Patreon vs Substack: Selecting the Ideal Membership Platform (2025 Guide)

[00:00:00]hello my friend in this video i'm going to be comparing sub stack to patreon so if you want to learn how you can monetize your content by offering some kind of monthly membership this is the video for you and we'll figure out exactly which platform you should choose so the main difference between sub stack and patreon is that sub sac focuses on letting writers and podcasters offer a single monthly subscription and patreon focuses on letting any type of content creator offer recurring memberships that have multiple different tiers subsec has one single plan that takes a 10 cut of any income you get while patreon has three different pricing plans that take between 5 and 12 of how much you make on patreon depending on which plan you are on so if you want to learn a little bit more about this we'll dive into the details of each obviously you can use substack for anything but there's kind of a little bit of a focus of what it is a little bit better for and then although patreon does have a bit more options in terms of specific membership tiers when you actually look at it it may not be the best thing for you so we're actually going to look at it so with that said before diving in a little bit deeper i wanted to show you that i've also created an article on this topic as you can see right here so if you'd prefer to follow along or if you would rather just read instead of hearing my voice you can google patreon versus sub stack best friends club and you'll get access to this article for free so that said let's jump into the main differences between sub sac and patreon so when choosing between sub sac and patreon it's important that you at least look at what features they allow you to offer your audience what features they offer you and how their pricing works to help find the main differences and basically choose the right uh platform here so the main difference between substance and patreon again is that sub stack focuses on letting writers and podcasters offer a single monthly subscription and like mentioned patreon focuses on letting any type of content creator offer recurring memberships that have multiple different tiers so although you may see that or hear that and think that patreon is immediate letter immediately better since they offer more and can be used by any type of content creator that may not be the case so patreon's heavier focus on pushing recurring memberships means that you might be likely to generate a more regular income but you will be committed to creating bonus content in addition to regular content on a very consistent basis for all of your individual membership tiers in order for it to actually be effective and for your patrons to actually stick around although patreon can be a highly effective tool for content creators that are focusing on anything which includes uh writing and podcasting uh patreon's focus on serious recruiting memberships may not be for you it's quite a big commitment and you're gonna have to offer quite a few different things and that might not be what you wanna do you might wanna have a simple uh single subscription for like a monthly newsletter or monthly weekly podcast whatever it is in that case substance might be better so subsequent also has some really great publishing and discovery features that patreon does not and if you're a content creator that focuses on writing and podcasting in particular because that's kind of substance forte then you may find that subsequent appeals to you a lot more and before we go into substance a little bit more you'll also find that although they do have kind of a more of a focus on podcasting and writing you can be any kind of content creator and use sub stack for sure so that's not like a limitation you have to be a writer or a podcaster so why would you choose sub stack over patreon so sub stack really is perfect for anyone who wants to monetize a recurring newsletter or podcast although they do have but with that said they do have some great publishing and content management features built in that can benefit podcasters comic book creators journalists bloggers honestly really any type of content creator so one thing that i personally really like about sub stack is that they're they are an email list building tool in addition to a membership platform with a big emphasis on letting their content creators have ownership over their data and content they even provide the ability to automatically import lists and posts from wordpress medium mailchimp tumblr and a bunch of other things and unlike patreon sub stack does not allow you to offer different membership tiers so this would not be the platform for you if you want to create multiple tiered offers however just like patreon substack is really a tool for monetizing an audience that you already have so it makes sense for subsect to complement a recurring social media strategy public blog public podcast or something like a youtube channel so what does substance allow you to offer your audience subsec has an impressive amount of features and different ways that you can offer up content to your audience ultimately when starting a substack what you get is an email list or the ability to create an email list and a website that is hosted on substack with the subsac editor you are able to create a public or private post private post would be kind of a paywall post then and in that editor you have the ability to uh record audio notes right from the editor or add in music or spoken content one really cool thing is that substance even offers podcast distribution so you could upload a podcast to subtac and this can then get sent down to apple podcast spotify stitcher and pocketcast which is pretty freaking cool and on top of this substack gives you a support help desk for your subscribers which is also a pretty handy feature in terms of discovery features uh subtech really has patreon beat here so unlike patreon subsec has several discovery features built into their platform that can help new supporters and fans find you on sub stack so we'll go over some of these uh their homepage showcases a bunch of featured creators and they have a monthly writer and residence showcase that appears here as well they also have a dedicated discover and featured pages these are two separate pages that showcase different creators and have different categories that potential supporters can search through in addition to this they have a really neat twitter integration that will show you what people you are already following on twitter that also