Best European Alternatives to Substack
Looking for a European alternative to Substack? Substack made paid newsletters mainstream and, in doing so, put a great many independent publishers' subscriber lists, payment relationships and content-moderation fate inside one American company.
These European platforms let you run the same model — free and paid tiers, memberships, a public archive — while owning the list and keeping subscriber data under GDPR.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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1
European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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2
Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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3
Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. Editorial policy
7 European Alternatives to Substack
Ghost
Open-source publishing with native paid subscriptions
MailerLite
Clean newsletter builder with a generous free tier
Brevo
Email, SMS and automation from a French provider
Steady
Memberships and paid newsletters for independent media
GetResponse
Newsletters, funnels and webinars in one platform
CleverReach
German email marketing with strict GDPR handling
Moosend
Automation-heavy email platform at a low price
Key takeaways
- Substack charges no monthly fee and takes 10% of subscription revenue, so the cheapest platform for a publication earning nothing is also the most expensive for one that earns well.
- The claim that you lose your paying subscribers by leaving is wrong: the Stripe account connected to Substack is your own, and a migration reconnects the same account.
- What you genuinely give up is the recommendation network and the app, which is where Substack growth actually comes from.
- Substack Inc. contracts under Californian law with arbitration in San Francisco County and offers no European hosting region of any kind.
- Ghost is the only option here that replaces the whole publication — paywall, memberships and archive — without taking a cut of what readers pay you, and Steady is the only one that keeps Substack's shape — no monthly fee, a cut of membership income — with a German company behind it.
Why people leave Substack
Substack made paid newsletters ordinary, and the pitch that did it is genuinely good: nothing to install, nothing to pay, and a cut only when readers pay you. For a writer with no audience and no budget that is the correct deal, and nothing below disputes it.
The trouble starts the year it works. Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue, before costs, for as long as the publication exists.
A newsletter making €2,000 a month hands over €200 a month, every month, for a service whose marginal cost of sending your emails does not rise with your income. Nothing here is hidden — it is the whole business model, stated plainly — but it is a partnership you cannot renegotiate, and it is worth the most to Substack precisely when it is worth the least to you.
The second reason is where the company sits. Substack Inc. contracts under the laws of California with arbitration in San Francisco County, certifies to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, and appoints Bird & Bird in The Hague as its representative for readers in the EEA. There is no European region to choose. For a publication whose subscribers are European and whose subject is often European politics, that is an awkward place for the reader list to live.
- The fee is a percentage, so success is what it charges for Ten per cent of gross subscription income is cheap at €300 a month and expensive at €10,000 a month, and the work Substack does is roughly the same in both cases. Every European platform here charges either a fixed monthly fee that stops growing or, in one case, a share that you can leave behind by self-hosting. The question is not whether 10% is fair; it is whether you want your platform bill indexed to your own success permanently.
- What you actually cannot take with you is the network The recommendation engine, the app, Notes and the cross-publication subscribe button are Substack's asset, not yours, and they are why a Substack grows faster than the same newsletter on a website. Leaving costs you that growth channel on the day you leave. That is the real lock-in, and it is a much better argument than the one people usually make about the mailing list.
- No European option exists, at any price This is not a residency setting withheld from the lower tiers, as it is with several American platforms. There is no tier. Substack states that it is established in the US and that personal information may be shared internationally, and relies on the Data Privacy Framework for European readers. Your subscribers' addresses, reading history and payment records sit under Californian law and American process.
- You are publishing inside somebody else's editorial policy A Substack publication lives on a shared platform with shared discovery, a shared app and a single set of content rules set by one company in San Francisco. Whatever you think of any particular decision, the structural fact is that the rules governing what appears beside your work, and whether your work appears at all, are not yours. On your own domain with your own software, that question does not arise.
What you have to replace, not just match
Substack bundles four things that most tools sell separately, and the one you are actually buying decides which of the seven platforms below is right.
There is the email: a list, a post, a send. There is the paywall and the membership: free tier, paid tier, who sees which post, and the billing that sits behind it. There is the website — the public archive, the post pages, the search results that bring in readers who have never heard of you. And there is the network: recommendations, the app, the subscribe button on somebody else's publication.
