Beehiiv V Substack V Ghost: Feature Comparison

I’ve been running publications on Beehiiv, Substack and Ghost for four months, and I honestly thought I’d have a runaway favourite by now, but I haven’t.

All three platforms have pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, and I’d love to take the best parts of each to make the perfect platform. Unfortunately, that isn’t possible, so instead, I’m going to provide a rundown of the key features.

Hopefully, this will help you decide which platform is best for your needs.

Price

I’ve already created a detailed article on price, but in summary:

• Substack is free until you have paid subscribers, and then they take 10% commission (plus Stripe fees).

• Ghost’s most basic plan is $11 per month or $108 for the year for up to 500 subscribers.

• Beehiiv’s free plan gives you 2500 free subscribers, but you need their paid plan if you want paid subs - the cheapest is $49 per month or $517 for the year.

For more on pricing, check out this detailed article:

Customisation of site layout and design

How do the platforms stack up when it comes to customisation and branding options?

Ghost

Ghost is by far the best platform for design elements. You can choose from a range of customisable themes, add pages, and create a decent-looking website.

The basic plan gives you 18 themes to choose from, and once you’ve picked one, you can customise it even further.

It’s super easy to add pages too, which means your blog/newsletter can also double as a website. And, at $108 for the year, I think it’s excellent value.

Beehiiv

Beehiiv is the most limited when it comes to design. The free plan allows you to customise background colours, logo, fonts and such, but you can’t do much with the layout and you can’t add pages.

The Scale plan allows you to add custom pages, but there really isn’t much you can do with the page design, so it does look very basic.

That said, Beehiiv is rolling out a drag-and-drop website builder. It’s currently only available on the Max plan, but they have said it will be available on Scale in the future. I haven’t seen it in action, but it could make a big difference.

Substack

Substack does allow you to add custom pages, but design features are limited. There are a few options for the layout of your main page (although the differences are very subtle, as you’ll see below).

Within the different layouts, you can opt for grid or list for your posts, but the differences in layout aren’t drastic, so although you can customise colours, fonts and layout (to an extent), your Substack will look like many others.

So, in summary, if you want to add pages and have a little more control over the design of your site, Ghost is the one to go for (at least until Beehiiv’s web design feature is fully rolled out).

Customisation of domain, sender info and welcome email

As well as customising the design and layout of your site (and the newsletters), you might want control over the domain and welcome email.

Ghost

You can easily add a custom domain to host your site on. I set this up in a few minutes. However, you can’t customise the email address that your email comes from (or at least not on the basic plan).

My newsletter is called The Freelance Fairytale, and the domain is thefreelancefairytale.com so the email is [email protected].

Ghost doesn’t give you the option to customise your welcome email which I find odd. You can, however, customise a welcome page that will open after someone has subscribed.

Substack

You can add a custom domain to Substack for a one-off fee of $50, but I decided to stick with the free Substack domain.

By default, the sender email is derived from your publication name. So my Substack domains are newbrewthursdayuk.substack.com and writewithlisa.substack.com and the emails come from [email protected] and [email protected], respectively.

You can also customise your welcome email, and there’s an additional option to customise a welcome email for imported subscribers. If you turn on paid subscriptions, you also get welcome email options for paid and founding subscribers.

Beehiiv

Beehiiv lets you customise the domain for the site and for your emails (even on the free plan). I didn’t want to put my main website on Beehiiv, so I used their free domain, but I did customise the email sender info. So this site has the domain makeyourcopycount.beehiiv.com, and the address the emails come from is [email protected].

You can also customise the welcome email that goes out to new subscribers. Plus Beehiiv is the only one of the three platforms that allows you to set up email automations (only available on the paid plans).

I’ve created a guide on how to set up an automation, so I’m not going to go into detail here, but if automation and email sequences are important to you, then Beehiiv is the platform you need. That said, if you want a platform solely for setting up sequences, there are cheaper alternatives.

Community/chat features

This is where Substack probably stands out from the other two platforms. Substack is very much a community with a lot of social media-like features.

Substack

“Home” is essentially one big feed full of notes and posts from other publications. You can also have a chat feature on your publication (which can be open to anyone or just paying subscribers). There are also options for sharing videos and going live.

In my opinion, this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. If you are engaging with other Substack writers, sharing notes, recommending the publications and so on, it can help you generate subscribers.

The downside is that the platform is very noisy, and there are lots of “share your Substack below” type posts where people are simply trying to get engagement.

Ghost

Ghost doesn’t have chat features within the platform but can be integrated with Slack if you want to build a community.

There are also referral opportunities where you can recommend other publications, and they can recommend you.

Ghost has an “Explore” feature which allows you to browse other Ghost publications (and you can add yours too).

Beehiiv

When you upgrade to a paid plan on Beehiiv, you do get access to their Discord channel, which is full of tips, advice and guides. They are also very active in the Reddit Beehiiv community, where they will answer questions about using the platform.

However, there is no in-platform chat feature for you to offer your members (although you could easily set one up on Discord or Slack).

Beehiiv’s paid plan also gives you boost and ad opportunities so you can recommend other newsletters (and you can pay to boost yours).

Growth and monetisation features

One thing all three platforms have in common is that they allow you to offer paid subscriptions so you can make money from your publication. They also have features to help you grow and make money in other ways.

Both Beehiiv and Susbtack offer referral opportunities, where you can offer rewards to people who help you get subscribers. You choose the rewards and the tiers - for example, if they get you three new subscribers, they get a free book or if they get you ten, they get a free consultation. Ghost can be integrated with First Promoter to enable you to track referrals and manage affiliates.

All three platforms also have “recommendations” features where you can recommend other publications to your subscribers, and they can recommend yours to theirs.

