Buttondown Reviews

Clean design, but fully featured for all my email needs.

Some of the settings have been slightly confusing!

For people looking for a straight forward way to communicate with their audience, I think Buttondown gives the most straight forward way of doing so. Respecting both the writer, sender and reader.

Not a lot of translated languages as of yet, so that UI and generated content is not natively fit for some audiences.

How simple it was to implement. I don't really care for all the design features you get with mailchimp. Setting up Buttondown with a nice looking template and get emails out was super fast.

I hit the subscriber count too quickly so had to pay. But i guess that means it's working :)

The APIs! The support is absolutely top-notch as well. But the fact that I can get the data in and out of the system was why I chose Buttondown.

It's relatively new compared to some of the others so there are some nice-to-have features that I'm eager to get rolled out.

the support I get when I reach out. I get an almost immediate response from a real person with a name and I can ask for help as often as I need it...as an 80 year old writer who is not tech savvy, this means a lot to me.

there is nothing I dislike about button-down.

I like how easy Buttondown was to set up and start sending emails.

Tracking engagement was pretty much nonexistent until I upgraded my account. Even now, the analytics aren’t great.

It was easy to get up and running. The UI is easy to use and very straightfoward.

The analytics take some time to update, and there's no confirmation of an email being sent when you sent to a few people from your list.

It’s such a clean and rich control panel. The whole set up for how you deliver campaigns in button down is better than all other services we’ve used.

Nothing. Buttondown just works well across the board.

The setup is very easy and there are more technical options for the experienced to get your newsletter looking fab. The pricing is VERY generous too especially for non-profits.

Some of the documentation is a little dated but they are working on updating the text. It took me a bit to figure out how to setup my custom send domain.

I really like how easy it was to migrate my newsletter content to Buttondown from Substack and TinyLetter.

I wish I could look at the list of my sent emails in descending order from email last sent to oldest email, but perhaps I have not figured out how yet.

Buttondown is easy to get started with and supports the integrations an author needs to be a successful indie publisher.

Setting up a custom domain could have been simpler, but I got it working quickly.

I very much appreciate the support. I was able to schedule a half hour call with [sensitive content hidden] where he answered my questions. He seamlessly migrated my subscribers and archives over to Buttondown. Overall, once the DNS Records were switched, sending an email has been fairly straightforward, which I appreciate, as well as being able to choose between Markdown, HTML, or a mode in which it's done for me. The look is clean, and the archives page is easy to scan. The pricing (Standard) is reasonable.

I found it difficult to set up in large part because much of the "language" is foreign to me. My hosting server's help desk ended up switching the DNS Records for me because I didn't understand the directions. As well, I don't have the settings fully set up because I don't understand some of them. A lot of this is my own ignorance; some of it might be helped with a little more explanatory text or even "explain it to me like I'm a five year old" text. I very much hope comments are enabled when that is possible.

Buttondown is an easy to use newsletter platform that packs a lot of features into a simple user interface. Anyone can learn to use it, though it's best for users with some amount of tech-savvy. Onboarding was easy — I picked a url for my newsletter and added some basic details. The user interface for setting up custom domains walked me through all the arcane DNS changes and could check if I had set things up correctly. Then, I was able to use the editor. The editor supports writing in both rich text and Markdown modes, plus comes with a live preview. It's only 2 clicks to send a test email. The platform is highly customizable. The default email style is simple (looks very close to a handwritten email) but everything can be changed by writing custom CSS. Unlike Substack, where all emails look the same, I can make the colors, fonts, and other styles match my website to provide a consistent look-and-feel. I can even change the subject and body of reminder emails for people who have not yet confirmed their subscriptions. The free tier is quite generous as it has no time limit and includes advanced features like custom domains. It can send newsletters with up to 100 subscribers. For the first year, I was able to run my newsletter entirely on the free tier. Finally, [sensitive content hidden] provides great customer support, even on the free and entry-level tiers. He seems to respond to most/all tickets personally. He is very responsive to feedback, especially about documentation, which has resulted in a rich knowledge base that can resolve most of my problems.

