Trying to decide between Substack vs WordPress to create your own paid blog/newsletter or website?

Substack and WordPress share some similarities in that both tools give you the ability to launch your own free or paid newsletter/blog.

However, there are also some pretty big differences between them when it comes to pricing, features, extensibility, and more.

If you want to make the right choice for your situation, understanding those differences is essential. That’s why we created this post.

Below, we’ll compare WordPress vs Substack in the following essential areas:

• The basic approach of each tool
• Ease of use and setup process
• Content creation experience
• Flexibility/what types of experiences you can build with each tool
• Extensibility
• Pricing and costs

Let’s get into it…

How Substack and WordPress approach things: Basic introductions

Before we get into the more detailed comparison, we think it’s useful to start with some basic introductions to each tool and how each tool approaches helping you create a website/newsletter.

If you’re already familiar with these tools at a basic level, you can skip ahead to the next section. But if you’re just getting started, this section will cover some basic foundational details about each tool.

Substack

Substack is a service that lets you easily create a blog with an associated email newsletter. You can publish blog posts on your own site and those blog posts will also automatically go out to your subscribers via email.

Substack also includes built-in tools to monetize your blog/newsletter with paid subscriptions. You can have some content that you make available to all visitors and some content that’s only available to paid subscribers.

In addition to text content, Substack also recently added the ability to create a podcast and open a subscriber chat.

That’s pretty much it for Substack, though. It does not let you create a fully functioning website. It does not let you add a store to sell additional physical or digital products. It does not let you deliver online course content. It’s just a simple combination of a blog and a newsletter, with a few extra options.

WordPress

WordPress is an open-source content management system that lets you create any type of website.

You can use it to create a blog and newsletter just like Substack. But it also lets you go much further than Substack and add other functionality to your site, too.

You can add non-blog pages, custom web forms, course content, ecommerce functionality for physical or digital content, membership functionality, discussion boards, event calendars, and lots, lots more.

Basically, Substack lets you build one type of website, while WordPress lets you build any type of website.

Ease of use and setup process

In general, both Substack and WordPress are easy to use, and you do not need any special technical knowledge to use either platform.

That said, Substack’s one-time setup process is slightly simpler and faster than WordPress’s one-time setup process.

Let’s go through it…

Substack

With Substack, getting started is as simple as registering for an account. This is probably one of the most attractive things about the platform, especially for non-technical users.

You just register, import your email list (if you already have one), and then start writing. The only potentially technical part of the process is if you want to use your own custom domain name instead of a free Substack subdomain.

To manage your site, you’ll get a dashboard that looks something like this:

To configure your site, you get a settings area like this:

WordPress

With WordPress.org, the one-time setup requires a little extra effort. However, it’s still something that pretty much anyone can handle. What’s more, it really is “one time”. So while it might take you an extra 30 minutes in the beginning, you’ll be good to go after that.

The basic process goes like this:

1. Purchase web hosting from one of the many providers out there.
2. Install the WordPress software on your hosting. While this might sound technical, most hosts make it super easy. Usually you just need to click a few buttons.
3. Point your domain name to your WordPress site.

Here’s an example of what a WordPress installer tool might look like – it’s usually very simple.

Once you install the software, you can manage your site from a dashboard that looks like this:

If that setup process still sounds overwhelming to you, you can also use WordPress.com, which pretty much makes creating a WordPress site as simple as registering for an account. However, if you use WordPress.com, you’ll need to go with at least the Business plan so that you can install custom WordPress plugins like Gravity Forms.

Content creation experience at Substack vs WordPress

Once you’ve set up your site, both tools offer non-technical content editors to help you write posts and create content on your site.

Substack

With Substack, you only get one content creation editor.

You can just click and type to write text content, and then you also get some basic formatting tools.

While it doesn’t offer much in the way of advanced design options, it does make it easy to do things like embedding various types of media, as well as adding buttons. There’s also an option to add a code block, which gives you some extra flexibility.

WordPress

The default WordPress editor makes it similarly easy to write and format text content.

However, it also goes a bit further when it comes to giving you more advanced design and layout options. For example, you can create multi-column layouts, add backgrounds to sections, insert all different types of content, and more.

If you want even more design flexibility, you can also install a type of plugin called a “page builder”, which will give you a completely visual, drag-and-drop design experience. We’ll talk a bit more about plugins in one of the next sections.

