Note: the following post contains affiliate links.  I receive a portion of any purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you.  —TPP

As we head into the end of June and reach the end of my series of pieces on WordPress.com (read the other installments here, here, and here). Last week I compared WordPress.com to Blogger/Blogspot, the platform I used to start my blog way back in 2009. This week, we arrive at the final boss of blogging platforms: Substack.

Even as I went to Substack to retrieve a link to it, the site and its writers sucked me in for a solid fifteen minutes. It’s why I’ve taken to calling the platform “Subcrack,” because it’s really good at roping in readers.

The secret to Substack’s appeal seems to be its unique blending of X’s short-form observations (“Notes” in Substack) and WordPress.com‘s long-form content. But there’s something more, too: the minimalism of Substack’s interface makes it a pleasure to read, especially when put in “Dark Mode.”

Yes, users have a degree of customization with their individual Substacks. They can change the homepage’s layout and the colors, but the customization is fairly limited beyond that. In some ways that limitation can be a strength, as it gives the sensation of experiencing many branches of one service, but I’ll get into that below.

I setup my own Substack page earlier this year, and I’ve been cross-posting my content from WordPress.com to Substack. While I still almost all of my long-form writing natively in WordPress.com‘s block editor, I use Substack primarily for its “Notes” functions—and to reach an audience that is almost entirely separate from the WordPress.com ecosystem.

As with last week’s post, I’m going to compare WordPress.com and Substack in three areas: overall interface (looking at the home screen, for example, when you first log into your account); the posting interface/editor; and the final published content (what the blogs look like when published).

Note that Substack is free for authors/creators. With WordPress.com I have the Premium plan, which is $8 a month when paid annually (or $18 a month otherwise). Substack does not have any inherently paid options for creators, but enables readers to pay for a subscription to their preferred creators. One way that Substack functions like X is that there might be many users, but only a handful of actual creators, although I’ve found that the Venn Diagram overlap is very high on Substack. Similarly, people can have a WordPress.com Gravatar without actually maintaining a blog, but that pool seems very small.

To illustrate, here’s a Venn Diagram I created in MS Paint based totally on vibes:

Regardless, the basic functionality of posting, checking analytics, etc., is analogous enough between Substack and WordPress.com to compare the two. I think it’s especially important because, right now, it seems like Substack is WordPress.com‘s biggest potential competitor in the blogosphere.

Overall Interface

Substack is a bit peculiar, in that the landing page you get depends on the URL you use. The default “www.substack.com” will take you to your “feed,” which shows mostly Notes (but also essays) from the writers you follow and/or subscribe to. To access your dashboard—the “behind-the-scenes” view—you click on “Dashboard” on the left-hand side; to view your “blog,” you click “Profile,” although “Profile” doesn’t really take you to your blog, but to an “in-app” (for lack of a better word) view of your page as a profile.

Actually getting to your “blog”/personal Substack is confusing if you don’t have your URL memorized, and the URL is tied to your username, not the title of your blog. To get there from the main feed, you have to click “Profile,” and then click a tiny, elongated oval picture of yourself to get what is “actually” your page/blog:

Here is where the clean minimalism of Substack runs into some issues. It’s too clean, to the point that navigating around is annoying, especially when you’re new. The wag will (rightly) point out that you rarely need to go to the actual page, which is true if you’re doing everything natively in Substack. However, many non-Substack users are going to find individual writers’ blogs outside of Substack’s interface, at least initially. That was the case with me, and I was only ending up on Substack via direct links to writers’ blogs or through e-mail newsletters.

The dashboard itself is less confusing, albeit more obtuse (I think) than WordPress’s dashboard:

I will note that I rarely, perhaps never, spend any significant time in the Substack dashboard view, other than to check to see if a post is scheduled properly. There’s just not a compelling reason for me to do so. The WordPress.com dashboard, however, draws me in; I want to play with its widgets and look at my stats. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been using WordPress.com for eight years and have something of a following there, while I’ve only had a presence on Substack for a few months, so there’s just more to see in terms of stats. However, the WordPress.com layout invites interaction with its tools in a way that I just haven’t seen from Substack’s dashboard yet.

For a refresher, here’s an image I used in last week’s post showing the “My Home” page in WordPress.com:

I actually think of the “My Home” page as the “dashboard” for WordPress.com, as it is the landing when logging in and looks awesome. The actual dashboard has more of that “pro user” look, but is really a more “computer nerd” version of “My Home”:

Overall Interface Verdict: Again, so much of this comparison comes down to personnel preference, but I think if the goal is to have access to robust statistics and seamless control over your blog, WordPress.com wins. On the other hand, Substack, like Blogger, is good for writing right away, as there’s a big, fat, orange button that says “Create” on the main activity feed.

Posting Interface/Editor

As noted last week, WordPress.com uses the block editor; like Blogger, Substack presents the user with a blank page that is more akin to the classic WordPress.com editor:

Using Substack’s editor takes a bit of adjustment, but it has a few little bells and whistles. It has “buttons” instead of blocks, but the variety is far less extensive than WordPress.com‘s. It has a Polymarket button that some users might enjoy, but that seems to be the only writing feature it possesses that WordPress.com does not. It also makes it pretty easy to paywall content with a button, but WordPress.com has the same option as a block.

