, Beehiiv is the top dog and an excellent choice, especially for creators.
If you are looking for a Beehiiv alternative, Kit and Flodesk are two interesting options you may also want to check out. We also compare Beehiiv vs Kit here, and Kit vs Substack here.
I hope this article has helped you figure out what’s more suited for your newsletter project!
Have you used Substack or Beehiiv? Let me know in the comments about your experience – or if you have any other questions!
Email Marketing Ebook: Beginner's Guide
Sign up to receive your free copy and avoid common mistakes!
The authors
Learn more about us
We keep our content up to date
Jun 25th 2026: General update
July 10th 2025: General update
May 29th 2025: Updated Beehiiv pricing
December 12th 2024: Added Video
June 26th 2024: Updated with Beehiiv's new monetization features
Our Methodology
This article has been written and researched following our EmailTooltester methodology.
Our Methodology