Substack

As mentioned in the section above, the community element of Substack is helpful for getting your publication in front of more people, but I actually find their marketing a little aggressive.

When you send people to your Substack home page, they don’t see the home page straight away. Instead, they get a pop-up to subscribe like this:

You can avoid people getting this pop-up by sharing links to any page other than your home page or by linking directly to a post, but even then Substack tries to push people to the app:

Plus, they encourage you to recommend other publications as soon as people subscribe. If you don’t change the setting, your new subscribers will immediately be given the option to subscribe to a load of other publications before they’ve even had chance to read yours.

I just find it all a bit too pushy, and I can see people being put off by it if they aren’t familiar with Substack.

Another thing to bear in mind with Substack is that they make money from your paid subscriptions. This means they aren’t keen on you using the free version to try and push paid services on other sites. In fact, they state in the terms that you can’t use it for this purpose.

That doesn’t mean you can’t promote other products and services through your publication (lots of people do). But you’re more likely to get away with it if you are also offering paid subs so Substack can at least make a little bit of money too.

One thing Substack does offer that can be useful is the ‘Pledge’ feature. This is switched on by default when you set up a Substack account, so you’ll need to turn it off if you don’t want it.

The Pledge feature gives free subscribers the option to pledge their support by committing to a paid subscription if you decide to offer one in the future. This can be a good way to gauge interest in a paid option before launching it.

I used the pledge feature as an “early-bird” option when Write with Lisa was launched. I offered a discounted price to anyone who pledged their support before the paid membership went live.

Ghost

Ghost probably offers the least in terms of support in growing and monetising your newsletter, but you aren’t limited in what you can promote. It does also allow you to add products to your pages or posts:

And you can add different pricing tiers to your subscription options (Substack limits you to monthly, annual and founding members).

You can also offer discounts, special offers and free trials and get a link for tips and donations.

Beehiiv

Beehiiv offers the most in terms of monetisation, but only on the paid plan. If you’re sticking to the free version, you can promote paid products and services in your content (and share affiliate links), but the paid plan gives you access to more options within the platform.

With paid subscriptions, you can offer monthly and annual plans, one-time purchase options, and pay-as-you-feel (name your price) options. You can also add offers, discounts, or free trials (with customised upsell email), and crate customised paywalls for your newsletter and site.

But paid subs aren’t the only feature on Beehiiv’s paid plan. You can also utilise their boost and ads features.

Boost allows you to boost other people’s newsletters and receive a small commission fee for each subscriber you generate. Ads allow you to run paid ads in your newsletters, which generate a small commission based on each click.

You can proactively seek out these opportunities (as shown in the above image), but as part of your subscription to Beehiiv, they will also offer you boost and ad opportunities via email. Within two weeks of upgrading to the paid plan, I was offered my first boost and my first sponsorship/ad opportunity (despite having less than 100 subscribers).

If you take advantage of these monetisation features, you could use them to cover the cost of your Beehiiv plan (depending on your subscriber numbers and engagement).

Mobile apps

Ghost doesn’t offer a mobile app, but any content on your site will automatically be optimised for mobile.

Beehiiv and Substack do offer apps, but in very different ways.

Beehiiv

I’ve mentioned it before, but I still find it super cool that Beehiiv offers you your own customised app for your subscribers to download.

Here’s a very crude walk-through I recorded of me downloading the app for this publication and opening it on my phone.

If you want to test this out for yourself, you need to be a subscriber and be reading this on a mobile. Then just go to the top right corner, log in and select the ‘Add App to Home Screen' option.

I appreciate that having an app full of my updates might not be particularly useful (unless you want to revisit the guides at some point). But for other types of content, this app could be great for subscribers. For example, if you share recipes or workouts or step-by-step guides and so on, the app makes it easy for your subscribers to access your content on the move.

Substack

Substack doesn’t offer a customised app, but your subscribers can download the free Substack app (and Substack heavily encourages this, as mentioned earlier). This means your subscribers can view your content, join the chat, and follow your notes on the app. They can also receive notifications when you post something new.

The feed does look a little different on the app - much more like a social media platform. The home feed will be a mix of content from publications they have subscribed to, notes from people they have followed, and content that is popular with other users. This means it can be quite noisy.

However, there is a tab that allows you to view content only from publications you have subscribed to and you can filter this by all, media, paid and saved content. You can set this as the default screen when you open the app (rather than the home screen), which makes it easier to find the content you are most interested in. To do this, open the app, go to ‘settings’, then ‘display’ and select ‘inbox’ in the ‘default tab’ section.

You can also write posts and notes in the app. I often share notes in the app, but prefer writing longer posts on the desktop version.

So which is right for you?

All three platforms can be used to host a blog or newsletter. All three have drag and drop features when you are writing posts to make it super easy to add images, links, buttons and so on.

All three allow you to add content as web-only, email-only or both. All three allow you to have free and paid subscribers. And all free generate code so you can add subscribe forms to your website.

But as well as the similarities, there are some differences, with each platform having advantages and disadvantages. I haven’t covered every single feature in this article, but I think I’ve covered the main things you’d be interested in when choosing your platform.

Which is right for you will depend on what your goals are for your publication.

I offer 90-minute consultations, so if you would like some bespoke advice on choosing the right platform, setting it up (and using it), and planning your content strategy, why not book a session here for only £150.

Thanks for reading.

My publications

• On Beehiiv - My Content Marketing Experiment (this is the one you’re reading now)

• On Ghost - The Freelance Fairytale (a newsletter for freelancers and small business owners)

• On Substack - New Brew Thursday (a newsletter dedicated to beer)

• On Substack - Write with Lisa (a newsletter for anyone who writes)