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Substack vs. Patreon vs. beehiiv: The Best Platform for Your Content
Which Newsletter Platform Wins in 2025?
Nicola Vaughan
March 25th, 2025
Email newsletters are a powerful way of keeping in touch with subscribers.
With 4.48 billion email users globally in 2024 (Statista), email is clearly a force to be reckoned with for driving awareness of your brand and building a loyal following.
But with a plethora of subscription-based newsletter platforms available, how do you know which one to choose?
In this guide, we’ll analyze Substack vs. Patreon vs. beehiiv to see which content creation platforms win in regards to platform fees, usability, and content ownership.
We’ll also examine these platforms to determine the best monetization tools for creators in 2025.
Table of Contents
Substack vs. Patreon vs. beehiiv: Overview of Platforms
You may have heard of Substack, Patreon, and beehiiv in your search for a killer email newsletter platform. These tools are popular with creators looking to send out regular content to their audience, with a focus on growing their subscriber lists, too.
Here’s a deep dive into each newsletter platform to give you a better idea of what these platforms are and how they work.
What Is Substack?
Substack is a subscription-based newsletter platform with an emphasis on empowering creators to launch paid newsletters. This enables creators to have a direct line of contact with their audience, while also monetizing their content.
Writers, journalists, and content creators alike can use Substack to share regular pieces of content with their audiences. This content could take the form of articles, newsletters, or video content -- or whatever the creator wants their audience to see.
Substack’s clear focus is encouraging the production of exclusive content that is only accessible to paid subscribers. In doing so, creators work to curate a loyal community of supportive readers, rather than large email lists of disengaged users.
What Is Patreon?
Patreon is a membership platform that allows creators to offer exclusive content to their subscribers via tiered memberships.
Users (or patrons) can financially support their favorite creators by using Patreon and, in return, receive content including:
Art
Podcasts
Videos
Articles/Newsletters
Patreon helps creators build a loyal community around their content while establishing an income by monetizing through fan support.
Patreon users can set up tiered membership options, giving supporters access to a range of exclusive content depending on how much they want to contribute financially.
What Is beehiiv?
beehiiv is a newsletter platform designed for creators looking for advanced email marketing tools and flexibility.
Creators can use beehiiv to grow subscriber lists with both paid and free subscription options, allowing subscribers to choose how much they want to engage with their favorite creators.
There are also different monetization options with beehiiv, such as sponsorship opportunities and the functionality to recommend subscribers to other publications for a fee.
With more of a focus on scaling email lists than Substack or Patreon, beehiiv encourages creators to build on their loyal following to create larger lists of engaged users and ultimately earn an income from their content.
Key Differences Between Substack, Patreon, and beehiiv
In the next section, we’ll compare the key differences between Substack, Patreon, and beehiiv. This should help you understand how the tools differ when it comes to important features such as monetization, audience engagement, platform charges, creative control, and growth tools.
Monetization Models and Revenue Streams
Substack, Patreon, and beehiiv have different ways of enabling users to monetize their content and create long-term revenue streams for their businesses.
Let’s start with Substack. Creators can make money on Substack by creating a paywall for their content, charging a set amount to subscribers in return for access to paid newsletters.
Patreon does this slightly differently, offering patrons a range of membership tiers to choose from. This enables creators to offer different levels of content to their community, in return for financial support.
For example, one tier could provide regular articles for a set fee per month, while another tier could provide direct contact with a creator for an increased fee.
beehiiv excels when it comes to monetization, offering creators more avenues for income than Substack and Patreon.
Users can set up paid subscriptions for their content using beehiiv (just like Substack and Patreon), but there’s no need to stop there.
beehiiv’s Ad Network allows creators to feature well-known brands within their content and earn money for doing so.
Creators retain complete control over this process, only featuring brands that are relevant to their business to maintain a balance between monetization and high-quality content.
Another monetization opportunity offered by beehiiv is via their Boosts program.
beehiiv Boosts lets creators create an additional revenue stream by referring their subscribers to similar publications on beehiiv, allowing creators to create a passive income stream for their business, which is measurable and easy to configure in one single platform.
Audience Engagement and Community Building
Audience engagement and community building are vital for curating an engaged, loyal audience.
The three platforms we’re comparing offer different ways of engaging audiences, each with its focuses and drives.
