Compare
Substack is a complete newsletter platform: you write in it, it hosts the website, sends the email, bills paid subscriptions through Stripe for a share of the revenue and brings readers through its own app and network. EdgeKit Publications builds each edition from the CMS your newsroom already runs, on the reader record your paywall already uses, and hands it to the email platform you already have. They differ on whether your newsletters move platform, whose account the reader signs in with, and who brings you new readers.
10 questions · checked 11 October 2026
Side by side
Rows are ranked by how much each one moves a decision. Substack wins two: growth and ready-made sign-up forms. EdgeKit wins six, and the rest are even, among them unsubscribing from a single newsletter and selling sponsorship.
| The question | Substack | EdgeKit |
|---|---|---|
| Do we move our site and our CMS, or does it read the ones we have?Favours EdgeKit | You write in Substack. Posts are written in its editor, or imported from WordPress, Ghost, Medium, Mailchimp, beehiiv and others or from an RSS feed, and published on a website Substack hosts, at a substack.com address or, for a one-time $50, on your own domain, where Substack recommends a subdomain such as www. | Neither moves. EdgeKit reads Arc XP and any other CMS vendor, synced continuously, and builds the edition from what your newsroom has published: feeds by section, tag, content type or author, beside your editors’ own picks and text. |
| Is the newsletter subscriber the same reader as our paywall?Favours EdgeKit | On Substack, yes: subscribing creates a Substack account from the reader’s email address, and that one account holds their free and paid subscriptions to every Substack publication they subscribe to with that address, yours among them. Substack also sends that account occasional emails about new features and recommendations of other publications to read, which the reader can switch off. | On your own site, yes: the list sits on the same reader record as sign-in, the paywall and the subscription, across every title you publish, and is pushed to your email platform. An unsubscribe made inside it comes back, so the list and the preference never disagree. |
| Do we have to change our email platform?Favours EdgeKit | Substack is the email platform and sends the email itself, with no limit on how many you send. Every email is sent from your publication’s substack.com address, which cannot be changed to your own, even once the website runs on your domain. | No, if it is Braze, SendGrid or Resend: EdgeKit renders the edition and your platform delivers it, from the domain and reputation you already have. Any other platform is added at no charge. |
| Can the platform bring us new subscribers?Favours Substack | Yes. Recommendations between Substack publications appear as a reader subscribes, on your homepage and in digest emails; Notes, the Substack app’s discovery feed and category leaderboards show publications to readers across Substack; and subscriber referrals reward readers who bring in new subscribers, at tiers you set. | Through referrals, yes: EdgeKit integrates with Dub for referral rewards, and on each title’s pages the decision engine chooses which of that title’s newsletters to offer each reader. EdgeKit runs no network between media groups. |
| How far can the paywall go beyond free and paid?Favours EdgeKit | Each post is for everyone, free subscribers, paid subscribers or founding members, with a paywall placed anywhere in it and an optional seven-day free trial offered at the wall. One setting paywalls free posts once they are older than an age you choose, and with Substack Boost on, eligible free subscribers can unlock one paid post in the Substack app. | Any number of meters, counting signed-in readers and anonymous devices alike, and rules that decide on every page view what each reader sees, from their subscription, their reading and facts about the article. |
| Can each reader get a different newsletter?Favours EdgeKit | By subscription status: blocks within a post show different content to readers who are not subscribed and to free, paid and founding subscribers, with an optional block for everyone else, in the email, in the app and on the web. A post can also be emailed to one saved segment only. | Yes, in Braze: a personalised feed fills each reader’s own stories at send, ranked by EdgeKit Personalization from what that reader has read on your site. A template can greet each reader by first name, with a fallback. |
| Does the newsletter go out when nobody is at a desk?Favours EdgeKit | Yes, for a post written in advance: it can be scheduled to email and publish at a set time up to three months ahead. Drip campaigns also send a set sequence of emails when a reader subscribes, starts paying or cancels. | Yes, if you want it to. Set days, times and a timezone and autopilot creates and schedules every edition, and its feeds fill at the moment it sends, so a 7am edition carries what was published at 6:55. |
