Newsletter Alternatives to Substack

Substack is almost synonymous with email newsletters, particularly in the creator economy.

Since its launch in 2017, Substack has helped authors, journalists, and content creators publish and monetize email newsletters. Its platform is especially good at helping newsletters grow, adding subscribers as well or better than nearly every alternative.

In fact, there is a sense in which Substack is more like a social network than it is an email service provider. Nonetheless, in January 2025, SEMRush reported that nearly 2,500 folks per month search for "newsletter alternatives to Substack."

So, having spent several years specifically focused on email and email newsletters, I wanted to share what I believe are some of the best Substack alternatives.

I have listed these in alphabetical order, and not some sort of ranking, so please don't misinterpret the order.

beehiiv

Beehiiv is a modern email newsletter platform dripping with rich features. The company is relatively new —Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett, and Jacob Hurd founded it in 2021— but has made a big splash in the creator newsletter space.

I personally use beehiiv for the Ecommerce Shelf Life newsletter, which I started in December 2024 as part of an artificial intelligence newsletter experiment. It is a well-done, well-executed email platform worthy of consideration for any email newsletter.

Ghost

Ghost is a content management system first and an email newsletter platform second. It feels like a relatively less complicated and more intuitive version of WordPress.

It has my favorite user experience of any of the email service providers on this list of Substack alternatives, but it does not have all of the email features one would find on some of the others.

I use a Ghost for this website —You, Money, Happiness— and the Science Fiction Classics website. In the latter case, I also use Ghost to send Science Fiction Classics' weekly email newsletter which I  launched in 2025.

Ghost should be a top consideration if you need a strong website to accompany your email newsletter.

Hoppy Copy

In 2025, generative artificial intelligence is not only popular, but in many ways, it has become an essential tool.

Hoppy Copy is an AI-first email marketing and newsletter solution. A creator could generate much of the newsletter and send it with this tool.

Kit

Kit has been around for more than ten years and has always focused on the creator community, so in many ways, it is the incumbent, predating Substack by several years.

The Kit platform is very attractive and has many features that are easy to use. In full disclosure, I used to work for Kit, running the company's nascent advertising business.

I use Kit to send the two editions of the You, Money, Happiness newsletter. Tueday's newsletter is an essay or article. Friday's broadcast is a roundup of creator economy news and stories.

Kit has always performed well, and has great deliverability.

Letterhead

Letterhead is the only email newsletter platform on this list of Substack alternatives that I have not personally used in any way, so I am including it based on its reputation.

In the creator and publisher community, Letterhead is often described as an excellent AI-driven newsletter generation tool built on top of a great sponsorship sales problem that drives real revenue for newsletter authors.

MailChimp

MailChimp is the 800-pound gorilla of email marketing —pun intended— and a good choice for email newsletters.

I have worked on dozens of newsletters using MailChimp. It is stable and functional, to say the least.

The platform does not have the newsletter discovery tools you find on Substack, beehiiv, Ghost, and Kit, but it does have just about everything else.