have a stub stack profile so you kind of set up that integration you'll see instantly who you're already following that has a substance profile which is neat and they also have a weekly newsletter that can feature creators that's called on sub stack so in short substack kind of kills patreon when it comes to discovery features still not like gonna end the world and how amazing the these discovery features are i think you're gonna definitely wanna have your own audience and then monetize them with sub stack as opposed to try to start off on substack and find it everything from there in terms of pricing subsac has a very simple pricing model where they take 10 of any income that creators may make on sub stack and their payment provider which is stripe will take an additional 2.9 plus a 30 cent transaction fee per subscriber that's kind of standard stuff there particularly with the credit card payment providers all of these platforms are going to have some kind of payment provider fee and any banking fees and that kind of stuff right there the main thing you're looking at there is the 10 that they will be taking this pricing model is much simpler than patreon's multi-tiered pricing model however subset can take a larger cut depending on which uh patreon pricing tier you are comparing to uh in terms of getting paid stubs payouts usually arrive within 48 hours of each transaction that you receive on substack and it's generally much quicker and honestly a little bit better than having to wait like you do with patreon in terms of analytics subtac provides some pretty detailed analytics for your posts subscribers and general stats because substance provides you with an email list and website they make sure to give you helpful analytics for both of these things um which is really great to see after reviewing all the analytics that they provide on a blog post uh i'll link to it right here in the article as you can see um i found myself honestly thoroughly impressed with what they provide and i think anyone that uses substack will absolutely love the analytics and the attention to detail in the analytics that you're able to get there in terms of kind of safeness and legitness sub stack is definitely safe for anyone that wants to sign up as a creator or wants to sign up to support creators and substitute has been around since 2017 which is a good amount of time now and has been definitely proven to be kind of a safe and legit platform in terms of support subsac has some pretty solid support in the form of a help center resource center and the ability to submit a ticket via an online form in addition to having a few publicly available email addresses which is quite nice one really small thing it's a very very small thing i want to emphasize small but it's a potential negative thing that i did notice when it comes to substance marketing uh so ultimately i don't think this really impacts how amazing subsac can be for creators it's just a little nitpick that i noticed that i couldn't help but want to show you about this so first although it can technically be true that the cut of revenue that blogs can take from craters can vary the real truth is that the overwhelming and vast majority of blogging platforms take a zero percent cut so on one of their pages here they have this chart and they're comparing how substance compares to other options and they say that substance takes 10 of revenue and blogs it'll vary substant honestly they must know that most blogs are hosted on wordpress and wordpress takes zero percent i think actually even like 40 of the web is like a wordpress blog so it's it's significant um and the truth here is that they did not want to mention zero percent in their chart because they felt that the more honest answer of saying zero percent would make their platform look less appealing i don't think they had to do that i think it's better to be honest than to do something like this and it's just a small little gripe that i have there was also one other area so another area where their marketing team decided to be a bit deceitful is where they mentioned that their business model is superior to an ad model which is an alternative because it would take 40 000 page views per day to make 1 000 a month in ads so here is like a little snippet of the website where they say this they're saying 40 000 page views per day it gets you a thousand dollars in ads which is wrong and i'll show you how in a second and they're saying with the subset model a steady base of 1000 subscribers paying five dollars each can get you 60 000 a year so they're using very wildly different like 1 000 a month and then 60 000 a year to kind of make their comparison that's a little bit weird and i want to break down why that ad model is just it's really really off so in reality the average earnings per thousand visitors which is epmb which is how you calculate ad earnings generally it's about fifteen dollars uh per thousand visitors if all of those visitors are from the us okay so fifteen dollars uh per thousand visitors so forty thousand page views per day which multiplied by thirty would equal to one point two million page views per month if 100 of that traffic came from the us you could expect to make 18 000 per month in ads not 1 000. so considering the fact that epmv can range wildly between something like around two bucks per thousand visitors to all the way up to sixty dollars per thousand visitors even assuming the absolute worst case scenario of a two dollar epm fee you'd be seeing about two thousand four hundred dollars per month which is more than double the amount that they state and two dollars epmp is quite quite low i am currently i have ads on my website i'm not making 40 000 page views per day i'm making more like 70 to 80 000 page views per month my epmb is around 12 and so just from like a fraction of what they're saying my ad revenue is around like 700 on my uh on my website so they are it's very off what they're doing they're clearly trying to you know make it seem like like sub stack's amazing and don't do ads at all i wanted to highlight this just to show you that they when you're on their website they may be have a tendency to put some deceitful stuff in there just be aware of that and that i wouldn't take them at their word on everything um perfect example of this one here is it would make a lot of sense to have a public vlog in addition to a private sub stack you might want to do both instead of taking their word for it and just ditching everything and doing subsequent just something to be aware of couldn't help myself had to kind of call