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Substack vs Revue: Who's the winner?

As we all know, yesterday Revue was acquired by Twitter. With the acquisition were some major changes to Revue. We thought it would be a great time to do a detailed comparison on Substack and Revue and see what the better choice is.

There have been many questions on if you should choose Substack or Revue. I think the community will find this really useful.

https://newslettercrew.com/substack-vs-revue/

  1. 7

    It'w worth noting that, with Revue, subdomains still don't support https in 2021, which is a major liability in today's web and harms publishers.

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      Incredible 👎🏼

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      What! Even BlueHost throws in a free SSL certificate.

      If this is their approach to visible security features, then it's frightening to imagine what's inside.

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        I'm equally puzzled. That's what I found out when setting up newsletter.mydomain.com to point to my Revue newsletter.

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      Ah I didn't knew it. I did also found that they didn't have support for Dkim verification.

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        Revue may support DKIM, I haven't been told it doesn't. But, even with Revue's and Namecheap's help, so far I have been unable to properly set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC and I have no idea what's wrong.

    4. 1

      Wow thank you for that! I'll add this to the blog. This is pretty big to be honest.

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        You're welcome. My domain registrar, Namecheap, said https support should be set at Revue's end. Revue's support told me https would eventually come, but that was months ago.

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          Yeah that's really unfortunate actually. HTTPS is almost a given nowadays.

  2. 3

    Interesting comparison. I was looking at those two platforms yesterday and if I recall correctly Substack doesn't allow you to export content and contacts. Did you come across the same issue?

    Overall, however, my research found they are both subpar to Ghost or even what you can do with Pico+WordPress. I guess it ultimately comes down to what your business model is and whether you'd want to build onto your newsletter business.

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      Revue doesn't let you export content either.

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      This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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        Thanks but I'm not sure I follow what you did.

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          This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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            Got it. Revue doesn't have a similar feature.

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              This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

              1. 1

                Indeed, some assembly required.

  3. 2

    This depends on how Twitter integrates Revue into it's platform. I can see how this move could be huge for newsletter creators as Twitter as a platform could popularize getting quality content from newsletters.

    I'd be curious to know how much distribution people running their newsletters on Substack or Revue are getting from these platforms vs people running them on their own stack.

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      Great question. I'd hope Twitter would be able to drive more traffic to Revue newsletters. How does it currently compare to stand alone newsletters? I'm not exactly sure, but something on my list to research.

  4. 2

    Hope people find this useful.

  5. 1

    I use Substack for my newsletter. Sometimes I don't see accurate open rates. For example, they clearly opened the newsletter since they're clicking on links, but it shows they haven't opened the newsletter. Anyone else shares this?

  6. 1

    I feel like substack is much better in terms of usability

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      In the end both are quite similar in terms of big features. If you get down to the details they start diverging but it's all based on personal prefrence.

  7. 1

    Thank you for this awesome discussion, we'll be updating the comparison based on these comments.

  8. 1

    Forgive me for being blissfully unaware -- why would I choose either of these over a regular solution? Like Mailchimp or Convertkit?

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      Mailchimp is to help you run your business. Substack is your business. I think you could use Mailchimp for paid newsletters, but you'll have to create a website, manage payments, add paying users to the mailing list, etc.

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        This makes a lot of sense, thank you.

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      So there are a few reasons. One reason is that if you're looking to start a paid newsletter you'd need to hook MailChimp up with Memberful, which increases cost and also a bit of technical complexity. For writers who have 0 tech experience and don't want to spend more than 5 seconds on technical issues, then Revue or Substack would work really well.

      If you're going for a free newsletter, then MailChimp would work well too. Substack and Revue are great also since you don't need to fuss with UI email building. The editors for Substack and Revue are simple but powerful. For editorial newsletter, it has everything that you need.

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        Ya I hadn't thought about the Paid vs Free model, very interesting.

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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