Almost everyone around me uses Substack as their newsletter platform of choice. I get it. The user experience is sleek, its free tier allows for unlimited subscribers, and it feels like the cool platform to use. Friends will declare that they're starting a "Substack" and everyone automatically understands that this means a personal (blog-like but not marketing) newsletter. But for some of us, Substack has become cringe. Maybe it's the company’s content moderation policies and its history of data breaches. Or maybe it's the way the platform aggressive pushes its social media network features. Either way, some of us are on a hunt for alternatives.
Why I'm writing this: While I was researching newsletter platforms for my own projects this year, I didn't find any articles with a thorough breakdown of options, and people on social media who are critical of Substack usually just complain without constructively offering alternatives.
If you're willing to spend a bit of money
Buttondown is my current favorite platform for a straightforward, well-designed newsletter platform. It has sensible defaults, easy-to-navigate menus, and does a good job of getting out of the way when I want to just write the next issue of the newsletter. Plus, Buttondown is a small company that's not venture capital funded, which means it's not trying to upsell you constantly or sell your (and your readers') data. Its privacy policy is much more "private" than that of Substack, and pledges 10% of its profits to fighting climate change.
I use Buttondown for my own personal newsletter. My personal favorite feature is its support for copy-and-paste images. The main downside for me is that its free tier only extends to 100 subscribers; anything beyond incurs a low monthly fee.
If you want a free platform
Things get a little more complicated for free platforms, which I learned when I was trying to pick a platform for two group projects I'm involved with. Neither are well funded, so we are trying to cut costs as much we can. For now, that means a platform that would comfortably accommodate 200 subscribers or more without slapping us with a bill.
Beehiiv is probably the closest competitor to Substack and it was my initial choice. Like Substack, Beehiiv is a popular venture-funded tech platform with a slick interface, numerous features (website builder, podcast hosting, etc.) and an internal referral/recommendation system to boost your subscriber base. Most importantly, its free tier allows for up to 2500 subscribers. Several artists and journalists I follow are happy users of Beehiiv. In the case of my group project, Beehiiv rejected me before I had a chance to try it because they rejected our Protonmail email address during the sign up process.
After some research, I came across my current pick for a newsletter platform with a generous free tier: EmailOctopus. Like Buttondown, they are a small business (not venture capital fueled), have a straightforward product/design, and advertise their giving back and doing good initiatives. Their newsletter writing/editing interface is clunkier to use than Buttondown or Substack's but that's a small price to pay given that their free tier allows up to 2500 subscribers.
Plus, their domain isn't automatically blocked by my web browser's privacy extension (uBlock Origin), which is not something I can say of some of the other bigger platforms. On these platforms, I wasn't able to use the sign up form (or "landing page") hosted on their website because it was automatically blocked.
Platforms flagged by my privacy extension
I have uBlock Origin installed on my laptop's web browser, which "blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, annoying anti-blockers, malware sites, etc." uBlock Origin is open source and comes highly recommended by experts in the privacy and tech space, so I have it set up with its default set of filter/block lists. I rarely ever have to add websites to the Trusted sites section of the extension to bypass it, so I was surprised to learn that it was blocking some of the bigger newsletter platforms.
After looking into this issue further, I realized that for most newsletter platforms, uBlock Origin simply blocks the specific domains/subdomains that are tracking or collecting data about you, leaving the rest of the website perfectly functional. In select cases though, uBlock Origin also blocks the domains/subdomains used in the sign up forms. For example, I checked the following newsletter platforms to see whether or not their embed forms would be blocked by uBlock Origin's default filter lists:
| Platform name | Free subscriber limit | Sign up form blocked by filter lists? |
| Substack | ♾️ | |
| Buttondown | 100 | |
| Beehiiv | 2500 | |
| EmailOctopus | 2500 | |
| AWeber | 500 | |
| Brevo | 2000 (but only 300 emails perday allowed) | |
| Cakemail | 500 | |
| Campaign Monitor | ❌ | |
| Constant Contact | ❌ | |
| Drip | ❌ | 🛑 |
| EcoSend | 250 | |
| GetResponse | 500 | |
| Ghost | ❌ | |
| Kit | 10,000 | 🛑 |
| Klaviyo | 250 | 🛑 |
| Mailchimp | 250 | |
| MailerLite | 250 | |
| Patreon | ♾️ |
About the data in this table:
- Data was collected on July 30, 2026. I logged the subscriber counts manually, and after failing to dig through filter list documents and platform help files myself, I asked Claude (AI) to cross examine uBlock Origin's default filter lists with the platforms' embed codes.
- The selection of platforms is based on: 1) the four platforms I've written about so far (Substack, Buttondown, Beehiiv and EmailOctopus), 2) relevant competitors that are cited two or more times on the marketing websites of these four platforms, and 3) two additional platforms (EcoSend, Cakemail) that were on my shortlist before I settled on EmailOctopus.
Other use cases
If you've made it this far, you probably realize that I'm only focusing on a specific use case: someone who wants an email newsletter platform for personal writing, life updates or organizational announcements. Use cases that fall outside this purview include:
- Someone looking to "convert" customers, sell goods, or track user behavior.
- Someone who wants to offer a complex, tiered membership program with custom rewards.
- Someone who wants to run a public blog or news site, possibly with a partial paywall, that wants to send parts or all of its posts through email.
The platforms I'm recommending here may still be useful for these use cases, but their mileage will vary depending on what you're looking to do specifically.
If you're looking for an easy-to-use platform for your personal newsletter though, give Buttondown or EmailOctopus a try before following the herd on Substack. Wouldn't you rather support a small business with commitments to doing good rather than a venture-funded tech company whose long-term investor recently doubled down on AI and defense? Plus, both platforms have real human faces and names on their about/team page, whereas Substack's only has a sales pitch about making money along with a few featured customers.