out that uh bit of thing but regardless of that i do think substance is a really great platform and you would you would definitely get a chance choosing it just wanted to call that out now on the flip side why would you choose patreon over sub stack so when compared to substack patreon has a much bigger focus on recurring memberships but recurring memberships that have multiple different tiers because there is more of a focus on committing to different types of content for different tier levels patreon can be seen as a lot less laid back but potentially more lucrative option when compared to sub stack in addition to this patreon's features are broadly useful for content creators that are creating any kind of content not just writing and podcasting so if you want to seriously push a recurring membership that has multiple tiers to your audience then patreon is likely to be the better option for you when compared to sub stack knowing that you will be committing a lot more content for sure so what does patreon allow to offer to your audience compared to substance although it is possible to accept one-time donations with patreon something that you actually can't do with substack the real focus here is getting patrons to choose between one of the different membership tiers you've created that have different prices and benefits or perks and um subscribe to that on a monthly or annual basis in addition to this patron allows you to fulfill merch to your membership tiers and either get paid monthly or per creation and although both patreon and subset have the ability to create members only or public posts uh patreon has many more post types to choose from which include text photo audio video live stream polls and more i'm sure this is something that stuff that can be added to in the future but patreon is a little bit more set up for like you can do whatever the heck you want with in terms of those posts there in terms of discovery features uh unlike sub stack patreon does not really have any discovery features that will help potential supporters find your patreon page at all patreon is a membership platform and is in no way a discovery platform which means you will need to do all of the work bringing people to your patreon page and convincing them to sign up if you want to learn a little bit more about this i made a video about called how to get patreon supporters which you can dig into this will actually be useful regardless of if you're using patreon or sub stack but i think it's a useful video for you for sure in terms of pricing when compared to sub stack patrons pricing is much more complex but can take away less from you as a creator so patreon has three different pricing plans available two creators that all have no monthly upfront fees or signup costs just like with sub stack uh and how it works is patreon will take between five and twelve percent of the monthly income you earn on patreon in addition to any standard payment processing fees like stripe and all that banking fees and all that kind of stuff the main one that you'll want to do is the patreon i think pro plan and it takes eight percent which is still less than sub stack if you do the one that's only five percent you actually can't have the multiple tiers so if you want to have multiple tiers you're going to want to do the 8 cut fee and again it is less but regardless there it is right there and if you want to learn a little bit more about patreon's pricing and all that kind of stuff i will also link to a video above right here so in terms of how long it takes to get paid out with patreon it's much more of a hassle getting paid with patreon when compared to sub stack it's a small little new nuance but i want to mention it after choosing a patreon plan getting your first patrons to join and then having their payments processed you will be able to receive your payout minus the creator and payment processing fees on a monthly basis although patreon process payments on the first of each month they recommend that all creators wait until the fifth to allow patreon some time to recover any decline payments first so it's just a little bit faster with substack in terms of analytics they do provide some analytics as well google analytics i think it's not as robust as what sub stack off offers and then in terms of safety and legitness patreon is definitely very legit to use they've been around since 2013 and they've definitely established themselves to be solid in terms of patreon support it's kind of mediocre it's a bit more frustrating when compared to sub stack um they don't have any public emails it's just like a contact form and like a detailed contact form you gotta get really in there and fill out a bunch of things to get to like the finally putting in a message to them kind of thing but that said that's kind of an overview if you want to check out the article here i have some more information on how to get supporters and an audience that supports your art as well as how to build a content plan for your membership whether it's with subspec or patreon it keeps supporters coming back for more and more and then a bunch of different other tools you can use particularly your if you're marketing music instead of like writing them posts or blogs or anything like that but with that said uh that's kind of an overview of the two i think they're both honestly quite awesome and quite useful the biggest difference is the kind of multiple tiered membership plan kind of thing um it's more serious and will take a lot more commitment but you do have that option of multiple tiers with patreon where substack can be useful for any type of content creator with a little bit more of like a focus on like the feature sets a bit more focused on uh writers and uh podcasters they really came out first as a way to create a monetizable page newsletter that's kind of how substance started then they kind of moved into offering some really cool features for podcasters and then it's obviously one of those things where regardless of what kind of content creator you are you can figure out how to use it in a really cool way so they're both good options but that's kind of the main difference with that said hopefully you did find this video useful if you did like and subscribe and all that good stuff otherwise good luck picking uh the membership platform of your choice you're gonna be in good hands regardless of which one you pick just wanted to make this comparison for you and hopefully you have a good time picking one so other than that i'll see you in the next video my friend have a good one [Music] [Music] you