Find the newsletter platform that actually fits you.

Beehiiv is the best fit for most creators leaving Substack. It keeps 100% of your subscription revenue, where Substack takes a 10% cut plus Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, so on $1,000 of monthly paid subscriptions you keep roughly $130 more on Beehiiv. It supports native paid subscriptions from day one, runs a built-in recommendation network for organic growth, and charges no platform fee on what your readers pay you. Kit is the stronger choice if you sell digital products or run advanced tag-based automations: it stays free to 10,000 subscribers and charges only a 0.6% commerce fee. Ghost wins if you want full design control and self-hosted ownership with zero fees, at the cost of a steeper technical setup. There is no single winner. The right platform depends on whether you prioritise revenue share, automation, or ownership, which is exactly what our comparison measures.

Yes, and it is faster than most people expect. Every major platform imports your subscriber list from a CSV file, and your paid subscriptions transfer through Stripe Connect, usually in under ten minutes. Beehiiv and Ghost both offer one-click Substack importers that carry your free and paid subscribers together, including the Stripe billing relationship, so your paying readers are never asked to re-enter their card details. Your email list is yours: it is data you own and export, not something a platform can hold hostage. The one detail to plan for is your custom domain plus any automations or welcome sequences, which you rebuild once on the new platform. We document each migration path step by step on our comparison and migration pages, with the exact export and import screens, so you can see precisely what moves, what needs rebuilding, and how long each stage takes before you commit.

Deliverability depends more on your own sending habits than on the platform you pick. List hygiene, subscriber engagement, and proper authentication move your inbox rate far more than the logo on your sending tool. Every major platform sets up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for you, so the technical baseline is similar across Beehiiv, Kit, Mailerlite, and the rest. The real difference is control: shared-sending setups like Substack give you less influence over IP reputation than platforms that let you warm a dedicated sending domain. We refuse to publish single-account deliverability scores or bought seed-list numbers, because they do not reflect what your real list will see. We are building an opt-in inbox-placement panel and will publish per-vendor results with full methodology once the sample is large enough to be honest. Until then, each review summarises what real users report, never vendor-supplied figures.

Most platforms are free up to your first 500 to 10,000 subscribers, depending on the vendor: Mailchimp starts charging at 250 contacts, Mailerlite at 500, while Beehiiv and Kit stay free into the thousands. Above the free tier, the first paid plan typically runs $25 to $99 per month and rises with your subscriber count. Substack is the exception that looks cheapest and often is not: it charges no monthly fee, but takes 10% of every paid subscription plus Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, so the moment you monetise it can cost more than a flat monthly plan. The honest way to compare is total cost at your real list size and revenue, not the headline price. We track all 17 vendors' pricing every week from their official pages, so the numbers on OwnLetter reflect what each plan costs this month, not a figure copied from a 2024 screenshot.

We earn an affiliate commission when you sign up through some of our links, and we disclose it at every link and in full on our How we make money page. It does not decide our rankings. Our score comes from a fixed methodology applied the same way to every platform: we open a free account and test it, we test the paid tier, we run a hands-on audit across 53 feature data points, and we re-check pricing every week. Commission rate is never an input to that score. The proof is on the page: Substack, Mailchimp, and WordPress pay us nothing, yet they are scored on exactly the same terms as the platforms that do, and our trust ranking puts platforms that pay us zero at the top. We also publish the one-line basis behind every score, so you can check our reasoning against the data yourself instead of taking our word for it.