Substack vs. Vellum vs. Venngage

I think Substack is better for people who want to set up a personal-facing branded website vs people who just want to post random musings every so often. Monetization is better there than any other collective publishing platform as well as organic reach via email. Substack also allows you to build direct relationships with your readers via emails and own them 100% which is great long-term if you use it to pivot to another site or another form of writing/content creation. Substack would be less helpful for someone wanting to write as a part of a group, not individually, or someone who's unwilling to put their personal brand behind their content. It's less optimized for SEO (which other platforms allow you to do) and can be harder to curate content based on your interests (you really have to go in knowing what you want vs finding it on the fly).

Incentivized

Vellum is perfect for novels, novellas, short fiction anthologies, and any lightly illustrated fiction. It’s excellent for most non-fiction. It’s great for e-Books and Paperbacks. I haven’t tried using the file for hardcover but it is likely good for that as well. Vellum wouldn’t be the right tool for coffee-table art books, picture books or children’s illustrated books.

Incentivized

I find it great for personal use especially when you are a visual person. As an assistant that needs a lot of organizing, it's wonderful. It helped me a lot and I usually don't require a lot of features. I also find it great for accessibility stuff, I respect that since I have a relative who has special needs. I didn't really need that specifically, but it's nice to know it was considered.

• Because it has a very high Domain Authority ranking relevant backlinks in a published article will help make my store more searchable.
• Substack is very easy to work in. The toolset they provide may not be as extensive as other platforms but it is certainly enough to create a meaningful, interesting post.
• Substack is very focused on creating a community of writers that support each other. They run an ongoing email campaign that reinforces their focus on building a community of writers.

Incentivized

• Professional, Tasteful Formatting
• Table of Contents management
• File Management
• Ease of switching elements (i.e. Chapter, Acknowledgement, About the Author etc.)
• Beautiful Style Sheets
• Generating uploadable files quickly and painlessly
• Previewing for a variety of formats and devices

Incentivized

• Extremely user-friendly: simple, easy-to-follow interface really made ramping up on the offering incredibly fast and painless.
• Variety of templates: Venngage has a HUGE assortment of templates ranging from corporate reports and business decks to more visually-engaging, "fun" content such as infographics, awesome charts, and highly customizable social graphics.
• Brand-alignment: we really appreciated the opportunity to tee up our brand guidelines and have those remain on the back-end and let us apply our style guide to multiple templates instantaneously.

Incentivized

• editor is on the primitive side - it's wysiwyg, but missing some embed options
• integrate with google analytics
• percentage cut that Substack takes can become a burden as your revenue grows. Problems scaling.

Incentivized

• Could improve ability to change the look of a design element like Ornamental Break.
• Doesn’t currently output in Smashwords .doc format (but does EPUB).
• Spell Check is rudimentary but accurate - still, it’s much better to use Word or Grammarly.
• If style uses initial drop cap, it doesn’t handle one-letter words well (I, A, O) - repeats letter in sentence. This may be standard practice, not sure.
• There are a couple dozen styles. I would gladly pay for a “Style Pack” to add on additional styles.

Incentivized

• It's hard to lock graphics into place in Venngage once you create something.
• Layering is next to impossible. The feature is there but is very difficult to use and most times the user is better off copying the object over instead
• Unless you have a business account (we have a professional account- middle grade) you cannot sort and organize your infographics. This is messy and cumbersome to go through and the price difference between professional and business grade accounts was quite large.

Incentivized

I use Venngage for a new project 1-2 times per week... I could not see using another program at this point.

Incentivized

I find it very user friendly, straight to the point, and the minor issues I found wasn't really impacting on my role. So I think it would depend? but personally I find it perfect for me. There were lots of templates I could use, and they were very open to feedback and customer service was very accommodating.

I think that the attention that I get as a small business owner from Venngage is excellent. They quickly respond to questions and provide information that helps to resolve the issue that I am having.

Incentivized

Medium is not so good for running newsletter. I find the mail that a user gets is very easily readable. Also as a creator it's very easy for me to track the analytics and monetise my blogs unlike Medium. Blogger is a very old technology. The kind of integrations and the support for Markdown / different media is very great in Substack.

Incentivized

Up until purchasing Vellum, I’ve used Smashwords Meat Grinder template and Kindle’s PC-Only software. I had to buy a PC just to publish to Kindle - very expensive investment with modest return. Vellum is only for Mac. In fact, it would have been cool if it worked with a PC. But Mac is my ecosystem for writing, and the PC is a pain. I ultimately chose Vellum because it works with my MacBook.

Incentivized

We prefer Canva but feel Venngage is easier for us. In comparison to Adobe, we prefer Venngage because of the ability to have everything in one system and not have to jump around.

Incentivized

• I haven’t made any money from it
• Can be disheartening when you realise you’re putting in maximum effort for minimum audience

Incentivized

• Less time publishing means more time writing
• Beautiful books sell better than Times New Roman dreck
• I’ve stayed away from Google Books but will move into that market now

Incentivized

• It was frustrating to be required to purchase a full month, not be able to download into PowerPoint and edit, and not be given a refund.