Flexibility: What types of websites can you build?

In addition to the setup process and content creation experience, it’s important to consider the level of flexibility Substack and WordPress each offer in terms of adding more/different features to your website.

Even if your current plans are to just have a newsletter/blog, those plans could certainly change in the future.

For example, maybe you want to create some custom web forms to learn more about your audience or connect with them in different ways. Maybe you notice that your readers are interested in a certain topic and you want to publish a paid course on that topic. Or, maybe your readers are asking you to start selling merch and you want to create a simple ecommerce store.

In all of these situations, having some extra flexibility can really come in handy, even if those features aren’t on your radar right now.

Substack

Substack only does newsletters/blogging. If you ever want to branch out from that, you would need to use a different tool. For example, you might use Shopify for your merch store or Teachable for your online course.

This approach can work, but it will add costs and complexity to your setup. You’ll need to learn multiple platforms, pay for multiple platforms, integrate multiple platforms, etc.

WordPress

Unlike Substack, WordPress is a multipurpose website builder that you can use to build pretty much any type of website.

It can handle a simple blog/newsletter setup like Substack, but it also lets you do a lot more if you ever need to.

Here are just a few examples, though this is by no means a complete list:

• Online course
• Membership website
• Ecommerce store
• Discussion board
• Social community
• Portfolio/brochure website

Again, even if you don’t want to add those types of features right now, having the ability to add them in the future will give you a lot more room to scale and grow.

Extensibility

Building on the previous section, let’s also talk about the options that you have for extending your site when you use Substack or WordPress.

When it comes to website builders, there are two main types of extensibility:

• Themes/templates – These let you change the design of your website by adding new layouts and design options.
• Plugins/add-ons/extensions – These let you add new functionality to your site beyond what’s in the core tool.

Substack

With Substack, there’s really nothing to talk about here because Substack offers very little in the way of extensibility.

First off, the idea of a marketplace of themes/templates to choose from doesn’t really exist with Substack. While you get some basic options to customize your logo, colors, etc., you’re largely limited to the preset design options that Substack offers.

If you subscribe to other authors’ Substack blogs, you’ve probably noticed that they all look mostly the same. This lack of a true theme/template marketplace is a big reason why.

There’s also no such thing as a Substack plugin/add-on to add functionality to your site. What’s more, you can’t even add third-party JavaScript code embeds, which is something that even limited website builders like Google Sites allow.

There are positives to this total lack of extensibility, namely in the simplicity that Substack offers. But if you ever want to do anything “more” or “different” with your site, you’ll be quite limited if you use Substack.

WordPress

WordPress is on the completely opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to extensibility. While Substack offers pretty much zero extensibility, WordPress is the most extensible website builder out there.

To start, you can choose from thousands of free and premium themes to quickly switch up the design of your site.

You can also access tens of thousands of plugins to add all kinds of different functionality to your site. These could be small tweaks or large changes, such as adding full ecommerce functionality.

For example, the Gravity Forms plugin lets you create pretty much any kind of web form using a drag-and-drop builder and connect your forms to a whole bunch of third-party services. You can create contact forms, newsletter subscription forms, payment forms, user registration forms, and lots more.

Pricing/costs of Substack and WordPress

WordPress and Substack have very different approaches to pricing/costs. Here’s a quick summary, but we’re going to dig into this in more detail below:

• Substack has no one-time setup fee (for the most part) and no fixed/monthly costs. Instead, you’ll pay a percentage of each paid subscription forever. That is, you’ll pay 10% of all of your subscription revenue for as long as you use Substack. If you’re a fan of Shark Tank, you can kind of think of it like one of Kevin Leary’s perpetual royalties.
• WordPress has several associated fixed costs for purchasing hosting, a theme, and plugins/add-ons to extend your site. However, you get to keep all of your revenue and there are no percentage/variable costs.

These differences generally result in the following dynamic:

• Substack is cheaper when you’re just getting started and/or you only have a very small number of paid subscribers.
• WordPress is cheaper over the long term, especially if you have a lot of paid subscribers.

Let’s break it down in more detail…

Substack pricing

Substack is 100% free to get started with. You can just register for an account and start posting right away.

The only time you would need to pay a fixed fee to use Substack is if you want to use your own custom domain name.

