Newspack hosted platform for news publishers

What is Newspack?

Newspack is a publishing and revenue platform for news organisations. Its home page calls it “the platform for news” and says it is open source and built on WordPress. WordPress.com develops and hosts it, with funding from the Google News Initiative, the Knight Foundation and The Lenfest Institute. The footer of its pricing page identifies it as a product of Automattic Inc.

Word & Press is independent and is not affiliated with Newspack, Automattic or WordPress. This profile describes the service as a third party, from the vendor’s own pages.

Who is Newspack best for?

The vendor targets news organisations. Its home page names publishers including The Colorado Sun, The Texas Tribune, CalMatters, VTDigger and Voice of San Diego. These are the vendor’s own statements and we have not checked them with the publishers.

The pricing tiers are set by annual revenue, with the first at under US$300,000, so the service is clearly pitched at smaller and mid-sized outlets. It suits a newsroom that wants a news-specific setup with hosting and support included, and does not want to hire a developer to assemble plugins. It is less suited to a publisher that needs full control of servers, or a heavily customised stack.

Editorial workflow

The home page describes publishing tools built on newsroom presentation and production practices. The help site has sections for Blocks, Themes, Homepage Management, Posts revisions and Guest Contributors, which indicates revision history, a homepage tool and a route for outside contributors. The help site makes no feature claims on its front page, so we have not read what each section covers.

Roles, approval steps and scheduling are not described on the pages we opened. Because the platform is built on WordPress, the WordPress profile describes the underlying editor and roles, but Newspack may differ, so check against a demo. See the editor experience guide.

SEO with media and performance

The help site has an Optimization area, with sections including Core Web Vitals, Performant Posts and Blocking AI crawlers. The pricing page lists a CDN and edge caching as part of hosting. Sitemaps, structured data, feeds and redirects are not covered by the pages we opened, so we make no claims on them.

Revenue tools

This is where Newspack differs most from a general CMS. The pricing page lists advertising tools, audience segmentation, newsletter signup, integrated payments, a metered paywall and tiered subscriptions, plus free Revenue Development coaching. The help site has sections for Advertising, Reader Revenue, Newsletters, Audience Management and Content Gating. We have not tested any of them, and the pages do not say which payment providers are supported.

Hosting and requirements

Hosting is part of the service. The pricing page lists hosting with 200 GB of storage, CDN, edge caching, security scanning, backups, automatic updates and a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee. Migration is listed as free, with a staging site and technical and design support during the transition.

The Newspack monorepo is a development repository. Its README says installable builds come from the Newspack Download Center or GitHub Releases. The older newspack-plugin repository was archived on 18 August 2026, with development continuing in the monorepo. If you track the code, follow the monorepo.

Extending Newspack

The monorepo holds the product plugins, themes and shared packages under GPL-2.0, and the help site has a section on third-party services and plugins. We did not read it, so we cannot say which outside plugins are supported on a hosted plan.

What Newspack costs

The page lists support: a designated Technical Account Manager, a Slack help channel, a documentation site, periodic business check-ins and on-call help for site-down issues. The price does not include a newsroom’s own staff time or any custom design beyond what is listed. See the cost guide.

Where Newspack falls short

• Pricing rises in steps with annual revenue, so growth raises the bill.
• Publishers with more than one site, or over US$1M, get no public price.
• Hosting is part of the service, so you depend on one supplier for the platform and its roadmap.
• We have not tested it. See how we test.

The verdict for publishers

Newspack is worth shortlisting for a smaller or mid-sized news outlet that wants newsletters, ads and reader revenue tools in one hosted package with support. Public tiered pricing makes it easy to compare with the self-hosted options or a headless build.

It is a weaker fit if you need self-hosting, several sites at a fixed price, or a custom stack. Check what is included against your own list using the feature checklist. A large media group buying through a sales process may also look at Brightspot.