Ghost CMS review: The best for content websites

Ghost is an open-source blogging and newsletter platform that has been around since 2013.

It was born of the frustration with WordPress becoming too complicated for blogging. And today, Ghost is one of the best platforms to monetize your content, competing with Beehiiv, Substack, and Kit.

Ghost strikes a balance of being easy for non-tech people and giving all the options advanced users want and need.

Here are some of Ghost's built-in capabilities that will make your life easy as a creator:

• Memberships: allows you to collect newsletter readers or even put a paywall in front of your content;
• SEO: all the fundamentals to help your site be found on search engines;
• Fast sites: all Ghost sites are super fast by default;
• Analytics: information about newsletter and website traffic directly on the dashboard;
• Comments: lets users comment and interact under your posts, and includes moderation rules;
• Themes: there are loads of themes available to customize how your site looks.

When you are ready to take Ghost to the next level, here are some of the things you will love:

• Integrations: this gives you the ability to connect Ghost with almost any service, including publishing via API;
• Email automation: finally after many years, Ghost is rolling out email automation to improve your interaction with subscribers;
• Team members: give roles to let your team publish and manage the site without the need to share a password.

Ghost is a great tool used by large businesses like Buffer, Airtable, and Kickstarter for their blog content.

Table of contents

Here's the table of contents of this post. Clicking on a link will jump to the section:

• Pricing;
• Customization;
• Monetization capabilities;
• Newsletter capabilities;
• Great SEO;
• Safety record;
• Writing experience;
• Fast websites;
• Team capabilities;
• Ghost CMS reviews around the web;
• Ghost alternatives;
• Final Thoughts.

Pricing

Ghost CMS is an open-source platform, giving you the freedom to pick between self-hosting and managed hosting.

The official and most popular hosting option for Ghost is Ghost Pro, starting at $15/month. This is what I have used since August 2022.

Managed hosting is the best option if you don't know how to code or use the command line. These services have the advantage of taking care of installation, backups, updates, and security.

Managed hosting is a bit more expensive than self-hosting, but when you factor in the cost of your time, the difference isn't that big in my opinion.

3rd-party managed hosting services for Ghost also tend to be a bit cheaper. The more popular options are:

• Magic Pages
• Midnight.
• DigitalPress.
• Firepress.

As for the most popular self-hosted options, you have DigitalOcean and GitHub Pages.

Customization

Ghost has beautiful themes available for you to pick from that are a 1-time purchase, so you don't have to worry about a subscription for your theme.

I like the growing list of themes, which has given us options to make our sites more unique and pretty.

Although Ghost is fully customizable, most changes require code changes. This means that if you know HTML/ CSS, it's almost trivial to do anything you want.

But to make customization easier for everyone, Ghost has introduced more options in the dashboard over time.

A noteworthy change was the newsletter design options. Now each newsletter can look more unique, as you can create a template that fits your colors and style.

Ghost is not a website builder, and will never be, but it doesn't mean your site will look bad or hard to customize.

If you want a custom theme, check the Ghost Experts page containing a list of pre-approved developers. These are developers that know Ghost and can build something custom for your needs.

Monetization capabilities

Monetization with Ghost relies on paid memberships where readers pay to access the content.

Ghost is one of the best platforms for this type of monetization because it has 0% fees and the membership features are built-in.

This means you don't need to install anything fancy: just connect your Stripe account and turn on the membership feature.

A crucial advantage of Ghost over other competitors is the lack of fees.

Fees are predatory and tax the success of creators at an unjustified price.

For example, with 1000 paid members, Substack is 14 times more expensive than Ghost. This is the difference between paying $349 per year for Ghost and $5000 for Substack!

Other popular ways to make money on Ghost CMS are via affiliate marketing and display ads.

To make money from affiliate commissions, you just need to put your affiliate links on Ghost, as simple as that.

As for display ads, Ghost has a 'call to action' card in the editor that you can use to create sponsored sections. Or, as an alternative, you can also use Google Adsense.

Newsletter capabilities

Ghost is a blogging and newsletter platform.

In short, Ghost works similarly to Substack as you send newsletters to your audience and have them displayed on the website.

Ghost's blogging is more mature, as the platform was initially a WordPress alternative.

But as newsletters became popular again, Ghost kept improving the service to have a great product.

