Buttondown vs. Curated
So — you're looking for a newsletter solution and you're weighing both Curated and Buttondown.
Welcome!
I try pretty hard not to be biased with these writeups — there are a lot of great products out there, and I'm not going to pretend that Buttondown is the best fit for every use case.
Let's start with the points in Curated's favor:
- It's cheaper to get started. Buttondown's free plan only lets you collect a hundred subscribers, while Curated's free plan lets you collect up to 1500.
- Curated has built-in support for sponsorship management. While Buttondown has support for paid subscriptions through Stripe, sponsorship management is not supported.
If you really need sponsorship management taken care of for you, or if you're extremely price-sensitive — Curated may be the right choice for you.
However! (There's always a however, isn't there?) There are a couple big red flags with Curated:
- The product is on life-support. I don't mean this in a mean way — I mean this in a literal way. The copyright notice on their main site still says 2021; they haven't tweeted in two years. Meanwhile, Buttondown is shipping tons of new features every week.
- While Buttondown's free plan is less generous than Curated, almost every other price point is cheaper. Two thousand subscribers will cost you $39 on Curated compared to $29 on Buttondown; five thousand subscribers will cost you $129 on Curated compared to $79 on Buttondown.
- Buttondown is a richer, more popular product. It's got integrations with all of your favorite apps — plus RSS and API support — to make it easy for you to curate an editorial newsletter of your dreams.
Check out the comparison table below:
| Curated | Buttondown | |
Scheduling | ||
Web archive | ||
Send from custom domain | — | |
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— | ||
— | ||
CSS | — | |
Tags | — | |
Attachments | — | |
Metadata | — | |
— | ||
— | ||
— | ||
— | ||
— | ||
Host on custom domain | — | |
— | ||
— | ||
— | ||
— | ||
Remove Buttondown branding | — | |
Dedicated IP | — |
Kind words from happy writers
It's a humble app doing a common job but with end users in mind.
—Si Jobling, Engineering Manager
Buttondown has been an amazing experience for me. The service is constantly being improved and customer service is the best. My newsletter with Buttondown has grown from a fairly small list to over 15,000 subscribers, and it hasn't broken a sweat yet.
—Cassidy Williams, CTO, Contenda
I switched over to Buttondown from Mailchimp because of the difficulty I had with Mailchimp's campaigns, so Buttondown's easy and user-friendly system has been a genuine breath of fresh air.
—Jessi Eoin, Illustrator + Comic Artist
You’ve truly built a great product that I feel good about using (vs a monopoly from our tech overlords).
—Rachel, 2030 Camp
I love how personal Buttondown feels, especially compared to Mailchimp, Convertkit, and services like that.
—Simen Strøm Braaten, Designer
This product has been exactly what I’ve needed!
—Nathan Bird, Podcast host, Chattanooga Civics
It's already so refreshing compared to the mega companies.
—Casey Watts, Author, Debugging Your Brain
Definitely will be using for the foreseeable future. It’s a great service and I feel well cared for. Thank you!
—Phoebe Sinclair, Author
I’m a sucker for elegant UI and I really love your site, but above that I think your product has so much value for so many different people. I’m not a coder, I’m only familiar with the bare basics, but I was able to figure out and utilise Buttondown quickly.
—Claudia Nathan, Founder, The Repository
The killer feature for me: Buttondown will take an RSS feed then automatically slurp up the content (in their words) and then send it to our subscribers. Job done. They seem like a good company too, so I’d say this is a winner.
—Andy Bell, Founder, Set Studio
Well may I just say your support experience is already approximately 1 billion times better than ConvertKit. Excited to be switching!
—Michael J. Metts, Author, Writing is Designing
Privacy focused sending and sign up form; lets me focus on writing - editor is "just" markdown; simple, elegant design template looks like a blog post; the founder is amazing - he's helped with every question I've had, even outside of Buttondown.
—Joe Masilotti, Founder, RailsDevs
We need more nice and professional services like yours on the web.
—Tobias Horvath, Designer and developer
No one is paying me to say this, but I love @buttondown so far for my lil newsletter. It’s so smart, simple, and attractive (and to my knowledge, not actively anti-trans!). Customer service is also legitimately excellent.
—Julie Kliegman, Copy chief, Sports Illustrated
I love it! It lets me breathe, not compete as I write with other writers.
—Devin Kate Pope, Writer and editor
It’s a pleasure working with you. Thank you! (And what a contrast with Mailchimp, where I spent two weeks and a dozen of emails trying find out why our form goes down sometimes (only sometimes), and never really got a real answer.)
—Anton Sotkov, Software Engineer, IA
Buttondown exemplifies how I wish most software worked, and I hope to achieve a similar thing with the software I develop in the future.
—Matt Favero, Software engineer
It feels incomparably good to be able to email just like a guy named Justin when you have a
@buttondown
question 15 minutes before you’re about to blast a Geistlist email. (Not a guarantee but wow this guy is human-level good.)
—Jacob Ford, Designer About Town
Enter Buttondown, Justin Duke’s lovely little newsletter tool. It’s small, elegant, and integrates well. And it is also eminently affordable.
—Will Buckingham, Author
Your settings page is a joy to use and everything about Buttondown makes me happy.
—Gareth Jelley, Magazine editor
have been on Buttondown for ~18 months and I can't recommend it enough.
—Elizabeth Minkel, Podcast host
You really do make ALL other customer service look terrible by comparison.
—Chris Mead, Improv teacher
There is a caring person on the other side of this software, which is one of the things I like the most about Buttondown.
—Keith Calder, Film & TV Producer
I’d also like to add that @buttondown is an absolute joy to use. Hats off, Justin!
—Elliot Jay Stocks, Creative Director, Google Fonts
Shoutout to
@buttondown
and
@jmduke
for building an amazing bootstrapped product for newsletters, all while being very open to feedback and connecting directly with customers 🙏
Easily one of the most enjoyable product experiences I've had.
—Den Delimarsky, Head of Ecosystem, Netlify
if you are looking for "newsletter tool for hackers" i tentatively believe the answer is @buttondown
full api, compose in markdown, good docs for setting up domain auth, simple subscribe form HTML that you style yourself (or not)
—Brian David Hall, Author, Your Website Sucks
I really like @buttondown as a blogging platform, it has the simplicity of Substack but the corporate culture is less toxic.
—Chad Loder, Extremism researcher
I worked with @buttondown and asked for some new payment support beyond the supporter single tier / pay-what-you-want options.
Justin was great and built it in just a couple days.
—Dan Hon, Author & consultant
I write nonfiction and I use @buttondown buttondown.email/Changeset - indie, GREAT personal customer support, very nice default styling, all the options I want including ones to protect my readers' privacy
—Sumana Harihareswara, Open source maintainer
I use @buttondown because it does exactly what I need (manage subscribers and send markdown emails), not more and not less 👍 As a bonus it's made by an indie dev which I love!
—Max Stober, Founder, GraphCDN
If you’re considering running an email newsletter, or if you already run one and are considering a change of provider, I highly recommend @buttondownemail. Super-easy app, very fair pricing with a generous free tier, and exemplary support. 💯
—Peter Gasston, Technologist and speaker
imo @buttondown is easily one of the best-designed services i’ve used in recent years, if you have a substack you should really consider switching!
—Kabir Goel, Engineer, Cal
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I hope you have a very nice day.