Ghost and Steady replace the first three; nobody replaces the fourth, and any page claiming otherwise is guessing. If your publication is free and always will be, you need only the first and possibly the third, and five of the platforms here will do it for less effort than Ghost asks.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Ghost | London, United Kingdom | Free self-hosted / Ghost(Pro) from about $9/month, no revenue share | United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #2 | MailerLite | Vilnius, Lithuania | Free (500 subscribers, 12,000 emails/month) / from about €10/month | EU (Lithuania) |
| #3 | Brevo | Paris, France | Free (300 emails/day, unlimited contacts) / from about €8/month | EU (France) |
| #4 | Steady | Berlin, Germany | Revenue share on membership income; no monthly fee | EU (Germany) |
| #5 | GetResponse | Gdansk, Poland | Free (500 contacts) / from about €16/month; automation from €54 | EU (Poland) |
| #6 | CleverReach | Rastede, Germany | Free tier / from about €15/month | EU (Germany) |
| #7 | Moosend | Athens, Greece | From about $9/month | EU (Greece) |
How each alternative compares to Substack
- Which law reaches it. United Kingdom (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). Substack is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Your own server, or a Ghost(Pro) region of choice.
- Source code. Open source, where Substack is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Publications where the subscription income is already the business
Ghost is the direct structural answer to the thing that costs Substack writers the most: it takes no share of subscription revenue at any level of earnings. A publication billing €5,000 a month keeps the €500 that Substack would have taken, and keeps it again next month, which over a few years is the difference between a hobby and a salary.
It is also the migration that works. Substack exports free and paid subscribers as CSV, and Ghost's documentation has you connect the same Stripe account that Substack was using, so existing paid subscriptions continue uninterrupted. This is unusually clean for a platform move, and it is the reason Ghost sits first here rather than any argument about features.
Two things are genuinely worse. There is no recommendation network, no app and no Notes, so the growth that Substack manufactures for you becomes your own job from day one. And the foundation that owns Ghost is registered in London: post-Brexit that is an adequacy arrangement rather than EU establishment, which on a directory of European alternatives is a footnote that deserves to be a sentence.
What Ghost does better than Substack
- No cut of subscription revenue at any scale, against Substack's permanent 10% of gross
- Paid subscriptions survive the move because you reconnect your own Stripe account
- MIT-licensed and self-hostable, so you can put the publication on a European server and answer the jurisdiction question outright
- Your own domain and your own archive, accumulating search value for you rather than for substack.com
- Themes, templates and an API you can build against, where a Substack publication is a page inside somebody else's site
Where Ghost is a step down from Substack
- No recommendation network, no app and no Notes, which is where Substack growth comes from
- A London-registered foundation, so the publication sits under a UK adequacy arrangement rather than inside the EEA
- Self-hosting means somebody owns updates and backups, where Substack has no operations at all
- A fixed monthly cost from day one, so a publication earning nothing pays more than it does on Substack
Standout against Substack. Double your subscription income here and the bill does not move at all, which is the one thing Substack can never offer.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Lithuania). Substack is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as Substack is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Writers whose newsletter is marketing for a book, a course or a practice
A large number of Substack publications are not subscription businesses at all. They are a free letter that keeps an audience warm for a book, a workshop, a consulting practice or a shop, and the 10% clause never triggers because nobody is charged. For those, Substack's weakness is not the fee but the shape: you are running a marketing list inside a publishing network you cannot design.
MailerLite, from Vilnius, is built for that job. Its free tier stretches to 500 subscribers and 12,000 monthly sends, and it includes the things a launch actually needs — landing pages, signup forms, a welcome sequence — rather than leaving them to be improvised. Paid plans start around €10 a month, from an EU company processing in the EU.
It is a poor swap if you sell subscriptions. Paid newsletters are supported but this is not a membership platform, there is no public archive that reads like a publication, and nothing here will recommend you to anyone.
What MailerLite does better than Substack
- Automation, landing pages and signup forms that a Substack publication cannot build at all
- An EU company with EU processing, against Substack's Californian contract and DPF transfers
- Segmentation, so different readers can receive different letters — Substack sends to tiers, not to behaviour
- A free tier that costs nothing whether or not you ever charge readers
Where MailerLite is a step down from Substack
- No membership or publication layer worth the name, where Substack handles the whole paid-tier apparatus
- Priced by subscriber count, so a large free list costs money that Substack would not charge
- No public archive that works as a website on its own
- No discovery of any kind
Standout against Substack. It is the entry that assumes the newsletter is not the product, which is true of more Substack publications than their authors admit.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Substack is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as Substack is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Publications with tens of thousands of free readers and no paid tier
Substack has no per-subscriber cost, which is why publications let their free list grow to numbers that would be expensive anywhere else. That is the specific problem when leaving: a 40,000-name free list is a rounding error on Substack and a serious monthly bill on a per-subscriber platform.