Today, Ghost has the following newsletter capabilities:

• welcome emails to new subscribers;
• email sequences (released a beta version in June 2026);
• publish posts on the website and send by email;
• email segmentation - allows sending newsletters to users based on labels/tags.
• analytics - clicks and open rates about your newsletter;
• newsletter recommendations - lets you recommend other users and vice-versa;
• embedding forms - lets you put embedding forms on other sites to grow your Ghost newsletter.
• customization - allows you to make your newsletter look like you want.

Great SEO

Ghost CMS is great for SEO, which is one of the most important things for making blogs and newsletters easy to find online.

By using Ghost, you have a capable tool for letting your site get discovered by traditional and newer AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Ghost accomplishes this search engine optimization by having the most important features built-in. So, you don't need to install SEO plugins or be an expert.

I have used Ghost CMS since 2021 with good results. Although the traffic numbers aren't mind-blowing.

Ghost has all the important things you need from an SEO perspective, like:

• Ability to customize URLs;
• XML sitemap to help search engines discover important pages;
• Canonical tags to tell search engines which page is important in case you have different pages talking about very similar topics;
• Possibility to create redirects if you want to delete or change URLs, which avoids broken links;
• Adding meta descriptions to posts;
• Schema markup on posts to help search engines understand your articles better;
• Robots.txt file to tell crawlers what pages they can access;

As I said, most of those things are already in place, so you don't have to worry about optimizing Ghost for SEO!

Safety record

Ghost websites have been historically safe even without 2-factor authentication.

There's barely any record of Ghost websites being hacked. The last major incident I know of happened in May 2020.

This is in contrast to the constant vulnerabilities found on other platforms like WordPress.

And even when there are security vulnerabilities with Ghost, it may not affect everyone and not at the same time, which gives time for updates and fixes.

Writing experience

Ghost has the best text editors I've tried.

The editor has the right balance between being clean, providing a distraction-free environment, and having all the features one expects, including the optimization of post metadata.

Another lovely thing is the ability to save text and links as 'snippets'.

This saves me so much time, as I don't have copy and paste stuff all the time!

For example, I use this for my affiliate disclaimer and HTML for affiliate links.

Here is a list of the existing cards on Ghost:

• Image: for adding single images;
• Markdown: for pasting markdown into the post, which is then converted into HTML;
• HTML: for writing code for your use cases;
• Gallery: for displaying images close together in a gallery;
• Divider: for adding space between paragraphs;
• Bookmark: for embedding links with metadata;
• Email content: content that will only show on email;
• Email call to action: a button when posts are sent by email;
• Public preview: text above this card is public for everyone, and below is only for members;
• Button: for putting buttons on the body of the post;
• Callout: put a box with style around your text;
• GIF: to entertain users when they are reading;
• Toggle: for collapsible text, useful for FAQs;
• Video: for uploading videos directly from your device;
• Audio: upload an audio file from your device;
• File: a downloadable file for visitors;
• Product: for reviews and recommendations with style;
• Header: put more style into your post headers;
• YouTube: for embedding videos;
• Twitter: for embedding tweets;
• Vimeo: for embedding videos;
• Codepen: embed code snippets;
• Spotify: give music to visitors;
• SoundCloud: yes, some people still use it;
• NFT: show your artistic PNGs;
• Other: for general URL embedding.

Fast websites

Ghost websites are fast.

The best part is that you don't need to spend 1 second worrying about making your site faster, especially when you use managed hosting like Ghost (Pro), which includes a CDN.

Speed is a Google ranking factor, and almost all Ghost websites pass Core Web Vitals, which is a good SEO signal.

Team capabilities

Ghost is also suitable for team collaboration.

It has 4 levels of user role-based permissions:

• Administrator: staff user that can manage all the content, settings, and options of the site;
• Editor: can publish and edit any posts on the site, as well as invite Authors and Contributors;
• Author: a user who can create, edit and publish their own posts, but can’t modify others;
• Contributor: a user who can create and edit their own posts but cannot publish them. An Editor needs to approve and publish for them.

These user permissions remove the need to share passwords while helping editors and admins publishing content. News websites and other big media entities benefit a lot from this.

Ghost CMS reviews around the web

MS reviews, most of the content you will find is about self-hosting Ghost.

This happens because historically Ghost required more technical knowledge to use, and most people creating this content are developers who know how to code. So for them, self-hosting is easy and cheap.

The most popular self-hosting Ghost tutorial is from Jessica Deen (video below).

You can also see people comparing Ghost vs WordPress on Reddit, but again, most of the comparisons are about self-hosting.

