Substack vs WordPress: Which One is Better? (Pros and Cons)

Comparing Substack and WordPress can help you decide which platform is best for your needs. Both allow you to publish content online and sell memberships, but they offer different features and flexibility.

Substack is known for its simplicity and built-in audience. But, we think that WordPress offers more features and full control over your website’s design and functionality based on our experience with creating membership subscriptions.

In this article, we will break down the pros and cons of Substack and WordPress to help you determine which platform is better suited for your content and business goals.

Since this is a detailed comparison of Substack vs. WordPress, here’s a quick table of contents:

Overview: Substack vs. WordPress

Before we start with our in-depth comparison of the two popular subscription platforms on the web, it’s important that we cover the basics and highlight what makes these platforms stand out.

What Is Substack?

Substack is an online newsletter publishing platform. It allows you to easily send newsletter emails to your subscribers.

You can have both paid and free subscriptions, and Substack receives a share of all your paid subscription fees. In addition to newsletters, you also get a basic website and podcast hosting.

With paid subscriptions, you can think of Substack as a Patreon alternative for newsletters.

However, Substack doesn’t have all the functionality of a typical blogging platform or a content management system.

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder. It allows you to easily make any website you want. It works seamlessly with almost all popular email newsletter services to send newsletter emails.

You can have both free and paid newsletter subscriptions. Plus, you can use it to make a podcasting website, eCommerce store, membership website, and more.

Note: When we say WordPress, we are talking about self-hosted WordPress.org and not WordPress.com. For more details, see our article on the difference between WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com.

What to Look For in a Subscription Platform

Choosing the right platform for your subscription offering is the most important decision you’ll make. Once you start growing, switching platforms will be harder, and you may lose users in the process.

Here are a few basic pointers that you should keep in mind when choosing your subscription platform.

• Ease of Use – How easy it is to get started on your own
• Costs – How much it will cost
• Integrations – Can you connect it to other apps to grow your subscriber base?
• Data Portability – Can you move your data away?

Keeping these parameters in mind, let’s take a look at Substack vs. WordPress in detail.

Ease of Use

Most publishers are not professional website designers or marketers. Choosing an easy-to-use platform helps them focus on their strengths and leave the technical details aside.

Substack: Ease of Use

We found Substack to be incredibly easy for bloggers to use. Even absolute beginners can use it quite comfortably. All you have to do is sign up, and you will be able to start working on your content right away.

Substack is highly focused on writers and easy publishing (similar to Medium).

It comes with a minimalist editor where you can create newsletter emails, write articles, and upload podcast episodes.

You can choose whether you want an article to go to paid subscribers or everyone on a post-by-post basis.

Even though writing a post is incredibly easy, the default substack editor does not allow much creativity. There are fewer customization choices and formatting options.

WordPress: Ease of Use

WordPress is open-source software, which means you install it yourself and manage updates and backups. While this may sound technical, WordPress is incredibly easy to install and use.

You’ll need a domain name and a web hosting account to install WordPress.

We recommend using Bluehost, which is one of the biggest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.

They are offering WPBeginner readers a free domain name and a generous discount on hosting. You can get started for $1.99 per month.

Bluehost will automatically install WordPress for you, and you can simply log in to your WordPress dashboard in your account.

WordPress comes with an intuitive and powerful block editor, which is a pleasure to use.

This allows you to create content on your website and design it any way you like.

To lock your premium content behind a paywall, you’ll need MemberPress. It is the best WordPress membership plugin that allows you to easily restrict content based on a user’s subscription plan.

Unlike Substack, where you can have only one subscription plan for all users, you can create multiple subscription levels with different benefits.

To send newsletters, you’ll need to connect WordPress to an email marketing service. We recommend Constant Contact, which is the best email platform for small businesses.

However, with WordPress, you can choose any email newsletter platform like Brevo (formerly Sendinblue), Drip, Kit, Mailchimp, and more.

For details, see our article on how to create a paid newsletter in WordPress, which has step-by-step instructions for beginners.

Winner: Substack

Cost of Running a Paid Subscription Service

The next important factor to consider is the cost of running a paid subscription service. Higher costs and low profitability could make it challenging to scale your business as you grow.

In our experience, many online business ideas die because they are unable to make a profit, which slowly destroys the motivation to keep going.

Actual Cost of Substack Paid Newsletter

You can send the free newsletter to your free subscribers. This helps you grow your audience and build a subscriber base. However, having only free subscribers is not profitable in the long run.

You can remedy that by adding a paid subscription option for your newsletter. This allows you to send exclusive content to your paid subscribers.

Substack allows you to use Stripe to accept payments. Stripe is available in select countries. You cannot receive payments if you are not located in one of those countries.

Both Substack and Stripe take a cut from each transaction. Substack charges 10%, and Stripe charges 2.9% + 30 cents.

If you charge $10 per subscriber, then the Substack + Stripe fee will be 1.59.

