Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. Substack is positioning themselves to their customers, which are journalists/authors, as a comprehensive alternati

Well, it's a bit more complicated than that. Substack is positioning themselves to their customers, which are journalists/authors, as a comprehensive alternative to having a normal job working at a newspaper or magazine. That seems to include high-touch customer support, an integrated business model with payments, a mailing list system, a distribution method, etc. It's more of a service than a piece of software. Ghost actually seems to have jumped on Substack's bandwagon by trying to skew their blog software toward being a direct Substack alternative. So Ghost seems to have adopted Substack's business model and Substack seems to have adopted some of their blog technology.