Brevo, from Paris, is the one that does not care. Contacts are unlimited on every plan including the free one, and the meter runs on emails sent: 300 of them a day for nothing, and paid plans opening near €8 a month. For a fortnightly letter to a big free audience that arithmetic is closer to Substack's than anything else here.
What it is not is a publishing platform. There is no paywall, no membership tier, no reader-facing archive and nothing resembling a publication page, and its automation and CRM breadth is aimed at businesses rather than writers. Choose it because the list is large and free, not because you want to sell subscriptions.
What Brevo does better than Substack
- Unlimited contacts on every tier, so a huge free list costs nothing to store, as on Substack
- A French company with EU processing, against a US platform with no European region
- Real segmentation and automation rather than the single broadcast Substack sends
- SMS and transactional email in the same account, which a Substack publication has no way to do
Where Brevo is a step down from Substack
- No paywall, no paid tiers and no membership billing, which is the whole of Substack's paid product
- No public archive or publication website
- Business software rather than writing software: more configuration before the first send
- Mailing a modest list very often costs more here than the per-subscriber platforms
Standout against Substack. It is the only platform on this page where a free list of any size costs nothing to keep, which is the hidden expense of leaving Substack.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Substack is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU (Germany).
- Source code. Closed source, as Substack is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Independent journalists who want no monthly fee and no American company
Steady Media GmbH in Berlin is the closest thing here to Substack's bargain: no monthly fee, a share of membership income instead, and a product built around readers paying an independent publication directly. For a journalist leaving a newspaper with no capital and no certainty, that risk profile is the point, and fixed-fee platforms get it wrong.
The difference from Substack is where the reader relationship sits. Steady is a German company under German and EU law, and it is built for European memberships rather than for a network of American writers — which shows most in the payment methods, since a German-speaking audience converts far better when it can pay by direct debit than when it is asked for a card.
It is narrower than Substack in one direction and different in another. There is no publishing network to be discovered through, and it is a membership and payment layer rather than a full site with themes and an archive. Publications usually run Steady alongside their own website rather than instead of one.
What Steady does better than Substack
- A German company under EU law holding the reader and payment relationship, where Substack holds it under Californian law
- No monthly fee, so the risk profile that makes Substack attractive to a new publication is preserved
- European payment methods that a German-speaking audience actually uses, rather than card-only checkout
- Built for independent media memberships rather than for a platform that also hosts everything else
Where Steady is a step down from Substack
- No recommendation network and no reader app
- A membership and payment layer rather than a complete publishing platform, so you still need a website
- Revenue share means the cost keeps scaling with success, exactly as Substack's does
- Reach is concentrated in German-speaking Europe
Standout against Substack. It is the only entry that keeps Substack's no-fee, revenue-share arrangement while moving the company, the law and the payment rails to Europe.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Poland). Substack is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU data centres.
- Source code. Closed source, as Substack is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Newsletters attached to courses, webinars and funnels
Some Substack publications are the front of a teaching business: the letter is free, the money is in a course or a live session, and the paid tier was never the plan. Substack has nothing for that beyond a link in the footer.
GetResponse, from Gdansk, carries a native webinar tool with registration, reminders and follow-up driven by the same automation as the email, along with landing pages and funnels. A free tier covers 500 contacts and paid plans start around €16 a month, with the heavier automation on a higher tier.
For a pure writing publication it is the wrong shape entirely — a marketing suite where you wanted a page with your name on it — and the interface density reflects that. It earns its place only if the events are real.
What GetResponse does better than Substack
- Webinars, registration and follow-up in the same tool as the newsletter, which Substack cannot do at all
- A Polish company with EU data centres, against Substack's US establishment
- Funnels and landing pages for selling something other than a subscription
- Automation that reacts to what a reader did, where Substack sends the same post to a tier
Where GetResponse is a step down from Substack
- Not a publishing platform: no membership apparatus of Substack's kind, and no publication-shaped archive
- Heavier and more commercial in feel than a writing tool should be
- Automation sits behind a higher price tier
- No discovery, no app, no network
Standout against Substack. It is the only one here that runs the webinar itself, which for a teaching publication is the revenue Substack never touched.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Substack is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Germany.
- Source code. Closed source, as Substack is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: German-language publications where consent records are checked
A Substack list is gathered under Substack's signup flow and stored with Substack. For most writers that is fine. For a publication operating in Germany or Austria, where marketing consent is actively litigated and a supervisory authority may ask how a particular address was obtained, the record and the answer both sit abroad.
