Substack vs Magnolia

Compare Substack and Magnolia for your content needs. Find out what actual users are saying about each product and which one is best suited for you!

Substack
Substack
Substack is a user-friendly publishing platform for writers, enabling them to create newsletters and build a subscriber base while retaining full ownership of their content and mailing lists.
Magnolia
Magnolia
With Magnolia, unify your content, customer data, and legacy tech to build engaging websites, portals, and apps at scale. Empower your content teams with AI and enterprise-level security.

What Users Say

See what users who have used Substack and Magnolia have to say about their overall experience with the product.

Substack's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Substack.

Magnolia's Key Strengths

Read what users love about Magnolia.

Substack's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Substack.

Magnolia's Key Issues

Read what issues users have with Magnolia.

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What Marketers & Content Creators Say

Hear from the users who uses Substack and Magnolia daily about their experience with the editors.

Substack's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Substack's editor.

Magnolia's Editorial Experience Highlights

What marketers love about Magnolia's editor.

Substack's Editorial Experience Issues

What marketers dislike about Substack's editor.

Magnolia's Editorial Experience Issues

What marketers dislike about Magnolia's editor.

Mobile Editing

Find out how the platforms handle the mobile-first experience for the new generation of workforce on the move.

Substack:
Mobile-First Experience

Substack has launched a mobile editor for creating posts directly on iOS and Android devices, offering essential functionalities.

"Today we’re launching a new mobile editor, which allows you to write and publish posts directly from the Substack app for iOS."
Source
"Publishing a new post is available on the Substack iOS and Android apps."
Source
Magnolia:
Mobile-First Experience

Magnolia CMS supports mobile-first experience with a focus on creating content on mobile devices.

"Focused on delivering modern UX designs with a mobile-first mindset."
Source
"Start building responsive, mobile-first experience sites using web components with React, Angular or Vue."
Source
"Focus then shifted to mobile first, omni-channel experience, personalisation, loyalty and analytics."
Source
"Their rebuild of the software for a tablet and mobile first design."
Source

Automatic Content Linking

Find out if the platform supports automatic linking of related content to help user discover more content without additional manual effort from the marketer. This automatically create topical clusters of content and is essential for SEO.

Substack:
No Automatic Content Linking

Substack does not support automatic related blog linking features; manual linking is required.

"If you'd like to share certain parts of a post or allow readers to jump to a specific section of a long post, try adding anchor links."
Source
"Recommendations are a Substack super ... However, I couldn't find evidence of automatic related content linking."
Source
"I was wondering if it is a good idea to create a substack and post my content on there as well and even link the substack post back to my main blog."
Source
Magnolia:
Unknown

The feature of automatic related blog linking is unclear from the available documentation and sources.

"No specific mention of automatic related blog linking found."
Source
"The AI Accelerator module mentions automation in content generation, but not specifically for related blogs."
Source
"Tagging functionality is available, but no clear automatic related linking feature noted."
Source

Automatic CTA Linking

Find out if the platform supports automatic display of Call-to-Actions using AI to help users take actions that are relevant to the content they are reading.

Substack:
No Automatic CTA Linking

Substack lacks built-in automatic CTA linking; users rely on external tools for automation features.

"Substack provides no automation tools at all; the author notes this is a primary reason users leave for competitors."
Source
"Substack lacks several critical features needed for effective email marketing, including automated email sequences."
Source
"Users discuss the absence of integrated automation features in Substack, noting their reliance on external tools."
Source
Magnolia:
Manual CTA Linking

Magnolia offers AI features that assist in automatic content creation, but specific CTA linking is not detailed.

"Magnolia’s AI Accelerator brings flexibility and composability to AI in digital experiences, by supporting connections to any generative AI engines to speed up content creation."
Source
"Magnolia equips you with powerful tooling and an easy to use interface so that you can work more effectively and launch experiences faster."
Source
"This feature was experimental and relied on outdated and unmaintained libraries."
Source

Comments

Find out if the platform supports comments from your users to improve user engagement. This is often a great way to collect feedback and user emails.

Substack:
Comments Supported

Substack supports commenting on posts from both subscribers and non-subscribers, with moderation options available.

"Navigate to your publication's Settings and click on Community. Slide the toggle to enable comments."
Source
"You can now enable comments on your posts for anyone on your mailing list, even if they’re not a paid subscriber."
Source
"Writers can choose whether to allow comments from everyone or only paid subscribers."
Source
Magnolia:
Comments Supported

Magnolia CMS supports commenting with moderation, email notifications, and anonymous comments.

"This module offers commenting features as well as the possibility of liking or disliking comments. You can moderate comments or mark as author’s favourite."
Source

Multi-tenancy

Find out if the platform supports managing multiple clients or projects within a single account. This is useful for agencies, multi-client or multi-project scenarios.

Substack:
No Multi-tenancy

Substack does not support multi-tenancy, focusing primarily on individual writers and content monetization.

"Substack is designed for independent writers and does not offer multi-tenancy features."
Source
"Substack emphasizes individual monetization and audience ownership, lacking multi-tenant capabilities."
Source
Magnolia:
Multi-tenancy Supported

Magnolia supports multi-tenancy, allowing agencies to manage multiple client sites with separate configurations.

