If you’re building an online brand or community, you’re likely using 3rd party platforms to do it. You may be sharing tips on Threads, growing a group on Facebook (people still do it) or growing a TikTok audience. Then there’s those of us who are deeply focused on building our lists. Time and again it has been shown that building a list is one of the most important foundational elements of building an online brand…that most creators aren’t doing. In fact, I’ve even recorded a podcast episode asking the question “Why Aren’t Black and Brown Content Creators Building Lists?” In recent years those of us focused on list building have finally gotten the tools that are meeting the moment that we’re in. Substack and Beehiiv are leading the pack with Kit and Ghost meeting the list and community building needs of creators. Today I’m going to share why the Substack vs. Beehiiv comparisons need to end in 2025.
Disclaimer
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Listen to the Episode
How to Make Money on Substack
The Course
Do you currently run a Substack newsletter and have decided to monetize your project? Are you looking for tips, ideas and strategy to help you make money with your newsletter? I’m launching a new course called “How to Make Money on Substack” be a part of the inaugural launch. Right now the course is available for pre-order for $37 instead of the regular price of $67. What will students get?
- Access to once a month live Q & A sessions
- A resource that you can reference as you’re building your revenue streams
- A community of people who are on the same journey as you-you don’t have to do it alone
That’s a crazy amount of value for $37 dollars. I’ve made thousands of dollars on Substack in the past couple of years, currently have 3,000 subscribers and Creators Getting Paid is hitting its stride. Become a part of the community and get started earning money with your creative work. Go to https://creatorsgettingpaid.com/substack-course to purchase the course. The course is coming soon.
Show Notes
Up until mid to late 2023, it absolutely made sense that people were comparing Substack and Beehiiv. Substack was founded in late 2017 and one of the most compelling aspects of the platform was the ability to build a list. Creators could have access to the people that they were connecting with and even download their list to different platforms. In a world of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and more-this was unheard of. As a person who left almost 12,000 followers on Twitter-I can’t even imagine what a difference it would have made to my business to bring that list of people, community members and yes-prospects along with me when I left the platform.
Then, in 2021 Beehiiv was founded by Tyler Denk and he leaned into building a newsletter tool that would help creators build and grow their lists and monetize within the platform mechanism of Beehiiv. He used his experiences and expertise developed at other companies and his time at Morning Brew to build something better.
And, for some reason, the two tools were compared to each other often. And as time moved on the benefits, opportunities and downsides of each platform began to be experienced by their users. And in 2023 Substack made a move that for me has changed the platform so profoundly that it doesn’t make sense to that they’re being compared. Here is my breakdown of the differences between the two platforms and why it doesn’t make sense to compare the two.
A Brief Breakdown of the Substack Platform
Substack empowers users to build and grow lists
- Primarily through using the Substack content and community eco-system
- The Substack eco-system allows you to interact and see what other creators are publishing. Think of it like a really social coffee shop where people are exchanging their favorite records, books, mixed tapes or playlists depending on how old you are.
- You can go “live” and host a livestream that anyone can interact with or is available only for your paying subscribers
- Collaborating with other creators is a key growth lever
- It’s easy to comment and communicate with other users of the platform
- Most importantly the benefit of Substack is 100% the opportunity to build community.
Major challenges with the Substack platform/For Substack
- Traditional email functionality-The type that you would have access to with a tool such as Kit, Aweber, Flodesk and Beehiiv.
- Customer service-Happily I haven’t had to interact with the team related to an issue occurring on the platform. Unfortunately, I’ve seen and spoken with creators who’ve been unhappy with how they’ve experienced customer service on the platform. I think that the fast growth of the platform has made it difficult for the team to dial in a responsive customer service mechanism. I actually think that User Experience could eventually be Substack’s downfall-because people remember how they were treated-unintentionally driving people off the platform. There’s still time to work on this and get it right but the window is closing.