Substack focuses on encouraging creators to directly engage with their audience via email.
While new content will be sent to subscribers automatically via email, creators can also choose to send content directly to specific sets of subscribers, adding more opportunities for community building and engagement.
Patreon focuses on community-driven content through memberships. This involves engaging your community by offering different membership levels, with increasing levels of contact for increased fees.
Patreon allows users to choose how much they wish to engage with a creator while giving patrons the ability to build different sets of communities within their larger audience.
beehiiv handles engagement and community building a little differently. They offer more of a focus on email growth to build lists of engaged audiences from the offset. This is done via the ability to recommend new subscribers via beehiiv Boosts and encourages subscribers to recommend your newsletter to friends via the beehiiv Referral program.
Creators can further engage their audiences with beehiiv by using marketing strategies such as interactive content, automated welcome series, and strategic landing pages.
Subscription Fees and Platform Charges
The question at the forefront of your mind is probably the following: How much does each platform cost, and how is this managed?
We’ve compiled a quick data table to show the fees associated with each platform. This should allow you to easily compare the costs involved in each content-subscription tool and how you’d be expected to pay these fees.
We can draw the following conclusions from the data table above about the fees associated with each platform:
Substack: Substack charges a flat 10% on paid subscriptions, plus Stripe transaction fees. This makes payments to Substack simple but doesn’t allow for different pricing models depending on usage needs.
Patreon: Patreon offers two membership levels, allowing users more control over their platform.
beehiiv: beehiiv offers four different pricing models, giving creators different options depending on their user needs.
Content Ownership and Creator Control
It’s super important for creators to retain ownership and control over the content they produce.
Obviously, content platforms differ when it comes to how much customization they provide users and whether or not creators can feel safe and secure when posting their content online.
Substack operates on a “you own what you create” policy. This ensures that Substack users own content published to Substack, as well as subscriber lists that can be exported at any time.
However, Substack is limited when it comes to creator control, with limited customization options on design and marketing possibilities.
Patreon also ensures that creators retain full ownership of all content posted on their platform. They also provide increased levels of creator control via membership interactions, allowing creators to engage with supporters via direct messages, chats, and polls.
However, while creators own the content they post on Patreon, they do not own their Patreon page, limiting certain aspects of control such as user experience and customer service.
With the range of membership levels available, beehiiv offers complete customization and control over all email content. Creators can elevate their content with custom backgrounds, a range of fonts, colors, sizes, borders, and effects, plus full ownership over all content posted on the beehiiv platform.
Many built-in design tools offer creators advanced creative control without the need for complex coding experience, and their AI assistant allows users to further refine both content and design.
Check out this case study about GRIT Capital to learn about a company that tried Patreon and Substack but found beehiiv to be the best platform for them.
Analytics and Growth Tools
In the 10 years that I’ve been working in the digital marketing space, I’ve learned that successful content is nothing without granular analytics.
You could create the best content out there, but it’s impossible to grow a campaign without analyzing your results.
Substack offers basic insights into subscriber growth via metrics such as subscriber numbers (free and paid), annual revenue, traffic levels, and subscriber retention. However, more advanced insights such as user behavior would only be found by manually connecting your Substack site to a Google Analytics account.
In terms of growth tools, Substack allows for subscriber referrals, recommendations, and CTAs (Calls to Action) to increase subscriber numbers.
Patreon allows creators to track income and membership stats such as total members, downgrades, upgrades, and cancellations to better understand the growth of your subscriber lists.
However, creators can’t track open rates from notification emails users receive or how users behave on the platform.
With a recently launched Recommendations tab, Patreon allows users to highlight their favorite creators to make it easier to link fans with creators.
Other growth tools Patreon offers include automatic promotions to encourage members to upgrade their membership, plus product discounts to encourage supporters to purchase from your digital shop.
beehiiv was built with analytics at the forefront of its design, with its 3D Analytics tool being reported as “the most comprehensive newsletter analytics tool in the game” (Growth Daily).