This may not sound like much, but let’s suppose you have 100 paid subscribers, each paying $10 per month. You’ll pay $159 each month and $1908 each year.

Cost of a Paid Newsletter Using WordPress

WordPress allows you to choose your email platform, website hosting, plugins, and tools. This gives you control over the costs, and you can decide how much you will spend on your paid newsletter subscription.

You can get website hosting with a free domain name via Bluehost for just $1.99 per month.

Pricing for email platforms varies. For instance, Constant Contact plans start at $20 per month and vary based on the number of contacts.

Similarly, you can start for free with Brevo (Sendinblue), which allows you to send up to 300 emails daily. After that, you can upgrade to their lite plan, which allows you to send up to 10,000 emails per day for $25.

Apart from email marketing, you will need MemberPress to sell subscriptions. Their basic plan costs $179.50.

You can use Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net as your payment gateway. These payment gateways will have their fees.

In the long run, WordPress gives you more freedom to cut down costs and increase your profits.

For more details, see the costs involved in making a subscription/membership website.

Winner: WordPress

Integrations Available to Grow Subscribers

You cannot just publish content and wait for readers and revenue to come in magically. You will need to reach out to your target audience to build the momentum.

In order to promote your paid newsletter, you’ll want to use third-party tools to grow your business. Let’s see how Substack and WordPress perform in this category.

Substack Integrations

Substack is an all-inclusive platform with limited to no integrations.

It comes with limited SEO features built into the platform. You can connect your custom domain name, Google Analytics tracking ID, and social media profiles from the settings page.

To grow your subscribers, you will need to promote your Substack on social media platforms. This can make it tricky for new writers to start earning right away.

The platform does not allow you to customize your designs, use custom fonts, or use formatting and design options to engage users.

Limited integrations also limit your potential to access other tools that may help you convert more visitors into paying subscribers.

We found Substack quite limited in terms of growth tools. We feel that a new publisher could benefit more if they already have a decent following on social media sites.

WordPress Integrations

WordPress is an open-source platform with thousands of third-party integrations available. These allow you to easily increase the number of subscribers to your paid newsletter.

With more than 59,000+ free plugins and thousands more paid integrations, WordPress gives you the freedom to use any tool you like to grow your business.

Here are some of the popular integrations and add-ons that will help you grow your paid newsletter:

• All in One SEO for WordPress – A complete SEO solution for WordPress websites that helps you improve your website SEO and get more free traffic to your website from search engines.
• OptinMonster – The best conversion optimization software on the market that helps you convert website visitors into paying subscribers.
• WPForms – The best form builder plugin to easily create newsletter signup forms and contact forms, with its own payment and email marketing integrations.
• MonsterInsights – An easy-to-use Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It shows where your visitors are coming from and tracks how users interact with your website.
• SeedProd – Need a quick landing page for a new campaign? SeedProd lets you easily design landing pages for your website. It comes with beautiful templates and an intuitive drag-and-drop design tool.

Need even more extensions? Look at our pick of the essential WordPress plugins for any new business.

Winner: WordPress

Data Portability

Both WordPress and Substack allow you to download your data and use it elsewhere.

Substack Data Portability

Substack makes it easy to download all your posts, pages, and email list subscribers. To do so, go to the Settings page and scroll down to the ‘Export your data’ section.

From here, you can download all your Substack data to your computer.

Your newsletter email subscribers list is in CSV format, which allows you to easily import subscribers into other email services. However, most email services require users to opt in again, and many users may not re-subscribe.

For the post data, you can use the Substack importer for WordPress to import the data into a WordPress blog or website.

WordPress Data Portability

WordPress allows you to export all your data using the built-in export tools. This includes all your posts, pages, comments, users, etc.

Simply go to the Tools » Export page to download your export file.

Your newsletter subscriber data is safely stored with your third-party email service provider. Almost all reliable email companies let you easily export your email list, which you can use elsewhere.

Once again, if you import your email list into a new email service, they may require users to opt in again.

Winner Tie

Conclusion: WordPress vs. Substack: Which One Is Better?

WordPress is better than Substack in terms of flexibility, scalability, and profitability.

It allows you to grow your newsletter differently and unlocks access to much better tools and extensions to do just that.

Plus, you are not just limited to paid subscriptions for monetization. You can extend your WordPress site to sell merchandise, display ads, add paid forums, and more.

On the other hand, Substack is better if you only want to easily send newsletters to non-paying subscribers and host a free blog.

You will not have the same flexibility as WordPress, and if you want to switch to a paid newsletter, you will pay a significant amount to Substack.

If you don’t want to use WordPress but still want a more affordable Substack alternative, we recommend Kit. It has all the powerful features without Substack’s predatory pricing, which takes 10% of your newsletter revenue.

We hope this article helped you compare Substack and WordPress. You may also want to see our tutorial on creating an author website in WordPress or take a look at some examples of the different types of websites you can create with WordPress.

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