Substack vs Kit (ConvertKit) 2026: Which Should You Choose?

Substack and Kit (formerly ConvertKit) are both popular among creators, but they solve different problems. Substack is a publishing platform for writers who want to hit publish and reach readers with minimal effort. Kit is an email marketing platform for creators who sell products, run businesses, and need sophisticated automation and commerce tools behind their newsletter.

The platforms overlap in that both can send a newsletter to an email list. But that shared capability obscures a deep structural difference in what each platform is actually built to do. This comparison covers every meaningful axis of that difference.

Feature Comparison

Pricing Breakdown

Substack is free to use for free newsletters. When you enable paid subscriptions, Substack takes 10% of your gross revenue plus Stripe processing fees (2.9% + $0.30). There is no monthly fee and no subscriber cap. You can have 500,000 free subscribers and pay Substack nothing. You can have 100 paying subscribers and Substack takes 10% of whatever they pay.

Kit's free Newsletter plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers but restricts you to basic email broadcasts with no automations, sequences, or commerce features. The Creator plan starts at $25/month for 1,000 subscribers and includes automations and sequences. The Creator Pro plan starts at $50/month and adds advanced reporting, subscriber scoring, and a newsletter referral system.

Kit's pricing scales with subscriber count. At 5,000 subscribers, the Creator plan costs $66/month. At 25,000 subscribers, it costs $150/month. At 55,000, it costs $279/month. Kit takes a 3.5% transaction fee on products sold through Kit Commerce (separate from Stripe's processing fees).

The cost comparison depends on your model. If you run a free newsletter, Substack costs nothing while Kit's free tier is limited. If you charge $10/month and have 5,000 paying subscribers ($50,000/month revenue), Substack takes $5,000/month. Kit Creator plan at that subscriber count costs $66/month plus 3.5% on product sales. For paid subscription businesses at scale, Kit is substantially cheaper. For free newsletters, Substack is unbeatable.

Audience Discovery and Growth

Substack has a massive structural advantage in audience discovery. The Substack Network is an ecosystem where writers recommend each other's publications. The Substack app puts your content in front of readers who are browsing for things to read. Notes lets you post short-form content that surfaces to other writers' audiences. Leaderboard rankings drive visibility for top publications in each category.

These network effects are most powerful for writers in categories where Substack has high density: politics, tech commentary, media criticism, finance, culture, and health. If you write in one of these niches, Substack can deliver subscribers you would never reach through your own marketing.

Kit has the Creator Network, which enables cross-recommendations between Kit creators when someone subscribes. This is a useful feature but operates on a much smaller scale than Substack's network. Kit's audience growth strategy relies more on you driving traffic through your own channels: landing pages, opt-in forms on your website, social media, and lead magnets.

Kit gives you better tools for capturing the audience you drive yourself. Its landing page builder, multiple form types (inline, modal, slide-in, sticky bar), and lead magnet delivery automations are designed for creators who already have traffic sources and need to convert visitors into subscribers efficiently.

Automations and Email Sequences

This is Kit's strongest category and Substack's weakest.

Kit's visual automation builder is the best in the creator economy. You can create complex subscriber journeys with conditional branching, time delays, tag-based triggers, purchase triggers, link-click triggers, and custom field conditions. You can build welcome sequences, product launch funnels, re-engagement campaigns, and post-purchase follow-ups, all visually mapped in a flowchart interface.

Email sequences in Kit let you create drip campaigns that send a series of emails over time. These are commonly used for onboarding new subscribers, delivering email courses, nurturing leads toward a purchase, or running limited-time promotions with automated follow-ups.

Substack has zero automation capability. You cannot create sequences. You cannot trigger emails based on subscriber behavior. You cannot set up conditional logic. Every email on Substack is a manually written broadcast sent to your entire list (or a segment, with limited filtering). If you want to send different content to different subscribers based on their actions, Substack cannot do it.

For writers who simply send a weekly essay to everyone, this limitation is irrelevant. For creators who need automated funnels, product launches, and personalized subscriber journeys, it is a dealbreaker.