While the editor's simplicity makes it far more intuitive than marketing tools like MailChimp, the editor's functionality is still more bare-bones compared to other newsletter platforms like Substack. For example, both platforms allow embedding X and Instagram posts in the email. Buttondown's format only includes the text of X posts, no image previews. It doesn't seem to be working reliably for Instagram. The user needs to insert a screenshot manually if they want the X/ Instagram posts to look good. Preview also seems slow overall, so I would recommend keeping the preview window closed while writing. The scheduling feature is a little confusing. After scheduling an email, I am allowed to change my mind and unschedule it. However, I did not find an easy way to send the email immediately instead. I must change the scheduled time to a date in the past.

It's not Substack and apparently has zero interest in platforming Nazis.

Formatting. It's 2024: if I cut and paste a poem from a Word doc, it should appear in Buttondown with the same formatting. I had to insert break tags, my first use of HTML since the Naughts.

• easy to use • manageable system to keep track of subscribers

• There is no app version of the platform

It's easy to use. I like Markdown, so that's a natural way for me to do things. The interface is mostly quite friendly, and I know that they have things in the roadmap that will make it even better. And for me, the best thing about Buttondown is the tech support. The people are great, helpful, and welcoming. The bottom line: I started on the free tier, and I'm not actually using any features that would require payment -- but I recently upgraded to a paid tier because Buttondown and its team are so useful and helpful that I figure that I should chip in at least something to the endeavour.

Hmm. The editor could be a tad better. I'd like to have a dark mode. But with the standardization on Markdown, I can write in a different tool and easily drop what I've written into the Buttondown editor window.

Things I liked: - Customizable CSS - Custom urls for page asking people to confirm and final confirmation page - Support for HTML form so I can implement with consistent style on my website - Prompt customer service response - Send from custom domain is included in free tier - Tracking off by default - respectful of privacy

- Settings interface is a little overwhelming - Took time for my upgrade to go into effect after purchasing - Price is a bit high for me since I am just using it for a personal newsletter (but with too many subscribers for the free tier). However it's well worth the money since they offer tons of customization that I wouldn't get elsewhere, and I want the company to do well and sustain themselves for many years, so I gladly pay for the lowest paid tier.

- Good feature breadth - Highly responsive customer support - Pricing very compelling relative to Substack

- UI lacks polish - Emails / contacts UI is feature poor and difficult to navigate

The markdown support, ease of use, great customer service.

Compatibility between the WYSIWYG editor and the Markdown editor – sometimes I lose HTML code/formatting when I switch between the two.

+ Easy to implement+ Simple yet powerful features like automation+ Wide range of subscription methods, including API+ Amazing support from the team

+ No a 'block builder' type interface for creating your content (but to be honest, I prefer this, as it keeps things really simple!, and it does support HTML and Markdown if you want to create something detailed!)

Ease of setting up, adding custom branding colors and images, and excellent customer service when I needed assistance setting up my custom domain.

CSS styling could be better. Some of the styles added are override by Buttondown's style. I have to set specific CSS for those case. Also the preview of the emails (web or mobile) doesn't seem useful as is. Spacing looks fine on the preview but when the email gets sent, it has more narrow spacing. Would be nice if the preview feature was more accurate.

I was a Mailchimp user for sometime, but hit the limits of their free tier. Buttondown was affordable for me, but what interested me even more was the support (both in product and documentation) for migrating both my existing list as well as my RSS-based campaign.

Honestly "it just worked". I'm sure they are as perfect as any other company, but I've had no issues.

I liked the approach, the elegance of the software architecture and approach.There are many software for mail marketing, but few products that are designed for newsletter for a free and paid audience.

There are same function that still need to be better implemented, I do not like that I can only dived the list in paid and free, and that on the list management, field like name and surname are not included by default

Hands down the best newsletter service available. Privacy focused, with a beautiful interface and WYSIWYG editor, it just works. [sensitive content hidden] and his team are also providing a top notch customer support.

Not much that I didn’t like. Eh, maybe some templates to start with could be great ? Take this as a feature request.

Setting everything up, linking my website, sorting out DNS, making tweaks. Attention to detail throughout, from the tint colour picker to the layout of the settings page.

No cons. Buttondown is the best at what it does, and it makes writing a newsletter a pleasure.