Substack vs Mailchimp for Writers — An Honest Comparison

Writers starting newsletters are almost always choosing between Substack and Mailchimp. Both are legitimate platforms. The right choice depends on what you want your newsletter to be and how you want to grow it. After five years of running Tumbleweed Words on Substack, I have specific views about this comparison that go beyond the surface features.

What Substack does well

Substack is not primarily an email platform — it is a publishing and discovery network. The distinction matters. When you publish on Substack, your work is discoverable within the Substack ecosystem by readers who have never heard of you. The Notes feature, the recommendation engine, the app — all of these create organic discovery paths that Mailchimp, which is purely an email tool, cannot offer.

For a literary newsletter with no existing audience, Substack's discovery mechanisms are the most important feature. They are how you grow from zero without buying advertising. A single recommendation from a larger Substack can send fifty or a hundred new subscribers — that pathway does not exist on Mailchimp.

Substack also handles the monetisation infrastructure — paid subscriptions, founding memberships, gift subscriptions — with no setup required. The platform takes 10% of revenue, which is the trade-off.

What Mailchimp does well

Mailchimp is a more powerful email tool. Its segmentation, automation, and analytics are more sophisticated than Substack's. If you need to send different content to different segments of your list, run automated welcome sequences with complex logic, or integrate with other marketing tools, Mailchimp handles this better.

Mailchimp also gives you more control over your subscriber data — you own the list more completely. On Substack, your subscriber data is hosted on Substack's platform, which creates a degree of platform dependency.

For a literary writer starting from zero, Substack's discovery network is worth more than Mailchimp's technical sophistication. For a writer with an existing large audience who wants more control, Mailchimp's tools make more sense.

The honest recommendation

If you are a literary writer starting a newsletter from scratch and your goal is to grow an audience organically, use Substack. The discovery features are genuinely valuable and the platform is increasingly where literary readers live.

If you already have a large audience elsewhere — a social media following, a blog with significant traffic, an email list from another source — and you want to migrate to a newsletter with more control and sophistication, Mailchimp or ConvertKit are worth considering.

For how to grow a literary newsletter once you have chosen your platform, read how to start a literary newsletter and what makes a good literary newsletter.