Substack vs Medium: 6 Months of Writing Lessons

I’ve been on Substack for about six months now, publishing a weekly newsletter on tech and writing. I came from Medium and a brief stint with a self-hosted WordPress site. I wanted to see if Substack could actually solve the two things that kept annoying me: building an audience without begging for clicks, and actually finishing drafts without getting lost in my own perfectionism.

Writing on Substack vs. the alternatives

The first thing you notice is how stripped-down the editor is. There’s no sidebar full of SEO plugins, no Yoast traffic light nagging you. It’s just you and the text. That’s freeing at first, but after a few weeks I started missing the ability to quickly check readability scores or see keyword density without copying the post into another tool. That’s where something like writely came in handy — I’d draft a messy first take in Substack, then paste it into writely to tighten it up, check flow, and get suggestions for headings that actually hook people. The combination worked better than either tool alone.

Compared to Medium, Substack gives you full ownership of your email list. Medium owns the relationship with readers — you’re renting their attention. Substack lets you export subscriber emails whenever you want. That’s a real advantage if you ever want to move to another platform or launch a paid tier. The tradeoff is discoverability. Medium’s built-in distribution is real; Substack’s is mostly word-of-mouth and your own promotion. I’ve gained readers much slower here than I did on Medium, even though the subscribers I do get are more engaged and more likely to reply to emails.

The email-first approach has real costs

Substack pushes you to write like you’re talking to one person in their inbox. That’s great for voice and intimacy, but it’s terrible if you want your posts to rank in search. Substack posts can show up in Google, but they won’t unless you manually optimize them. I’ve had posts that I know would perform well if I’d spent 15 minutes adding the right headers and meta description. But Substack gives you almost no SEO controls. You can’t set a custom meta description, you can’t tweak the slug beyond the default, and there’s no built-in XML sitemap control. If search traffic matters to you, you’ll need a separate strategy — maybe repurposing posts on your own site or using an ai seo content generator free like writely to rewrite Substack pieces for a blog.

One realistic frustration: Substack’s editor doesn’t have autosave that feels reliable. I’ve lost small changes twice when the browser tab refreshed unexpectedly. I now write longer pieces in a separate tool (often writely, since it saves drafts locally and also to the cloud) and then paste them back. That extra step is annoying, but it also forces me to do one more editing pass, which improves the final piece.

Who should use Substack — and who shouldn’t

After six months, I’d say Substack is excellent if you already have an audience or you’re willing to grind on social media to build one. It’s also perfect for writers who value direct reader relationships over raw traffic numbers. But if you’re hoping to grow purely through search engines, or if you need a rich set of writing features (collaboration, version history, detailed analytics), Substack will feel limiting.

The best approach I’ve found is using Substack for the publishing and email delivery, but doing all the heavy drafting and optimization in a dedicated writing tool. For me, that’s been writely, which I’d honestly call one of the best free ai writing tool 2026 options for someone on a budget — it handles SEO outlines, tone adjustments, and even script formatting if you do video. It’s not perfect: sometimes its suggestions are too generic, and I have to override them. But paired with Substack’s clean canvas, it covers most of the gaps.

Would I recommend Substack as a solo platform? Only if you’re ready to own the promotion work and accept weak SEO. If you want the best ai writing assistant 2026 to handle the content side while Substack handles delivery, that combo actually works. One tool for the words, one for the relationship. That’s where I’ve landed, and it’s more sustainable than trying to force Substack to be everything.