Again, I have not written extensively within Substack’s editor. I primarily write in WordPress.com, then copy-paste posts I wish to cross-post to Substack. There are few little idiosyncrasies that require some adjustment—writing my beloved em dashes (—) in WordPress.com means writing three hyphens instead of two, while Substack converts two hyphens into an em dash automatically—but those are little details you pick up over time.

Posting Interface/Editor Verdict: I’m siding again with WordPress.com here, although users who like the more minimal approach of a blank slate might like Substack’s editor better. The Substack editor seems to be the sweet spot beyond what Blogger offers, as the editor is pleasing minimalistic while still feeling feature-rich. But WordPress.com‘s editor offers up so much flexibility.

Final Published Content

Now to the most important part of this comparison: the finished product. Here is where I think Substack might take the edge over WordPress.com. Thinks look clean in Substack, but not restricted to a thin little strip like Blogger. WordPress.com, on the other hand, has lots of “extras” on the screen—recent posts, archives, etc.

To illustrate the difference, here’s a “Image Compare” block showing the same post on Substack and WordPress.com:

Ah, but there’s a wrinkle here; two, actually:

1. The Substack view is the “in-app” version, not the one you see if you go straight to the blog on Substack; and
2. My flabby (no pun intended) WordPress.com layout is one of many I could choose from; I just like it (even though I’m pointing out its potential visual flaws) and don’t want to change it!

To the first point, here’s the same post accessed through the blog on Substack, not the “in-app”/”native” view:

This version has the style I selected for posts on Substack. The problem is that there’s so little consistency over which format I get to showcase to readers. It’s nice to be able to find a post in dark mode if the writer typically uses, say, bright yellow font on a lime green background, but what if you want to make your readers suffer (or you have some specific aesthetic vision you hope to convey)?

Further, you may access a Substack article through the landing page, only to find that comments load up on the author’s blog. The transition from eye-comforting dark mode to eye-frying brightness can be jarring.

With WordPress.com, I have control over how I represent my blog. If the point of a blog is to make a space your own and share a specific vision with the world, it seems like WordPress.com has the clear edge here.

Final Published Content Verdict: Not surprisingly, I think WordPress.com wins out here in terms of the sheer power to change the layout of the blog—and to keep it consistent for readers. I love Substack’s minimalism and visual crispness; I just wish it was more consistent. Perhaps I need to play with WordPress.com‘s visual editor to try to trim some of the flab, but I also want readers to have easy accessibility to past posts; I want to encourage discovery and browsing through my vast archives.

Honorable Mention: Engagement

For all of that, I think Substack does something really well compared to WordPress.com: ease of engagement. Once you’re “in” the Substack ecosystem, which seems easier for some reason than getting people to sign up for a WordPress.com account, you have this addictive blend of social media and quality writing that is hard to beat; thus, the aforementioned “Subcrack” (meant to evoke the addictive nature of Substack’s content, not a foundation repairman’s nether regions). WordPress.com does have an active userbase, but there’s something about needing a WordPress.com to comment on posts that severely limits engagement. I’ve tried to address that by installing the Disqus plugin (now all paid plans have access to plugins, which is incredible), which has helped, as Disqus is used widely across platforms, but Substack makes engagement easy. It makes getting an account easy. I don’t know why, but I always feel like I’m one hard sneeze away from getting locked out of my WordPress.com account.

Conclusions

That’s something WordPress.com and Automattic can fix. What will be more challenging is catching up with the energy of Substack. In this post I’ve clearly discerned that WordPress.com is the winner from a technical, aesthetic, and writer standpoint. But the energy—the hardcore, unbridled, enthusiastic, youthful, fun, jolly energy of the blogosphere—is on Substack.

It was not ever thus. One reason I made the switch to WordPress.com back in 2018 is because, in the mid-2010s, WordPress.com was the place to be. It hosted writers and thinkers who were pushing the boundaries of prose writing, especially in non-fiction. It was still alive with a bawdy sense of irreverence and good humor. I think it suffered a bit during the long decade of 2015-2025, and Substack came along and picked up the million dollar sitting on the side of the information superhighway.

But I think WordPress.com can reclaim that mantle. Making new user onboarding easier, especially for those who don’t want to write a blog, but just want to follow their favorite creators, would do much to inject fresh blood into WordPress.com comment sections. Actively courting some of the top names on Substack to cross-post to a WordPress.com blog might help, too.

Of course, I’m one man writing from my own perspective. My comment sections have always been somewhat anemic (no offense intended at all to my readers who do comment—I appreciate every single one of you!), so perhaps I’m viewing it from a less optimistic perspective. I’ve seen some writers on WordPress.com with incredible engagement and audience interactions.

That said, WordPress.com is poised technically to maintain its dominance of the blogosphere; now it should rip-off Substack’s playbook shamelessly.

The Portly Politico is me, Tyler James Cook. I’ve been blogging on WordPress since 2018, and daily since 2019. I love to write about politics, culture, and music, and frequently feature my original music. Check out my musical creations here on the blog or on Bandcamp. —TPP