Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Which Is Best for Creators?

If you're looking for a platform to share content, grow an audience, and monetize your work, you've likely come across Substack and WordPress. 

Here’s the thing: Both can help you achieve these goals, but they take completely different approaches.

And if neither quite fits what you're looking for, beehiiv might be the alternative you need.

In this Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv comparison, we’ll break down how each platform handles content publishing, audience growth, and monetization—so you can decide which one works best for you.      

Key Takeaways:

1. Substack is a newsletter-first platform built for journalists and independent writers who want to grow a community around their content and monetize it through paid subscriptions.

2. WordPress (specifically WordPress.org) is a website-building and blogging platform suited for small to large businesses looking to design custom websites and access comprehensive blogging and content monetization tools. 

3. beehiiv is a newsletter-first blogging platform for content creators, digital solopreneurs, and media companies that want to build and scale profitable newsletter publications.

Why Trust Me?

Kawusara has 5+ years of experience running multiple WordPress websites. She’s also passionate about breaking down complex software concepts into plain, simple language and sharing them through engaging blog articles.

Table of Contents

• TL;DR — Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv

• Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Features Comparison

  • Setup & Ease of Use

  • Customization 

  • Content Publishing

  • Community Building

  • Growth Tools

  • Monetization Options

  • Analytics

  • Integrations

• Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Pricing

• Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Pros and Cons

  • Pros and Cons of Substack

  • Pros and Cons of WordPress

  • Pros and Cons of beehiiv

• Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Which Should You Choose?

• Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Frequently Asked Questions

TL;DR — Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv

Here’s a summary of how Substack, WordPress, and beehiiv’s features measure up: 

Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Features Comparison

Setup & Ease of Use

Setting up a Substack account is straightforward—go to the Substack website and create an account. 

Once you’re in, you’ll notice that the interface is clean and minimal, making it easy to navigate. Now all you need to do is create a new newsletter publication inside your account and start publishing content. 

Like Substack, beehiiv is built for simplicity. The setup process is just as quick—you can create an account and start publishing in about 10 minutes. 

There’s also an onboarding tour that walks you through the interface and shows where to find essential tools, making it easier to get started.

Unlike Substack and beehiiv, WordPress takes more effort to set up. 

Since it’s self-hosted, you’ll need to buy a hosting plan, domain name, and SSL certificate before you can install and access it.

At first, the WordPress dashboard seems simple, but it quickly becomes more complex as you navigate themes, plugins, and customization settings.

Getting a fully functional site up and running can take a few days (or weeks)—especially if you’re new to it—and you’ll probably need to follow a few tutorials along the way.

Customization 

Substack keeps things simple. Its newsletter and website structures follow a fixed layout, meaning you can’t add new elements or rearrange existing ones. 

However, you can customize your publication’s logo, background and accent colors, and typography to match your brand.

Like Substack, beehiiv follows a set structure for newsletters and websites, but it provides more customization options.

The Newsletter Builder lets you define how different content elements—such as headers, footers, tables, images, lists, and buttons—are displayed. 

Once set, these design choices apply to all your newsletters, ensuring a consistent, on-brand look.

Then there’s the Website Builder which lets you tweak your newsletter blog (aka the archive page) by adjusting the logo, typography, global colors, subscribe widget, and more.

Meanwhile, WordPress gives you complete freedom when building your website—you’re not locked into a rigid structure.

You can choose from thousands of themes to personalize the overall look and feel of your site. Plus, if you want to design your website pages, like the Home, About, and Blog pages, drag-and-drop page builders like Elementor, Divi, or Beaver can make designing easier.

Even with these page builders, you don’t have to start from scratch. There are thousands of high-quality templates available. So no matter your niche, you’ll find something that fits your needs.

If creating a unique website is a priority for your business, WordPress has all the customization options you’ll need to make it happen. 

However, you’ll need to be ready to invest time and effort to do it on your own, spend money on a premium template, or hire a WordPress designer if it all feels too overwhelming for you.

Content Publishing

If you’ve ever used Google Docs, you’ll feel right at home inside Substack’s content editor.

You can start writing your newsletter directly inside the editor, with all the formatting tools conveniently located in the top toolbar. The toolbar also lets you add images, videos, buttons, and polls to your content.

But Substack isn’t just for text posts. Unlike beehiiv and WordPress, you can also share audio posts (podcasts) and video posts with your audience.

Since Substack is a newsletter-first platform, every published post is automatically sent to your subscribers’ inboxes and stored on your Substack website. 

If you’ve enabled paid subscriptions (more on this in the monetization section), you can also control who gets access—whether it’s all subscribers or just paying members.

WordPress comes with a built-in editor for writing and publishing blog posts. It’s just as intuitive as Substack’s editor, but instead of a fixed toolbar, you use content blocks from the left navigation panel to add tables, images, audio, videos, and more.

Unlike Substack, WordPress lets you embed content from social platforms like YouTube, Spotify, Vimeo, X (formerly Twitter), and Reddit. Since WordPress is primarily a website and blogging platform, your content is published directly to your blog page.