- Monetization-I think that the platform would benefit from building in other ways to monetize people’s Substacks beyond just paywalled content. Here are some random suggestions:
- Have the creators contribute to a grant or scholarship fund and grant these funds to smaller users on the platform.
- E-Book or Regular Book Publishing-This is a HUGE opportunity and the audience is perfect for this type of product. They actually enjoy reading, long-form written content, books/zines and other content in that type of format.
- Substack Affiliate Program-I would love to be paid for affiliate referrals. I also think it would provide an opportunity for creators to design thoughtful content around what Substack actually is.
- Building connection with the Substack team/community-I would love to attend an in-person experience even if it’s a simple meetup in my hometown. Pay me to do it.
- Subscriber overwhelm-I often wonder how a person who is subscribed to 272 other newsletters will actually get the benefit of the work that I’m doing? How do I break through all of that noise.
A Brief Breakdown of Beehiiv
I did a lot of research on the Beehiiv platform and what it actually does. One thing that is very important to understand is that there is no community building within the platform. You cannot see what other people are building, for the most part publishers aren’t communicating with one another and there are no social media aspects to the platform. Think of Beehiiv as being in a co-working phone booth where you’re by yourself but it’s wired to connect with other creators in very specific ways if you feel like working with them.
Beehiiv does the following:
- Acts as an email service provider similar to Kit, Flodesk, Aweber
- Gives creators the ability to tag subscribers
- Build email funnels
- Allows newsletter builders to advertise in newsletters that they’ve identified as having an aligned audience
- Provides an opportunity to participate in growing ad revenue-without having to pitch or find ad partners (love this for beginners to monetization)
- Superb customer service-I’ve keep seeing comments around how responsive the team is to resolving customer problems. I think this is a core value and it seems like the team is heavily focused on this.
- Website capability
Beehiiv is currently the best newsletter building tool out there and it’s not even close.
Major Challenges of the Beehiiv Platform/For Beehiiv
- What exactly does Beehiiv do? I think that people are still having a difficult time understanding what Beehiiv does and that’s partly because of all of the comparisons to Substack. I do think that Tyler Denk (the Founder) and his team are doing a great job getting on podcasts, recording Creator Spotlight and working to get the word out about the product. I do think that they need more user reviews. Part of why I’m doing this comparison is that I had a hard time finding content generated by users about Beehiiv
- Let’s make other creator connections-There’s no community feature besides a pretty active X space (as I understand it) I’m not EVER going back to X so I would love to be in community I want an in-person experience even if it’s a simple meetup in my hometown. Pay me to do it.
- Who exactly is using Beehiiv? I know that Beehiiv has a huge number of users, but sometimes it’s unclear to me if that audience is diverse enough with enough projects that I could advertise in and connect with similar community members and grow my newsletter. To be blunt-My community is comprised primarily of Black, Brown and some allied community members. I sometimes wonder if there are similar lists being built on Beehiiv.
- Building Know Like and Trust-Your audience might not be as emotionally connected even if they are more aligned with your project. As a creator you have to make a much more compelling case as to why someone should say “yes” to your newsletter.
One important benefit to Beehiiv is that users have to continue to market and bring people to their newsltter vs. building a community
The Unexpected Final Conclusion
In my view Substack and Beehiiv are actually tools that compliment each other in supporting what a content creator is building. The challenge is the following:
- Should you use both?
- How to use both?
- The Terms of Service– will using both violate terms of service at some point in time? I don’t imagine that there will be an issue with Beehiiv because Tyler Denk, the founder, seems completely unbothered by the idea of users using Beehiiv with any other product. My read on Substack is that they might not be as excited about the prospect of users doing that.
- What about the chatter around Substack introducing access to sponsors? I still think that the platforms are evolving into two fundamentally different creator user experiences.
In fact, it’s starting to be easy to tell who has actually used both products by the talking points they’re sharing. Have you tried both platforms? What was your experience?
