Substack or Beehiiv?

I used to have Mailchimp (it is good for analytics and more targeted campaigns).

I wanted to increase my CTR by incorporating polls within the newsletter – Beehiiv and Substack have this option but for Beehiiv it is paid and at that time I didn't have profit for my emails so I switched to Substack where it is for free.

Spoiler alert: I used that poll feature on Substack only 2 times in my whole life. :D

TL;DR: If you do not have so much profit from this project at the moment, go for Substack and when you scale it up a little bit, you can switch to Beehiiv anytime. :)

I'm from the beehiiv team, but we only build features that are useful to the majority of creators. I can't think of a single major feature that we offer that's not incredibly useful. There's a lot, but that's because we're building a platform for you to run a full digital content business with.

I have both but if I am honest I am moving out of Beehiiv for several reasons,

It lacks support

I am the first to say that Substack is also lacking that but the number of bugs I encounter with Beehiiv is extreme. They have a slack channel and a support ticket system but their Slack channel goes silent for 90% of the issues. They tried boosting engagement once but stopped caring a few days later. They use it mainly for boosting their own social posts.

It lacks basic things that are crucial for my use case

This is a personal thing so I am sure people can do without but they don't have basic things like uploading more than 1 image at a time and because their platform is extremely laggy it takes forever (or it's impossible to be honest) to upload even 5 or 10 images.

You can't create a gallery or anything like it eg. slider, or carousel.

It eradicates the "Creative" group of users that want to use their platform to create a newsletter related to art, photography etc.

They have been focusing their marketing on Tech/Saas/AI creators

Not sure if they planned this or not but every time I see anything about Beehiiv they are basically promoting the above categories. That unfortunately shows in their user base. If you are in the creative space you can't find any site to partner with within their platform.

Overall they have an extremely tiny portion of the market so it's hard to find newsletters to cooperate with through Boosts etc. which brings me to the next point

Boosts is basically a sham

The amount of people trying to steal your money is crazy. This is not entirely on Beehiiv but people just use Boosts to get your money without giving anything by having bots sign up to your email. Since they need to verify 99% of the time you are getting your money back but it takes something like 20-30 days to get them back. Which means that if you have other qualified newsletters trying to boost your site they can't because you are spending all your money on fake ones.

Zero Ad Network

I can't be sure this is because of my niche or not but there are zero partnership opportunities. I am constantly getting the message (paraphrasing) "We are working on improving our ad network" etc.

Team is working on basically random things

They are working on a website builder that was initially going to be part of all paid plans. Once they launched this they made it available for the max plan. There is zero visibility on what the capabilities are. Everyone I talked to say that it basically just diluted the company value on the newsletter by building a solution that already exists from 100 different other companies.

Substack ain't better at a lot of those things but it's a lot better in terms of functions for my use case. You have to decide what's best for your.

eg. Chat, Podcast, Video, Community, functionality of the newsletter etc.