| Are the sign-up forms ready on day one?Favours Substack | Yes. Every publication comes with a welcome page and a subscribe page, an embed code puts a sign-up form on your own website, and after signing up a reader is offered the publications you recommend. | Not yet: hosted forms and pages are coming soon. Until then your team builds them with EdgeKit’s SDK: sign-up pages, sign-up flows the decision engine tailors to each reader, and preference pages showing each reader their own lists. |
| Does unsubscribing from one newsletter take the reader off all of them?Neither | Only if the reader chooses. The unsubscribe link in an email opens a page where the reader keeps or drops each of the publication’s sections, Substack’s name for its separate newsletters, or unsubscribes from all of them. Substack lists one-click unsubscribe among its features. | No. Every unsubscribe link EdgeKit puts in an edition is signed and scoped to the one list it came from, one-click header included, and every change is recorded with where it came from. |
| Can we sell sponsorship inside the newsletter?Neither | Through Substack’s sponsorships programme, which Substack says is still early: publications that are Substack Bestsellers or have at least 100 paid subscribers can turn on a Creator Kit to be considered for brand partnerships, and Substack’s team may contact them by email when a brand could be a fit. Substack’s help centre also says you are welcome to host sponsored content yourself, and that Substack builds no functionality to support advertising. | Through the email ad manager you choose, such as LiveIntent, Passendo or Kevel, with its placements built into your template. EdgeKit’s own ad manager is in development. |
What decides it
Substack is where the newsletter is written, hosted, sent and sold, so adopting it means moving your newsletters, their subscribers and their sending onto it, with every email sent from a substack.com address. EdgeKit Publications sits beside the CMS, the email platform and the site you already run: editions are built from what your newsroom published and delivered by the platform you already pay for.
On Substack, the reader subscribes with a Substack account that also holds every other Substack subscription made with that email address, and Substack emails that account its own news and recommendations of other publications unless the reader switches them off. EdgeKit holds the list on the same reader record as sign-in, the paywall and the subscription on your own site, across every title, so the reader who unsubscribed, the reader who hit the wall and the reader who renews are one record, not three reconciled copies.
Substack’s recommendations, Notes, app and leaderboards bring readers from across Substack, and EdgeKit has nothing like them; for referral rewards it integrates with Dub. What EdgeKit gives instead is one record of every reader across your titles, in a database of your own, that the paywall, the newsletter and the subscription all read.
Questions
Bring you an audience. Substack’s recommendations, Notes, app and leaderboards put your newsletters in front of readers from across Substack. EdgeKit runs referral rewards through Dub, but otherwise works with the readers you already have.
With EdgeKit, Braze does: list membership is pushed to it, so a welcome series or a win-back journey is built where your CRM team already builds them. Substack sends its own: a welcome email each for free, paid, imported and founding subscribers, and drip campaigns that send a sequence when a reader subscribes, starts paying or cancels.
Both can be. Substack publishes each post on the website it hosts and, post by post, sends it by email and to the Substack app or keeps it on the web only. EdgeKit, when you switch it on, keeps a public archive per publication on your own domain, one shareable page per edition, indexed by search engines only if you choose and hideable edition by edition.
How we checked
If a claim here is wrong or out of date, write to info@edgekit.cloud and we will correct the page and say what changed. That includes anybody at Substack, the newsletter platform.
Substack, Stripe, WordPress, Ghost, Medium, Mailchimp, beehiiv, Arc XP, Braze, SendGrid, Resend, Dub, LiveIntent, Passendo and Kevel are trademarks of their respective owners. EdgeKit is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of them. Product names are used here only to identify the products being compared.
Next step
A walkthrough against your own setup and your own newsletters, including the rows on this page where Substack wins.
Book a demo