Detailed comparison across 10 dimensions
Winner: Buttondown
Buttondown clearly comes out ahead of Substack on Staquest's weighted six-dimension score. Both offer a free tier. Buttondown's paid plans start at $9/mo.
| Overview | ||
|---|---|---|
| Type | hybrid | saas tool |
| Company | Substack | Buttondown |
| Free Tier | ||
| Has API | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Trending | Stable | Stable |
| Industries | Marketing | Marketing |
| Categories | email-marketing | email-marketing |
| Website | Visit | Visit |
Buttondown
freemium
freemium
usage based
usage based
| Feature | substack | buttondown |
|---|---|---|
| Ability To Enable Paid Subscriptions | ||
| Analytics | ||
| Basic Analytics | ||
| Archives On A Custom Domain | ||
| Email And Web Distribution | ||
| Automations | ||
| Subscriber List Management | ||
| Comments And Surveys | ||
| Unlimited Newsletter Publishing | ||
| Email Attachments | ||
| Hosted Newsletter Archives | ||
| Multiple Newsletters | ||
| Paid Subscriptions | ||
| Privacy-First | ||
| Rich Text Or Markdown Editor | ||
| Rss-To-Email Support | ||
| Send From A Custom Domain | ||
| Tagging & Segmentation | ||
| Teams | ||
| Whitelabeling |
Showing 20 of 20 features
Dashes mean the feature isn't listed in our data. The tool may still support it.
On Staquest's weighted six-dimension scoring, Buttondown comes out ahead overall, though Substack can be the better fit depending on your priorities — see the dimension-by-dimension breakdown above.
Both Substack and Buttondown offer a free tier.
Buttondown scores higher on pricing value in Staquest's analysis. It is the highest-weighted dimension in this comparison.
Buttondown exposes a public API. The feature comparison and dimension scores above cover the full breakdown.