"Multi-tenancy and the ability to share content assets - while also being able to configure access on a per-tenant basis - is crucial in today's..."
Source
"With Magnolia's multi-site, multi-language and multi-tenancy capabilities, you can centrally manage your network of franchises, country sites or subsidiary websites."
Source
"Using the Multisite module, you can set up and run multiple websites with different domains and languages from one Magnolia installation."
Source

What Developers Say

Hear from developers who've integrated and built on Substack and Magnolia about their experiences.

Ease of Integrating Substack:
Medium
Integration with Substack is feasible but lacks robust features and direct integrations, leading to some workarounds.
Ease of Integrating Magnolia:
Medium
Integration is moderately complex, requiring various skills and understanding APIs.

Substack's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Substack.

Magnolia's DX Highlights

What developers love about building with Magnolia.

Substack's DX Issues

What developers dislike about building with Substack.

Magnolia's DX Issues

What developers dislike about building with Magnolia.

Content Modelling

Find out how developers model and manage their content with the platform with key highlights and limitations.

Substack:
No Customisable Content Types

Substack does not offer built-in content modelling features or custom content types.

"Substack offers limited customization, focusing more on content rather than design."
Source
"Directus allows you to create custom schemas, manage data, define roles & permissions for your organization."
Source
"Substack doesn’t allow customization for its newsletter formats, thus limiting content modelling."
Source
Magnolia:
Customisable Content Types

Magnolia CMS supports content modelling with customizable content types and properties.

"Magnolia allows you to manage all your content and media in one place. Flexible content modeling."
Source
"A content model defines the structure and attributes of content for a specific project, including content types."
Source
"The Magnolia Content Types module is a tool to define the content model in Magnolia, creating a shared understanding across the domains."
Source
"A model definition describes the properties of a content type, including fields and relationships."
Source

Custom React Components

Find out if the platform supports custom React components to go beyond the basic HTML components for content.

Substack:
No Custom React Components Supported

Substack does not support custom React components directly in the content editor.

"Over the years, I’ve written and reviewed hundreds of React components for a $1.7B GenAI startup."
Source
"I wanted to display my Substack posts on my website instead of a subscribe link, so I created my own Substack feed component!"
Source
"A customizable React component renders the login page based on the user's UI settings."
Source
"The new components are both fully customizable AND robust."
Source
"I have used substackapi to achieve this Custom Embed Substack Signup Form."
Source
Magnolia:
Custom React Components Supported

Custom React components are supported through the Magnolia React Editor allowing dynamic content management.

"The Magnolia React Editor provides a lightweight, fully-featured library connecting React projects with the WYSIWYG authoring experience."
Source
"Magnolia React Templating allows you to use React JSX Components in Magnolia templates."
Source
"Components render content entered by editors in dialogs, supporting nested components."
Source

Full Text Search

Find out if the platform supports full text search across multiple fields to help users find content quickly.

Substack:
No Full Text Search

Substack's search functionality is weak, lacking full text search across all content and authors.

"From the Substack web inbox, readers can search keywords to find posts, publications, and people."
Source
"Substack search can’t find posts even when I know the exact title or URL. Search often can’t find people."
Source
Magnolia:
Full Text Search Supported

Fully supports full-text search across all content with real-time results customization.

"Magnolia’s search works using the Lucene algorithm where by default all properties mentioned in the index-rule receive a boost value of 1.0."
Source
"The Find Bar allows you to search across all content search inside and outside Magnolia (federated search, enterprise search). The search covers all Magnolia and custom-content apps, assets and pages."
Source
"It offers powerful full-text search across all your content and provides a starting point for many tasks."
Source

Starter Kits

Discover starter kits and templates to help you get started with the platform.

Substack:
Available

Substack offers various starter kits and templates for creators.

(Expand section to see a list of Substack templates and starter kits.)

Magnolia:
Available

Magnolia CMS has several starter kits available for developers.

(Expand section to see a list of Magnolia templates and starter kits.)

Pricing & Plans

Compare the prices of Substack and Magnolia.

Substack's Pricing
Monthly Subscription
$5 / month
- Includes all posts for paid subscribers only
- Recurring payments processed via Stripe
- 10% platform fee
- 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fees on Stripe
Annual Subscription
$50 / year
- Includes all posts for paid subscribers only
- Recurring payments processed via Stripe
- 10% platform fee
- 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fees on Stripe
Founding Member Plan
$20 / month
- Optional tier for additional support
- All posts for paid subscribers
Magnolia's Pricing
DX Cloud
$6000 / month
- Fully managed dedicated infrastructure
- Customizable
- Scalable
- Supports up to 99.9% uptime
- Multiple SLA packages
DX Core
$3500 / month
- Self-hosted
- Full control over infrastructure
- Multi-site support
- Seamless scalability
- Custom modules and integrations

Compare with other technologies

Looking for a better alternative to Substack & Magnolia? Try Wisp.
Wisp is the best solution for blogging. Try it free today!