CleverReach GmbH & Co. KG in Rastede hosts in Germany and treats confirmed opt-in and the retained record of it as the centre of the product. The company, the servers and the regulator are then in the same country, which is a simpler position to defend than a Data Privacy Framework certification.
It is a mailing tool rather than a publishing platform: no paid tiers, no membership billing, no public archive, no network. A publication moving here keeps the newsletter and needs somewhere else to be a website.
What CleverReach does better than Substack
- German company, German servers and a German legal notice, against a Californian contract and DPF transfers
- Confirmed opt-in and the retained consent record as core product rather than platform policy
- A free tier, and support in the same language and time zone as your readers
- Segmentation and automation beyond the single broadcast a Substack post is
Where CleverReach is a step down from Substack
- No paywall, no paid tiers and no membership billing at all
- No publication website or reader-facing archive
- German-first interface and documentation
- No discovery, and a template library aimed at businesses rather than writers
Standout against Substack. It keeps the proof of how each reader subscribed inside the country whose authority is most likely to ask.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Greece). Substack is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as Substack is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: Free publications that want the list off Substack and nothing more
Not every publication leaving Substack is making a statement. Plenty simply want the subscriber file with a European company, at the lowest possible monthly cost, with an editor that works and a report that shows who opened.
Moosend, from Athens, is that: automation-heavy for the price, from around $9 a month with a 30-day trial, processing inside the EU. Its automation editor is more capable than the price suggests, which matters if you plan a welcome sequence rather than only broadcasts.
It is last on this page for an honest reason. It has none of what makes a publication a publication — no paid tiers, no archive, no discovery, no reader payments — and a smaller company behind it than most of the alternatives above. It is a mailing tool, chosen on price.
What Moosend does better than Substack
- A Greek company with EU processing, where Substack offers no European option
- Automation sequences that a Substack publication has no way to build
- Low fixed cost with no share of any revenue you later earn
- A 30-day trial to move a list and test deliverability before committing
Where Moosend is a step down from Substack
- No paid subscriptions, no memberships and no paywall
- No public archive, so the publication needs a website elsewhere
- No trial-free entry point: there is no permanently free tier as on Substack
- The smallest company here, with the thinnest ecosystem around it
Standout against Substack. It is the least ambitious answer on the page, and for a free publication that only wants its list in Europe, that is the right amount of tool.
What actually breaks when you switch
The move itself is easy and the growth curve is not. Posts and both subscriber lists export, the same Stripe account carries the paid subscriptions across, and a determined writer does the technical part in an evening. What stops on the same evening is the recommendation traffic, the app and the subscribe buttons on other publications, and nothing replaces those. Publications that plan for a flat quarter are usually right.
Links are the second cost. A yourname.substack.com address cannot be redirected once the publication closes, so every citation of your work in somebody else's article breaks permanently. If you have a custom domain the problem disappears, which is an argument for buying one now even if you are staying.
Third, the paywall does not come with you as a concept. Substack decides who sees which post through tiers you configured in its interface; on Ghost or Steady you set that up again, and on the five mailing tools here it does not exist at all. Establish which platform can enforce your paid tier before you export anything.
Do I lose my paying subscribers if I leave Substack?
No, and this is the most widely repeated thing about Substack that does not survive a check. Free and paid subscriber lists both export as CSV from the dashboard. More importantly, the Stripe account taking the payments is yours: Substack connects to it rather than owning it.
That means a paid publication can move without asking a single reader to enter a card again. Ghost's own migration documentation instructs you to connect the same Stripe account that was attached to Substack, and the live subscriptions carry over. One tidy-up is worth doing: the statement descriptor on those charges may still say Substack, and it is changed in Stripe rather than anywhere else.
So the honest version of the lock-in argument is not about your list or your money. It is about discovery, which you do lose.
At what point does 10% stop being a good deal?
Do the division rather than the argument. Ten per cent of €500 a month is €50, which is more than most fixed-fee platforms here charge for the same number of subscribers. Ten per cent of €5,000 a month is €500, which is several times the cost of any of them, including a managed Ghost plan on a large member tier.
The rough crossing point for most independent publications is somewhere in the low hundreds of euros of monthly subscription income. Below it, Substack is genuinely the cheapest way to run a paid newsletter. Above it, every month you stay is a deliberate purchase of the network and the convenience.
That is a defensible purchase. It is just worth making it knowingly, with the annual number in front of you, rather than by default.