To do this, you need to pay a one-time $50 custom domain fee to Substack. You’ll also need to purchase your domain name, which is usually around $15 per year.

While that’s the only fixed/one-time fee associated with Substack, that definitely does not mean Substack isn’t making money from you.

If you want to accept paid subscriptions, Substack will charge you 10% of your subscription revenue forever. This 10% is on top of payment processing fees from Stripe, which are “2.9% + $0.30” per transaction for card payments plus an extra 0.7% for Stripe Billing.

If you have a lot of paid subscribers, this can add up to a substantial cost over the long term.

With that being said, one advantage of Substack’s billing approach is that you don’t need to pay anything for free readers/subscribers. You’ll only pay when/if you start getting premium subscriptions. This means you have zero monetary risk for creating a newsletter. If you fail to get any paid subscribers, the only thing you lose is the time that you spent creating content.

WordPress

With WordPress, you’ll have some fixed/upfront costs that you’ll need to pay to make your website regardless of whether you have any subscribers yet.

We can’t give a single number that will apply to every situation, but here’s a basic idea of what to expect:

• Web hosting – You could get started for as little as $5 per month, but this could easily scale to $30+ per month depending on your traffic and the quality of service that you want.
• Domain name – Usually around $15 per year.
• WordPress theme – Free themes are totally fine, and there are many to choose from. So you don’t need to pay for anything here, unless you want to use a premium theme.
• WordPress plugins – This is the most variable cost. If you want to make WordPress like Substack, you should probably expect to spend somewhere in the $60-$150 range at the absolute minimum, though it might be more.

However, if you plan to sell paid subscriptions, the advantage of WordPress is that you’ll be able to keep 100% of the revenue from all of your subscriptions (excluding the standard ~2.9% credit card processing rate that’s unavoidable if you want to accept online credit card payments).

If you grow to have a lot of subscribers, the long-term savings of not having to give up your subscription revenue can significantly exceed whatever flat costs you pay for your WordPress site.

How to make WordPress like Substack

If you like the idea of the flexibility and extensibility of WordPress, but you still need the core features that Substack offers, let’s end things with a quick guide on how to make WordPress like Substack.

There are a few key features that you’ll need to add to WordPress:

• An easy way to subscribe users to an email list.
• An easy way to automatically send a newsletter email to subscribers when you publish a blog post.
• The ability to set up subscription payments for users who want access to premium content.
• The ability to restrict access to premium content so that only active subscribers can view that content on your site (and receive those emails).

We can’t cover the entire process because that’s a little outside the scope of this post. However, you can add all of these features to your site using pre-made plugins or tools.

Here’s a quick rundown on what tools you might need:

• An email marketing service or plugin – You can use pretty much any email marketing service, including SaaS tools or native WordPress plugins. For example, you might choose Mailchimp.
• Gravity Forms – With Gravity Forms, you can easily set up both free and premium subscription options. Start by creating a simple email subscription form for free users. Then, for premium subscribers, you can build a payment form that automatically handles the entire process – charging their chosen billing method, creating a user account with access to premium content on your site, and adding them to a separate email list reserved for paying members. This way, only subscribers with active payments receive exclusive premium updates and content.
• Content restriction plugin – While Gravity Forms can create a user account for paid subscribers and assign them a certain user role to indicate that they’re paid subscribers, it doesn’t handle actually restricting content on your site to those users. To add that, you can use any one of the free content restriction plugins, such as Content Control or the Gravity Wiz add-on for Gravity Forms, Submit to Access.

Final thoughts on Substack vs WordPress

If you want to create a paid newsletter, Substack offers the simplest way to get started. However, that simplicity comes at a substantial long-term cost because you’ll need to give up 10% of each paid subscription forever.

WordPress has slightly larger upfront costs, both in terms of investing the time to learn and set up the platform, as well as for purchasing any tools/plugins that you need.

However, the advantage of this approach is that you get to keep 100% of your subscription revenue, which will more than pay for those upfront costs, especially if you’re able to attract a lot of paid subscribers.

Given that, WordPress makes better long-term sense for most newsletters from a financial perspective.

Plus, you’ll also get the added flexibility that WordPress brings, which means that you can use your existing site for non-newsletter purposes as you grow, such as creating an online course or selling merchandise.

You can also extend further using WordPress plugins, such as adding the Gravity Forms plugin to create all different kinds of forms for your site.