While WordPress doesn’t have built-in newsletter functionality, you can find freemium plugins in the WordPress library to add this feature and send blog posts as emails to subscribers.

beehiiv’s content editor has a Notion-like interface—clean and simple with minimal distractions. 

To add a table, image, video, button, or file, hit the slash “/” on your keyboard to bring up the menu. The slash menu also lets you create multi-column layouts, embed social media content, and generate a table of contents.

That’s not all.

The built-in AI assistant can help with brainstorming, editing, and translating content into multiple languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. And if you need images, let the AI know and it’ll whip them up for you.

Another unique beehiiv feature is that it’s built for collaboration. If you’re working with a team, you can @mention members in comments, which will notify them via email to review and make changes.

Like Substack, beehiiv is a newsletter-first platform, so you can choose to send content only to subscribers’ inboxes, publish it on the web, or both. If you have paid subscriptions enabled, you can also restrict content based on subscriber tiers.

Community Building

Out of the box, WordPress only includes a commenting feature for blog posts.

However, its extensive plugin library allows you to add just about any community-building feature you need—social sharing icons, forums, 1-on-1 messages, group chats, member directories, and more.

beehiiv has basic community-building features. Readers can like, comment, and share your posts, and that’s pretty much it. 

If you’re more focused on creating content rather than managing a busy community, these features should do the job.

Meanwhile, Substack is designed for community building. 

In addition to likes, comments, and shares, it includes built-in tools to help creators interact with their audience:

• Chats allow for private, real-time messaging with your subscribers.

• Discussion threads let you start conversations with your community by asking questions or gathering opinions on a topic.

• Notes work almost like X (formerly Twitter), where you can share thoughts, newsletter highlights, and updates with both your audience and the entire Substack community.

Growth Tools

If your primary focus is to grow your audience via search engines, then WordPress has you covered.

Right out of the box, it’s designed to be search engine-friendly, helping Google, Bing, and other search engines to easily crawl and index all the pages and blog posts on your website.

Plus, WordPress supports powerful SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and RankMath, which help optimize blog posts to rank higher in search results.

In contrast, Substack makes it easier to grow your audience through its reader community—it’s similar to how Medium works. Substack readers are always looking to find and subscribe to newsletters that interest them. 

The Notes feature, which we mentioned earlier, also helps with discovery on the platform. You can attract new readers by consistently publishing your own notes or engaging with other creators’ Notes. 

Substack also has a recommendation system that allows creators to cross-promote newsletters. If a reader subscribes to a newsletter that recommends yours, they are likely to subscribe to yours as well.

beehiiv is built with growth in mind, so you can easily grow your newsletter audience over the short- and long-term. As a beehiiv creator, you get these growth tools at your disposal:

• Recommendation engine: Cross-promote your newsletter with other beehiiv creators.

• Referral program: Incentivize subscribers to refer new readers in exchange for rewards.

• Magic links: Generate a one-click subscription link that non-beehiiv users can share with their audience.

• Boosts: Pay other beehiiv creators to promote your newsletter directly in their posts.

Monetization Options

Unlike Substack and beehiiv, WordPress doesn’t have built-in monetization tools, but you can add plugins to turn your blog into an income-generating asset. 

Some common ways to make money with WordPress include:

• Ads: Display ads on your site and earn based on views or clicks.

• Memberships: Charge a one-time or subscription fee for access to exclusive content.

• Affiliate marketing: Promote products and earn commissions. Plugins like ThirstyAffiliates help manage links and track clicks.

• E-commerce: Sell physical or digital products directly from your site.

Meanwhile, Substack focuses on a single monetization model: paid subscriptions.

You can have three levels of subscription tiers: Monthly for subscribers who want to pay a monthly fee, Annual for those who want to pay annually, and Founding Member for those who want to pay an annual fee higher than the standard annual fee you’ve set. 

Depending on your monetization strategy, these paying subscribers get access to premium newsletter content and engagement features like comments, chat, and discussion threads.

That said, Substack’s content guidelines discourage creators who set up their newsletter publication for the sole purpose of promoting their products and services.

beehiiv has three main ways you can start monetizing your newsletter content:

• Paid subscriptions: Charge readers a subscription fee for access to exclusive newsletter content.

• Ads: Join beehiiv’s ad network and partner with brands like BetterHelp, Aura, and Intercom to earn on a cost-per-click basis.

• Boosts Marketplace: Get paid by other beehiiv creators for recommending their newsletters.

Unlike Substack, beehiiv doesn’t restrict external monetization. 

You’re free to promote your own products or affiliate links inside your emails. It even includes built-in email marketing tools like audience segmentation and automated email sequences to help you sell products and maximize your earnings.

Analytics

Substack provides basic analytics to track your newsletter’s performance. You can monitor total views, open rates, likes, and comments for each post.

It also tracks how your free and paid subscribers are growing over time, and the top channels where these subscribers are coming from. 

beehiiv offers similar insights but with a more detailed and visual analytics dashboard.