What replaces the recommendation network?
Nothing on this page, and nothing anywhere else in Europe. Substack grows publications by putting them in front of other publications' readers, and no European platform has an equivalent audience graph to lend you.
What you get instead is search and ownership. A Ghost site on your own domain accumulates SEO value that belongs to you, rather than to substack.com, and your archive stops being a subdirectory of someone else's brand. Over years that is the better asset; in the first six months it is plainly worse.
The practical answer most publications land on is to leave and keep a presence: cross-post the free posts, or announce the move and let the recommendation traffic taper. Anyone who tells you the switch is growth-neutral has not done it.
Does the jurisdiction really matter for a newsletter?
It matters more than for most software, because of what a newsletter list contains. Reading history tied to an email address tells you what a person is interested in, and for a political, legal or investigative publication that is a sensitive record about the reader rather than about you.
Substack holds that record under Californian law, with arbitration in San Francisco County and the Data Privacy Framework as the transfer basis for European readers. Its EU representative is a law firm in The Hague, which is the mechanism the GDPR requires of a company with no EU establishment, and is itself the clearest sign that there is none.
If your readers are sources, subscribers to an opposition publication, or people whose interests they would rather not have on file abroad, that is a real editorial consideration rather than a compliance formality. If you publish a weekly roundup about garden design, it is not.
Which one to pick
If the subscriptions are the business, Ghost is the answer and the arithmetic is blunt: the 10% stops, your Stripe account continues, and the archive starts building search value on your own domain instead of on substack.com.
If you want to keep Substack's risk-free arrangement but not its jurisdiction, Steady is the only option here that does both, and for independent media in German-speaking Europe the payment methods alone justify it.
If the newsletter exists to sell something else, stop comparing publishing platforms. MailerLite if it is a book or a practice, GetResponse if it is courses and webinars, Brevo if the free list has grown very large.
And if all you want is your readers' addresses held by a European company, CleverReach or Moosend will do it cheaply — provided you accept that you are buying a mailing tool and that the publication now needs a website of its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
Ghost if the publication is the business and you want the revenue share gone. Steady if you like Substack's arrangement — no monthly fee, a share of membership income — but want a German company holding it. MailerLite if the newsletter promotes something else you sell. Brevo if there are tens of thousands of free readers and no paid tier. GetResponse, CleverReach and Moosend if you are sending email rather than selling subscriptions.
Nothing to start and nothing to send. Substack takes 10% of subscription revenue once you charge readers, and payment processing fees come off on top of that. There is no monthly fee at any size, which is why it is the cheapest option for a publication that earns little and the most expensive for one that earns a lot.
Yes. Free and paid subscriber lists both download as CSV from the publication dashboard, and posts export as well. This is one of the few platform migrations where the data genuinely comes out intact, and it is the reason moving off Substack is an evening of work rather than a project.
They can continue without the reader doing anything, because the Stripe account is yours rather than Substack's. Ghost documents connecting the same Stripe account during migration so the existing subscriptions carry across. Check the statement descriptor afterwards, since charges may still be labelled with Substack until you change it in Stripe's settings.
No. Substack states that it is established in the United States and uses service providers in the US and other countries, and relies on the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework for transfers. It appoints Bird & Bird in The Hague as its representative for readers in the EEA and UK, which is what a company with no EU establishment is required to do. There is no European hosting option to select.
The software is, under the MIT licence, and you can run it on a European server for the cost of the server. Ghost(Pro), the managed service run by the foundation, is not free and is priced in bands by member count. Either way there is no share of your subscription revenue at any scale, which is the comparison that matters against Substack.
Some, and it is worth planning for. The list transfers, so nobody is dropped, but the growth channel disappears: recommendations, the app and the subscribe buttons on other publications all stop the day you go. Publications that handle it well announce the move twice, send the first post from the new platform to the most engaged segment, and accept a flat few months while search traffic starts to accumulate on their own domain.
The shape is the same and the location is not. Steady Media GmbH is in Berlin, charges no monthly fee and takes a share of membership income instead, which is the arrangement that suits a publication with no budget and uncertain revenue. The differences that count are European payment methods, a German company holding the reader relationship, and a focus on memberships for independent media rather than on being a publishing network.
The archive moves: posts export and every platform here imports them, though formatting always needs a pass. A custom domain you bought moves with you by changing DNS. A yourname.substack.com address does not, and links to it stop working when the publication closes, so redirect what you can and expect old links in other people's articles to break permanently.
Who worked on this review
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