Every comparison of these three leads with pricing, and every one of them is out of date within a quarter. Fees change, feature lists change, and the article stays up, being wrong, ranking well.
So this compares what has not changed in years and probably will not: who holds which relationship, and what you can take with you.
That sounds abstract. It decides more than any number on a pricing page, because it decides what a future decision costs you.
The question underneath all of it
For each platform, ask: when a reader pays, who did they pay?
On a hosted platform, they paid the platform. The payment authorisation lives in the platform’s account with the payment processor. Your name is on the publication; the platform’s name is on the transaction.
On a self-hosted install, they paid whichever provider you connected. The authorisation lives in an account that is yours.
Everything downstream follows from that one difference.
Substack
The most integrated, and the one that asks least of you. Writing, sending, payments and discovery arrive as one thing that works on day one.
Structurally: the payment relationship is Substack’s. Your subscribers’ cards are authorised against Substack’s arrangement, and the money reaches you through Substack.
The reader relationship is shared in a way that is easy to miss. Your subscribers are your subscribers, and they are also inside a network that recommends other publications to them and yours to other people. That network is a real acquisition channel and it is the main reason people choose Substack. It also means the platform sits between you and your audience by design rather than by accident.
You can export the list of your readers, including who pays. You cannot export their subscriptions, and nobody can.
Beehiiv
Built later, aimed at the newsletter as a business rather than as a publication. Growth mechanics, monetisation beyond subscriptions, and the operational tooling for running a list at scale.
Structurally it sits where Substack sits: hosted, with the payment relationship held by the platform. The differences from Substack are in emphasis and tooling rather than in who owns what.
What you take when you leave is the same shape too: the list, not the billing.
Ghost
Open source, self-hostable, and the only one of the three you can run on a machine you control. Ghost(Pro) is the hosted version, and the important part is that it is the same software.
Structurally, the payment relationship is between your reader and a provider you chose, in an account that is yours. Ghost stores members and tiers and gates content. It does not sit in the payment path.
The cost of that is real: hosting to arrange, a payment provider to pick, and a setup that takes an afternoon instead of ten minutes. There is no built-in recommendation network. Nobody is going to discover you because Ghost suggested you.
The benefit is that nothing is between you and either relationship, and moving hosts is a data migration rather than a platform migration.
What actually leaves with you
The most useful column in any comparison of these three.
| Substack | Beehiiv | Ghost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your posts | Export | Export | Yours already |
| Your subscriber list | Export | Export | Yours already |
| Who was paying | In the export | In the export | Yours already |
| Their subscriptions | Cannot leave | Cannot leave | Cannot leave |
| The payment account | Platform’s | Platform’s | Yours |
| Reader discovery | Network | Platform tools | Your own |
The fourth row is the same for all three, and it is the row people assume differs. A subscription is an authorisation the reader gave to a specific company. It is not data, it is not exportable, and no platform is being difficult about this. Why that is.
So on any of the three, leaving means asking your paying readers to subscribe again. What differs is the fifth row, and that is where the asymmetry sits: on Ghost, changing payment provider does not touch your readers at all, because the provider was never the platform. On a hosted platform, changing payment provider means changing platform.
Choosing, honestly
Substack if discovery matters more to you than control, and you would rather be writing this week than configuring. The network is genuinely valuable and the integration is genuinely good. You are renting the payment relationship, and that is a reasonable trade to make deliberately.
Beehiiv if you are running the newsletter as a business with growth and monetisation as first-class concerns, and you want the tooling for that without building it.
Ghost if you want the reader relationship and the payment relationship both to be yours, and the setup cost is acceptable. Also the answer when the hosted platforms cannot pay you where you live, which is a constraint that overrides preference entirely.
There is no wrong pick here, only picks made without noticing what was being traded.
The Ghost footnote worth knowing
Ghost’s built-in billing runs on Stripe, and only Stripe. That is a real constraint and it is narrower than it appears.
Ghost’s membership system, tiers, gated posts, newsletters, member records, works off what the member record says. It has no opinion about where money came from, and the Admin API will create and modify those records for anything holding a valid key.
So the payment step can be a provider you chose, translated into a Ghost membership. Which matters most for exactly the people the hosted platforms serve worst: publishers in countries Stripe does not reach, and anyone who would rather a merchant of record handled the tax. The routes are compared here, and what merchant of record means is here.
Related: moving from Substack to Ghost, including the paying part.