For example, data about your newsletter’s daily acquisitions, top acquisition sources, and subscriber locations are displayed visually, so it’s easier to spot growth trends at a glance.

Also, not only does beehiiv rank your top-performing posts across your newsletter publication, but it also compiles your top-performing links to help you improve your linking strategy for higher engagement and conversions.

WordPress doesn’t come with built-in analytics, but you can add plugins to track your site’s performance.

The go-to option is Google Site Kit, which connects with Google Search Console to show how your content ranks in Google Search and Google Analytics to track visitor behavior on your website—page views, top user locations, bounce rate, and conversions.

Integrations

Substack has limited integrations with third-party apps. It only offers two built-in options—Unsplash for stock images and Stripe for handling subscription payments. There’s no Zapier integration, no API access, and no way to connect with other tools.

beehiiv has more integrations than Substack, making it easier to connect with external tools. It has 12 native integrations with e-commerce, automation, and payment platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, Stripe, and Zapier. 

If your preferred software isn’t supported, you can still link it through beehiiv’s API and webhooks. 

WordPress is the clear leader when it comes to integrations. With over 54,000 free and paid plugins, there’s a high chance you’ll find an existing solution for any feature you need.

As we’ve seen so far, some of these plugins include drag-and-drop website page builders, community-building, monetization tools, and analytics. 

And if you need a custom plugin that doesn’t exist in the plugin library, you can easily find a WordPress developer to create one for you.

Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Pricing

WordPress is free, open-source software, but you’ll need to cover hosting, a domain name, and an SSL certificate to set it up. These costs typically range from $60 to $100+ per year.

If you use free themes, page builders, and templates, you won’t have any extra costs. But if you choose premium themes, plugins, or custom tools, your expenses can go up quickly.

Substack is also completely free to use, with no upfront costs or subscription fees. You get access to all its features at no charge. However, Substack takes 10% of your earnings, which can add up as your revenue grows.

For example, if you charge $5 per month and gain 100 paying subscribers, you’ll earn $500 per month—but Substack takes $50 each month ($600 per year). As your subscriber base grows, so does the fee. At 2,000 subscribers, you’d be paying $1,000 per month ($12,000 per year).

While this pricing model works well for beginners, it becomes costly at scale. This makes flat-rate Substack alternatives more appealing for creators looking to maximize their revenue.

beehiiv offers a free plan that lets you send unlimited newsletters to up to 2,500 subscribers.

For access to all of beehiiv’s growth and monetization tools, the Scale plan starts at $39/month for 1,000 subscribers. Unlike Substack, beehiiv charges 0% commissions. This means that whether you make $1,000 or $5,000/month, you’ll still pay $39/month.

The Max Plan starts at $99/month for 1,000 subscribers and includes up to 10 publications under one account, unlimited team seats, and the ability to remove beehiiv branding. 

The Enterprise Plan is custom-priced for accounts with over 100,000 subscribers.

Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Pros and Cons

Pros and Cons of Substack

Pros and Cons of WordPress

Pros and Cons of beehiiv

Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Which Should You Choose?

Substack, WordPress, and beehiiv share similar features, but they work best for different needs. Picking the right one comes down to whether you want to focus on blogging or newsletters, and how you plan to grow and make money from your content.

Substack is simple and free, making it easy for anyone to start a newsletter and monetize through paid subscriptions. It’s also great if you’re looking to build an engaged online community, share updates, and have real-time discussions with your audience.

WordPress’s extensive themes, templates, and plugins library lets you have complete control over your website’s design, functionality, and monetization. Also, its SEO features make it easier to rank your website and blog posts in search. 

Meanwhile, beehiiv’s newsletter-first blogging platform, collaboration tools, growth and monetization features, and flat-rate pricing make it a great choice for businesses looking to turn their content into a sustainable income stream. Plus, its email marketing tools allow you to promote your own products and affiliate offers, to maximize your revenue. 

Still not sure about beehiiv?

Try beehiiv for free and see if it’s the right fit for you.

Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Frequently Asked Questions

Is WordPress better than Substack?

WordPress is better if you want to build a dedicated website and blogging platform and explore multiple monetization options. Meanwhile, Substack is better if you want to start a newsletter and monetize via paid subscriptions. 

What is the downside of Substack?

Substack is primarily a newsletter platform, so website customization and blogging features are limited. Plus, paid subscriptions are the only built-in monetization option. So if you want more ways to monetize your newsletter, beehiiv is a better choice. And if you need advanced website building and blogging tools, WordPress is the best option.

Can you use Substack with WordPress?

Substack and WordPress serve different purposes—Substack is for newsletters, while WordPress is for blogging. The only way to use them together is by embedding a Substack signup form on your WordPress site, allowing your site visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.

Can Substack replace a website?

Substack can’t replace a website because it isn’t a website builder and lacks advanced blogging and SEO features. However, its blogging tools might be enough if your main goal is to send newsletters and keep an archive of them on your Substack website.