Home
Starting Up
Case Studies DB
Products
Ideas DB
Vibe Coding Tools
Subscribe to IH+
Starting Up
Case Studies
Ideas DB
Products DB
Join
14
Likes
17
Comments
Best newsletter tool?
by
Marc Bromhall
I'm interested in starting a newsletter in the future. Is Substack the best tool for this?
It really depends what you are aiming to achieve with your newsletter.
Do you want to write a free newsletter? Do you want analytics? Do you want public discussions? Do you want to have a custom domain and be able to do SEO?
If you are able to share a little more, I think we can help you find something!
Otherwise if you're just starting out, pick one platform, and switch over if you find that it doesn't suit your style :)
Thanks Janel. That makes a lot of sense. I'm just starting out, so will probably go with substack
@Janel has good questions. There is no best tool. It really depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Substack has positives and negatives. Easy to get started, free, easy to do paid issues, in theory there’s some discovery within the substack platform. But... no custom domain, your content sits on their site so no building up SEO benefits, some don’t like the 10% cut when doing paid, formatting is basic (all substacks look the same to me), analytics are basic, no marketing functionality like segmentation.
Thanks for this input.
I really like Mailerlite. For just 9$ per month you get excellent email designer, website and landing pages builder. And it also has a powerful automation workflows. Before I tried Convertkit and was quite disappointed by their email designer and how limited it is.
Do you have a paid tier for your newsletter? If yes, are you integrating Stripe via Zapier? And if yes, what's the cost?
Between ConvertKit and MailerLite, whose better at the at the automation?
Agreed. Been using Mailerlite for a year. I'm about to launch a newsletter. I do regular email campaigns and their tools are pretty good. Check out dynamic blocks: https://www.mailerlite.com/video-tutorials/dynamic-content-blocks
Just want to give a shout out to https://buttondown.email/, a indie developer's mailing letter tool. Free to start, affordable to grow. Integrates with Stripe.
Substack has the ability to create "posts" which are basically the "newsletter emails" which also has the ability to enable comments for discussion on the website.
For starters, I think Substack is a good tool to build a newsletter. I have started building my newsletter, Psych on substack and haven't faced any issue yet.
Thanks for that info. Very useful.
Hey Marc,
As some of us say, it depends. And is true, I have been on mailchim. Hated it...
went to substack, loved it. Untill they decided to change the substack signup form. So i just moved to email octpus and doing my own templates, and my own site
I am stillworking on it thought...
Hi Marc I wrote a detailed comparison of the 2 major ones Revue and Substack.
https://blog.yirla.com/the-most-comprehensive-bake-off-substack-vs-revue/
Might be helpful. Or too detailed
I was a user (and still) of MailChimp, MailerLite, Sendinblue, SendGrid, Sendfox and now Substack.
And I've no regret to stick with Substack for most of projects. I like them because of the easy to edit panel, pay wall is so simple to configure and the deliverability is good so far.
Checking substack.... it looks cool but I guess that the most painful aspect is the lack of segments... or am I missing something?
Do you have any paid newsletters on Substack? If so, does the 10% cut bother you? I couldn't justify it myself, I decided to do the paywall by hand and save the ~$350/month cost
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
@jkristobans good questions haha
MailChimp - Business A & B
MailerLite - On and off side projects
Sendinblue - Client projects (once a year)
SendGrid - Used to work for their investor, hence I'm biased
Sendfox - On and off side projects
Substack - Bi-weekly newsletter
I think they're all great for different purpose and no one size fits all
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
This comment was deleted 13 days ago
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
Thanks for the advice