Last Updated: February 2026

Substack vs WordPress vs beehiiv: Which Platform Is Best for Creators in 2026?

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 managing multiple WordPress sites and has tested Substack, beehiiv, and WordPress side by side for this comparison. She’s also passionate about breaking down complex software concepts into plain, simple language and sharing them through engaging blog articles.

Table of Contents

• Substack vs WordPress vs beehiiv: Which Platform I …

  • 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: 2026 Pricing B …

    • 1. WordPress

    • 2. Substack

    • 3. beehiiv

      • Launch Plan (Free)

      • Scale Plan (Paid Growth Tier)

      • Max Plan (Advanced)

      • 🏢 Enterprise Plan

  • How the Pricing Models Compare (2026)

  • 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?

  • How to Migrate to beehiiv

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

    • Is Substack good for SEO?

    • What percentage does Substack take?

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.

To give you a quick sense of speed: Substack takes roughly 5 minutes to go from signup to your first published post. beehiiv takes around 10 minutes, thanks to the onboarding tour that walks you through the interface. WordPress can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks, depending on how comfortable you are with hosting, themes, and plugins.

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 beehiiv Website Builder, which gives you a drag-and-drop visual editing experience to build and customize your newsletter's public-facing website. You can adjust the logo, typography, global colors, subscribe widget, section layouts, and more— all without touching code. Since the website builder is a powerful standalone feature, it's worth exploring in depth if design flexibility matters to your brand.

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 WordPress newsletter 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 it can generate images on demand too. This is a standout advantage: neither Substack nor WordPress offers a native AI writing assistant. WordPress requires you to install a separate AI plugin to get similar functionality.

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.

What the list above doesn't fully capture is beehiiv's most powerful growth advantage: dual distribution. Every post you publish on beehiiv goes out as a newsletter to your subscribers' inboxes and simultaneously publishes as an SEO-optimized blog post on your public website. WordPress wins on search engine reach. Substack wins on built-in reader community. beehiiv gives you both: inbox delivery and organic search traffic from a single piece of content and a single workflow.

For creators who want to grow an audience without running two separate platforms, this is the killer differentiator.

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 gives you four distinct ways to :

Paid subscriptions: Charge readers a monthly or annual fee for access to premium content.

Ad Network: Partner with premium brands like BetterHelp, Aura, and Intercom. beehiiv matches you with advertisers and you earn on a cost-per-click basis.

Boosts Marketplace: Get paid by other beehiiv creators every time one of your readers subscribes to their newsletter through your recommendation.

Direct sponsorships: Manage your own brand deals and sponsorship placements directly inside your newsletter.

What makes this especially compelling is beehiiv's 0% revenue share. Substack takes 10% of everything you earn from paid subscribers. At scale, that number gets painful fast: with 2,000 paid subscribers at $5/month, Substack takes $1,000/month — $12,000/year — on top of Stripe's processing fees. beehiiv charges $0 in commissions, whether you make $1,000 or $10,000/month.

Unlike Substack, beehiiv also places no restrictions on external monetization. Substack's content guidelines discourage creators from using their newsletter primarily to promote products or services. beehiiv welcomes it — you can promote your own products, affiliate links, courses, or anything else inside your emails. It even includes built-in email marketing tools like audience segmentation and automated sequences to help you sell more effectively.

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 3D 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 offers A/B testing and Subscriber Segmentation, Website Analytics as well as 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 natively supported, you can still connect it using beehiiv’s API and webhooks—making it easy to bridge the gap for tools without built-in integrations.

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: 2026 Pricing Breakdown

1. WordPress

WordPress itself is free and open-source. However, you’ll need essential services to run a live site:

• Hosting: usually $60–$120+ per year for basic shared hosting.

• Domain name: typically $10–$20/year.

• SSL Certificate: often included with hosting or free through Let’s Encrypt. 

Optional Costs

• Premium themes: ~$50–$100+

• Plugins & page builders: $20–$100+/year each

• Developer customization (if needed): varies widely

✅ Best For: Full control, custom design, and SEO flexibility

❌ Consider: Can get more expensive as you add features and tools

2. Substack

Core Pricing Model:

• Free to start: There is no monthly subscription or upfront fee to publish.

• But once you charge for paid subscriptions, Substack takes 10% of subscriber revenue.

• On top of that, Stripe payment processing fees (~2.9% + $0.30 per payment + 0.7% billing fees) apply. 

Example:

• If you charge $5/month: Substack keeps $0.50 (10%).

• After Stripe fees, creators typically receive significantly less than the full $5. 

No subscriber caps: free newsletters can be unlimited in size (but fees apply only after you monetize). 