By separating data by posts and subscribers, beehiiv users can learn different metrics from their campaigns, including the basics such as open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rates, and user behavior, but also the following more advanced metrics:
Conversion Rate: The percentage of users that complete a conversion goal from a newsletter (e.g., make a purchase)
Lifetime Value: The total dollar value of a subscriber based on their subscription length
Churn Rate: The number of users who leave over a certain period of time
Weekly/Monthly Active Users: The number of users who have engaged with your newsletter over a week or a month
Inactive Subscribers: Subscribers who haven’t engaged with your content in a certain amount of time
Share Rate: The percentage of users that share newsletters with others -- this can be super useful if you’re looking to increase your referral rate.
There is a range of growth tools available when using the beehiiv system. You can use the Ad Network or beehiiv Boosts mentioned previously, plus they offer advanced A/B testing functionality, which can help to determine which content performs better (e.g., subject lines).
Pros and Cons of Substack, Patreon, and beehiiv
Below we’ve compiled some quick data tables to show you the pros and cons of each platform to help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of Substack, Patreon, and beehiiv at a glance.
Pros and Cons of Substack
From the below table, we can draw several conclusions about Substack as a newsletter platform.
Substack is quick and easy to set up and doesn’t require any coding knowledge to begin sending out regular newsletters. Substack users can easily monetize their newsletter with direct payment received via their subscribers, and creators can produce an unlimited number of publications.
Substack is also a well-known platform. This can make it appealing for subscribers as they trust it and may already know how to use it.
The disadvantages to Substack are that users are limited when it comes to design customization.
You can’t change the overall look of your Substack. Plus, it’s difficult to personalize your publications with names for example. This can affect open rates and the personability of your newsletter.
Also, there is no automation with the Substack platform, which makes sending a welcome series, for example, impossible.
In addition, Substack can get expensive if you have a large subscription list, with the platform taking a minimum of 10% of all revenue made on Substack.
Pros and Cons of Patreon
Patreon also has several pros and cons as displayed in the table below.
Patreon produces membership revenue, which makes monetization nice and simple for creators. It’s very user-friendly and has a wealth of integration opportunities such as Zapier, Wix, and Discourse. This makes it super easy to have all of your newsletter activities in one place.
A big selling point for Patreon is that it’s designed to help creators build a community based on support and connection. The platform makes it easy for people to support their favorite creators, and keep informed on their latest work/activities.
Unfortunately, creators have limited control over their Patreon page, which can affect user experience and customer service. There is also a lack of branding and customization features on the platform, making it difficult for creators to distinguish their page from similar artists.
Patreon can also get expensive when you get into the top-tier features, with the platform taking a flat rate of 12% of creator revenue.
Another point to bear in mind is that Patreon does require a fair bit of management when it comes to managing multiple tiers of supporters and ensuring that you’re providing what you promised when patrons sign up.
Pros and Cons of beehiiv
There are many pros to the beehiiv platform, being built with growth and analytics in mind.
beehiiv is designed in an intuitive, user-friendly way, with a whole host of monetization opportunities ranging from beehiiv Boosts to sponsorship opportunities via the beehiiv Ad Network.
beehiiv also puts a large focus on growth, encouraging users to make use of subscriber referrals and providing the ability to recommend subscribers from other like-minded creators.
The advanced analytics dashboard makes it easy to decipher data and make strategic decisions for your email marketing moving forward. Plus, creators can even create their own website within beehiiv to keep their digital marketing all in one place.
One point to bear in mind with beehiiv is that using it may be a steep learning curve for beginners or those new to the email marketing game.
While it’s very user-friendly, it may take novices a little longer to learn how to use beehiiv to its full capacity. However, they do have many support pages and a Chatbot Assistant to help users along the way.
Use Cases for Substack, Patreon, and beehiiv
While there are pros and cons to each of the platforms we’re comparing in this guide, it’s clear that each tool is more suited to certain creators, depending on your goals and focuses.
Let’s look at what types of creators each platform suits. This should help you choose which tool is best for your brand.
Substack is a good choice for writers and newsletter creators who are looking to build direct relationships with their audience.
It’s easy to build a community around exclusive content and allows creators to communicate via newsletters, direct messaging, and comment sections.
Monetization is also made easy, by upgrading users to a paid subscription in return for regular content.
Patreon for Artists and Membership-Based Creators
If you’re an artist looking to connect with supporters via a membership-based platform, Patreon may be the best tool for you.
Patreon was built with artists, podcasters, and creators in mind, giving them a platform for exclusive content that cannot be accessed elsewhere.