Commerce and Product Sales

Kit has native commerce built into the platform. You can sell digital products directly through Kit: ebooks, courses, presets, templates, music, software, coaching sessions. Kit handles the checkout, delivery, and payment processing. You can create product pages, offer discount codes, and set up automated delivery sequences that trigger when someone purchases.

Kit takes a 3.5% transaction fee on commerce sales (in addition to Stripe processing). This is lower than platforms like Gumroad (which charges 10%) and comparable to Shopify's transaction fees.

Substack does not sell products. Its monetization model is exclusively reader-supported subscriptions and, more recently, one-time payments for specific posts. You cannot sell an ebook, a course, or a digital download through Substack. If you want to sell products alongside your newsletter, you need a separate platform (Gumroad, Teachable, Podia, Shopify) and manage the integration yourself.

For creators whose business model involves selling things to their audience, Kit's native commerce removes the need for additional tools and keeps the entire transaction within one ecosystem. For writers whose model is purely "readers pay me to write," Substack's subscription-only approach is sufficient.

Writing and Publishing

Substack is a publishing platform first. Its editor is designed for long-form writing and produces clean, readable posts. The workflow is simple: write, preview, send. Every post automatically becomes a web page on your Substack publication. The reading experience is consistent and well-designed. Substack treats each newsletter issue as a piece of published writing, not a marketing email.

Kit is an email marketing platform first. Its email editor is functional but not designed for long-form content. The interface is oriented around broadcast emails and automated sequences rather than publishing. Kit emails do not automatically become web pages in the way Substack posts do. The reading experience is "an email," not "a publication."

If your primary output is long-form writing - essays, articles, reporting, analysis - Substack's publishing orientation is noticeably better. If your primary output is shorter email communications that drive action (click this link, buy this product, sign up for this webinar), Kit's email-first orientation is more appropriate.

Subscriber Management

Kit provides sophisticated subscriber management tools. You can tag subscribers based on behavior (clicked a link, opened an email, purchased a product, visited a page). You can create segments based on combinations of tags, custom fields, subscription date, engagement level, and purchase history. You can score subscribers based on engagement to identify your most active readers.

Substack's subscriber management is minimal. You can see who is subscribed, who is paying, and basic engagement metrics. You cannot tag subscribers, create behavioral segments, or track individual subscriber journeys. The platform assumes you are sending the same content to everyone, which aligns with its publishing-first philosophy but limits personalization.

Who Wins?

Choose Substack if:

• You are a writer first and want the simplest publishing experience
• You want free built-in audience discovery through the Substack Network
• Your monetization is reader-supported paid subscriptions
• You do not sell digital products, courses, or services
• You do not need email automations or sequences
• You want zero monthly fees (free newsletters) or are comfortable with 10% revenue share
• You want community features like Notes and Chat
• You want built-in podcast hosting
• You are starting from scratch and need help finding readers

Choose Kit if:

• You sell digital products, courses, or services to your audience
• You need visual automations and email sequences
• You need advanced subscriber tagging and segmentation
• You want to create multiple landing pages and opt-in forms
• You want native commerce with no additional tools
• You need deep integrations with your existing tech stack
• Your newsletter is part of a larger creator business, not the business itself
• You want A/B testing for subject lines
• You want the largest free tier (10K subscribers for basic broadcasting)

Final Take

The Substack vs Kit decision comes down to what your newsletter does within your business.

If the newsletter IS the product, and readers pay to read your writing, Substack is the better choice. It is free, it has built-in discovery, and it is purpose-built for the writer-reader relationship. The 10% fee is the cost of simplicity and distribution.

If the newsletter SUPPORTS a business where you sell products, courses, or services, Kit is the better choice. Its automations, commerce tools, and subscriber management are built for creators who need their email list to drive revenue beyond subscription fees. The monthly cost is the price of that capability.

These platforms rarely compete directly for the same user. Once you understand what you are building, the right choice is usually obvious.