Substack vs Beehiiv
Substack and Beehiiv are both great newsletter providers. If you are wondering which platform is a better choice, you are in the right place.
I’ve analyzed both Substack and Beehiiv on previous posts, as well as used both platforms for the past years.
First, there are some key features both platforms share, then, we will analyze each platform unique characteristics to determine which one is the better alternative.
Table of Contents
Common characteristics
Both platforms offer some basic tools that every newsletter platform must offer.
Recommendations
Both on Substack and Beehiiv, newsletter creators can opt in to recommend your newsletter. This way, when someone subscribes to their newsletter, they get the chance to also subscribe to yours.
This feature is really effective to get new engaged subscribers, I’ve personally used it, and manage to get hundreds of new subscribers. All for free.
Premium subscriptions
Beehiiv and Substack both allow premium subscriptions. Which means people can pay a premium plan in your newsletter, in order to receive exclusive content.
Although both platforms offer this same feature, there are some differences.
On Beehiiv, you need to be on Scale or Max plan in order to enable premium subscriptions, but they won’t charge any extra fees.
On Substack, although you don’t need to be on a paid plan to enable it, it will take a 10% fee from every premium subscriber. Thus, if you have many premium subscribers, fees will take a large cut of your earnings.
Web hosting
Both platforms allow you to host your newsletter on their site, that way people can find your content online, without having to be subscribed.
Also, new subscribers can read old posts this way.
You can also use your custom domain. On Beehiiv this feature is free, while on Substack you have to pay a one time $50 fee.
Unlimited email sending
It doesn’t matter if you send one post a month or one every few hours, you’ll pay the same.
If you send on a weekly or daily basis, this characteristic is really important, as other newsletter providers charge by email volume, which can get really pricey.
Substack features
Substack is remarkable for how easy it is to grow your audience on this platform. Some of the key features are:
Notes
Notes is a unique feature no other platform has. This feature allows writers to connect with their audience easily.
It’s like Twitter but for newsletter owners and readers. You can share short posts as well as your articles.
Of course, you can reply to other people, like their posts, and even follow them. But if you truly love their content, you can subscribe to them. That way, you allow them to send you emails, straight to your inbox.
As you can tell, this is not a dead platform, actually there are over 20 million monthly users. As seen in the image above, just a simple post can reach thousands of people. Which can become an incredible boost for your newsletter growth.
Browse
This way you can find any article you are interested in. If you are interested in crypto, you can just search for that topic.
Or even if you want to go more specific, just search for: “Crypto analysis June 2024”. And you’ll find many articles related to that search.
If you write about relevant topics, chances are you’ll get a lot of new subscribers, thanks to this feature.
This is also an incredible tool if you are searching for new newsletters to read that are related to your interests.
Chat
Unlike other social media platforms, inside Substack, you can send DMs to people and chat with them.
This feature is amazing if you want to build lasting relationships with your readers.
Inbox
As mentioned at the beginning, you can follow people. Actually, most people will follow you first before deciding to subscribe.
But, what is following for? When you follow someone, you’ll receive notifications for everything they post, including notes and articles.
Furthermore, when you follow someone, substack will send you weekly updates with recommended posts and viral notes from the people you follow.
This makes your inbox one of the most important features, helping you tighten relationships with your readers. Even helping you convert your followers into active newsletters subscribers.
Beehiiv features
Beehiiv is remarkable for the variety of ways you can make money and grow your audience.
Boosts:
You can grow your audience and your revenue with this feature. Every newsletter, that’s on the premium plan, can pay other newsletters to drive them more subscribers.
This works in the following way: every time someone subscribes to your newsletter, they’ll get the option to subscribe to other newsletters, for each subscriber you drive to other newsletters, you’ll get around $3.
As well as using boosts to increase your revenue, it’s also a fantastic way to increase your reach, by paying other newsletters in order to bring you more subscribers.
Boosts work awesome, as there are strict rules in order to verify if a subscriber is suitable for a newsletter or isn’t. If it isn’t a great option, for your newsletter, you won’t have to pay for that subscriber.
Ad Network:
This is, perhaps, as important as boosts. Getting companies to place ads on your newsletter is a hard task, specially when you don’t have a large audience. Thankfully, Beehiiv Ad Network has a solution.
Anyone can ask to place ads on your post, that way hundreds of companies, like HubSpot are likely to include ads on your posts. Of course, you are free to choose who runs an ad or doesn’t. You have full control.
Moreover, Ad Network doesn’t care about your subscriber count, as they send at least an email ad proposal every month. And you can make a lot just from this.
Ad network pays for clicks, the more engaged your community is, the more you’ll earn. The average payment per click is around $2-3 dollars, just if 40 people click the ad, you’ll make $100 a post, not bad.
Automations:
I love the fact that you can automate anything you want with Beehiiv. You can automatically send emails to inactive accounts, or send promotional content to your most engaged subscribers.
The best automation you can have is one for when someone subscribes to get your content, and the other for when people are inactive. You can get a lot of people back, and those who are not interested can be cleaned automatically. That way you keep your email list clean.
Design Page:
Beehiiv lets you customize everything you want, from the landing page:
To your subscribe page:
And even your upgrade page:
Of course, you can also customize how every post looks like, as well as how the online version appears.
Substack vs Beehiiv Price
Substack price:
It’s FREE.
No matter how big your list is, you won’t pay a penny.
How does Substack make any money then?
As mentioned, paid subscriptions are a big deal on Substack. They make money for every new premium subscriber. For every new subscriber, Substack will retain 10% of the premium plan price.
If your subscription is $5, you’ll only relieve $4.5 for every new premium subscriber. It sucks, but taking into account that everything else is free, it’s definitely a great alternative if you don’t want to spend much money.
Beehiiv price:
Beehiiv recently changed prices, from a fixed monthly payment to a variable payment depending on the number of subscribers on your list.
If you just want to text how it works, it’s a great tool for up to 2.500 subscribers, above that, you’ll have to pay, starting at $39 with the Scale and $99 on the Max one (up to 1.000 subscribers). This price will increase depending on the number of subscribers to $299 on the Scale plan and $399 on the Max one (up to 100.000 subscribers).
If you want to see how much you’ll have to pay, you can check on the Beehiiv pricing page.
As you can tell, it’s not expensive when you have a small mailing list, but it does get pricey when you try to grow your newsletter beyond this.