By using a membership model, Patreon makes it easy for creators to earn money from their work and connect with fans who are keen to supporting them financially in return for “sneak-peeks” into their favorite creators.
beehiiv for Email Marketing and Newsletter Growth
Subscriber growth is crucial to many creators, which is where the beehiiv platform excels.
beehiiv’s clear focus on email marketing provides creators with many avenues for subscriber growth, allowing users to expand their reach and grow their business as a whole.
beehiiv creates opportunities for creators to leverage powerful email marketing strategies to nurture subscriber lists via segmentation and A/B testing, all the while sending engaging, interactive newsletters.
beehiiv is also more useful for creators looking for a plethora of ways to monetize their content, producing passive income streams that are always being improved.
Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!
Which Platform Is Best For You?
To determine which newsletter platform is best for you, it’s important to consider what features are a must-have and where you’re happy to compromise.
Monetization opportunities and budget are often factors that distinguish these platforms. We’ll delve a little deeper into these points in the next two sections.
Choosing Based on Your Monetization Goals
How you’d like to monetize your newsletter is likely to inform which type of platform is best for you.
Substack is great if you want a tool that provides simple, paid subscriptions. Revenue is generated each time a new subscriber upgrades to a paid subscription, and Substack deducts 10% as their fee.
Patreon may be more appealing if you want to offer supporters a range of membership options. Perhaps you want to tier your content offering, with higher paying patrons receiving more of your time.
beehiiv is the clear winner if you’re looking to pair a few different monetization options with a focus on email marketing growth. You can pay-wall your content via paid subscription plans, as well as use sponsorship opportunities and Boosts to earn money from your email marketing.
For more monetization ideas using beehiiv, check out this blog!
Budget and Subscription Model Considerations
Budget is always an important consideration when it comes to choosing a new marketing platform. Subscription models such as Substack and Patreon can get expensive as your subscribers grow, with them taking a percentage of all income that you generate.
Substack takes a flat 10% of all earnings, plus billing fees, while Patreon takes either 8% or 12% depending on which plan you choose.
beehiiv provides a more bespoke service, with a range of plans available based on your budget and requirements.
beehiiv generally gives creators more bang for their buck, without being penalized for large subscriber lists -- especially when paired with a range of monetization opportunities.
Take a look at this case study to see how LA Magazine is saving $32,000 annually after switching to beehiiv.
Substack vs. Patreon vs. beehiiv: Conclusion
Now that you know the key points of Substack, Patreon, and beehiiv, we hope that you’ve found the ideal platform for you.
Here are some key takeaways from this piece:
Consider your goals around monetization, audience engagement, and content creation when choosing a platform.
Weigh up the pros and cons of each tool to decide which strengths appeal to you and where you’re happy to compromise.
Think about who you are as a creator and what you need from a platform. Substack is great if you’re a writer, Patreon is ideal for artists, and beehiiv is best for long-term growth and monetization.
If beehiiv has caught your eye with its wealth of monetization opportunities and long-term growth focus, start a free, 30-day trial today.
No credit card is required to get started, and your trial will end upon upgrade.
This is a really useful way to see if this platform works for you and lets you make use of many great features such as paid subscriptions, the beehiiv Ad Network, email automation, and much more.
Sign up with beehiiv now and start growing your mailing lists today!
Google’s People Also Ask Questions
What is better than Substack?
beehiiv is a better newsletter platform than Substack if you’re looking to focus on monetization and subscriber growth.
There are also better opportunities with beehiiv for analyzing data, customizing your content, and focusing on email marketing as a whole.
What are the downsides of Substack?
Some downsides of the Substack platform include:
Expense: Substack takes a 10% cut of all produced revenue, which can get costly if you have a large subscriber list.
Limited customization: You can’t make your newsletter your own in Substack, unlike other publications such as beehiiv where you can use custom images and fonts, etc.
Minimal automation features: Substack doesn’t offer much in the way of automation, making it difficult to set up a welcome series, for example.
What do people use Substack for?
People use Substack for publishing and distributing content, to either free or paid subscribers. It allows creators to establish a direct link with their readership, while also making an income via paid subscribers.
Can I link Substack to Patreon?
You can’t directly link Substack to Patreon. However, you can import a podcast RSS feed from Patreon to Substack by getting an RSS feed link from your Patreon podcast and importing this link into Substack.
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