✅ Best For: Beginners testing paid newsletters with no upfront cost

❌ Consider: Revenue share increases with earnings — more expensive at scale

3. beehiiv

beehiiv’s pricing is tiered and flat-fee based (with 0% platform commissions on paid subscriptions — Stripe fees still apply):

Launch Plan (Free)

• $0/month

• Up to 2,500 subscribers

• Includes unlimited sends, custom domain, analytics, audience segmentation, API access, and core tools to build and send newsletters. 

Scale Plan (Paid Growth Tier)

• Starts at ≈ $43/month (billed annually) for ~1,000 subscribers

• Pricing increases with subscriber count — for example:

  • ~$61/mo at ~2,500 subs

  • ~$96/mo at ~10,000 subs

  • Higher tiers up to ~$290/mo at ~100,000 subs (approx.) 

Features include:

• Paid subscription monetization

• Referral program

• Ad network access

• Automations

• Advanced analytics

• Surveys and polls 

Max Plan (Advanced)

• Starts at ≈ $96/month (billed annually) for ~1,000 subscribers

• Higher pricing tiers as subscriber count grows (e.g., ~$131/mo at ~2,500, ~$193/mo at ~10,000, etc.) 

What it adds:

• Remove beehiiv branding

• Unlimited team seats

• Priority support

• Up to 10 publications

• Audio newsletters, direct sponsorship storefronts, and more 

🏢 Enterprise Plan

• Custom pricing for large publishers (often 100,000+ subscribers)

• Dedicated onboarding & support

How the Pricing Models Compare (2026)

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.

How to Migrate to beehiiv

Switching newsletter platforms doesn't have to mean starting from scratch. beehiiv makes it straightforward to bring your subscribers, paid revenue, and content with you, whether you're leaving Substack or WordPress.

Migrating from Substack: Export your subscriber list as a CSV directly from your Substack dashboard, then import it into beehiiv under Audience → Import Subscribers. If you have paid subscribers on Stripe, beehiiv can transfer those subscriptions to preserve your recurring revenue — no re-subscribing required for your readers. Past newsletters can be republished as beehiiv posts to maintain your content archive and SEO equity.

Migrating from WordPress: Export your subscriber list using your existing email plugin (Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc.), then import the CSV into beehiiv. Migrate your highest-performing posts to rebuild your content library. Because beehiiv includes a built-in website builder, you can also migrate your site itself — eliminating WordPress hosting costs, plugin maintenance, and security updates in one move.

beehiiv's migration support resources walk through each step in detail.

Substack vs. WordPress vs. beehiiv: Frequently Asked Questions

Is WordPress better than Substack?

It depends on your goals. WordPress offers more customization, SEO control, and monetization flexibility through plugins, but requires managing hosting, security, and updates. Substack is simpler and free to start, with built-in newsletter and community tools, but takes 10% of paid subscription revenue and limits customization. For creators who want the newsletter simplicity of Substack with the publishing power of WordPress — plus built-in monetization at 0% revenue share — beehiiv combines the best of both approaches.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 are separate platforms that don’t directly integrate. The only way to use them together is embedding a Substack signup form on your WordPress site. However, this creates a fragmented workflow — you’re managing two platforms, two content workflows, and two sets of analytics. beehiiv eliminates this problem by combining newsletter publishing with a built-in website and blog, so everything lives in one platform.

Can Substack replace a website?

Substack provides a basic web presence with an archive of your posts, but it cannot replace a full website. It lacks custom pages (About, Contact, Services), advanced design customization, e-commerce, SEO control, and third-party integrations. If you want a professional web presence alongside your newsletter without managing a separate website, beehiiv’s built-in website builder with drag-and-drop templates provides a more complete solution than Substack’s basic archive page.

Is Substack good for SEO?

Substack has limited SEO capabilities. You cannot customize meta titles, descriptions, or URL structures, and the platform provides no SEO tools or analytics for search performance. WordPress is the strongest platform for SEO with plugins like Yoast and RankMath. beehiiv sits in between: it offers built-in SEO with auto-generated sitemaps, customizable meta tags, clean URLs, and mobile-first design. Its unique advantage is dual distribution — every newsletter also publishes as an SEO-optimized blog post, giving you both inbox and search traffic from one content workflow.

What percentage does Substack take?

Substack takes 10% of all paid subscription revenue, plus Stripe processing fees (approximately 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction). At scale, this becomes significant: if you earn $10,000/month from paid subscribers, Substack takes $1,000/month ($12,000/year). Both WordPress and beehiiv charge 0% revenue share on subscription earnings. beehiiv’s flat-rate pricing means you pay the same monthly fee whether you earn $100 or $100,000 from your newsletter.