Ghost CMS has more than a 4.0 average rating on G2, where you can read about people's experiences with Ghost.

A common "complaint" people have is the not-so-easy customization without code.

Ghost alternatives

In case you aren't fully convinced, and want to compare Ghost against other newsletter tools, this section is for you.

Substack vs Ghost

Picking between Ghost or Substack is a debate affecting several creators as the platforms are similar.

Substack is a "publishing" tool. It's more than just newsletters at this point. Substack has podcasts, a Twitter-clone called Notes, and a mobile app where readers can access content.

Although these things have benefits, they tend to put you into Substack's "system" and make it hard to leave.

Substack has limited layout and customization options, which makes every newsletter look the same. 

In terms of SEO, Substack has been historically bad and people find it hard to attract users unless you are active on social media.

While Substack is simple to use, it may lack several advanced features like email automation.

As for prices, Substack is free but takes 10% in membership fees.

If you need more info, read the full Ghost vs Substack comparison guide to learn all the differences between the platforms.

Beehiiv vs Ghost

The Ghost vs beehiiv comparison is not like comparing apples to apples.

Beehiiv is more advanced and better suited for creators who want to focus on the newsletter, while Ghost is better for blogging.

Beehiiv is superior regarding customization, monetization options like Ads, and growth capabilities.

On the other hand, Ghost has better SEO and more freedom to put custom code on the website. This openness in Ghost is also visible in the ability to buy a theme from a 3rd-party developer, for example.

Beehiiv and Ghost are 2 great tools for creators and are both suited for hobby and professional use.

Kit vs Ghost

Kit can be used as a Ghost alternative, but most times, they are used as complementary tools.

Kit focus is on newsletters, and they excel at it, where email sequences and monetization are stand-outs!

However, if you plan to blog or already have a website, Kit isn't a good fit.

Ghost and Kit only have overlapping features on the newsletter side, where Kit is undeniably better.

Maybe that's why several people use Ghost for blogging and Kit for newsletters. This a powerful combination where you get the best of both tools.

Ghost vs WordPress

Comparing Ghost to WordPress is tricky. Their origins are in content publishing, but the way they work is almost opposite.

Both platforms are open-source, but WordPress is far more popular as the most used CMS in the world.

An advantage of WordPress is that i can be whatever you want it to be.

A CMS, a website builder, a Learning Management System, a newsletter platform, WordPress can do it all.

However, that's also one of its downsides! Just because WP can do it, it doesn't mean it's a good tool for the case or easy to use.

That's why I like Ghost more: It's a more focused platform on publishing and doesn't require you to worry about every little detail.

Final Thoughts based on my experience using Ghost

I've been using Ghost since June 2021, and my experience has been positive after transitioning away from WordPress.

I was frustrated with WP because I spent too much time "developing" the site and doing maintenance.

So, it was time for a change.

In my search for an alternative, I found Ghost and loved it, including some of its limitations.

Because I didn't want to do the same mistake as before, I forced myself to try something new: managed hosting for Ghost.

With managed hosting, I outsource management, like security, backups, and updates.

This has freed up so much time.

However, customization is more limited on Ghost than WordPress; this is a forcing function for me to focus on writing instead of playing around trying to make the website "prettier".

Another thing I love about Ghost is the fast websites.

I don't have to spend a second improving the speed of my website or thinking of reducing the number of plugins... Ghost is fast and remains fast. Simple as that.

The editor on Ghost is amazing and the best text editor of any CMS I've used so far.

The absence of plugins is another blessing. This means there aren't complications with security or performance, which are common problems on WordPress sites. If I need something, Ghost has integrations.

My biggest complaint with Ghost revolved around the lack of email automation, but that has been solved in June 2026.

As for Ghost themes, I still feel that I never found a "perfect" theme for me.

I like how most themes look, but they always lack something. So, I never committed to any and never treated this as a priority.

Even if I "complained" about needing to use code to customize themes, that's not a negative.

On the contrary, that limitation helps keep my focus and over-optimizing itch under control.

To finish, let me tell you that I 1000% recommend using managed hosting with Ghost. I cannot overstate how peaceful it is to run a website this way.

Even if you hear that managed hosting is "risky" because you don't have access to files, that's not a problem. Most people who say that are developers who want to make customizations for their use cases.

On Ghost, you will rarely need access to the files to make changes. You can do most customizations to Ghost by uploading a custom theme to the dashboard.

The bottom line is that I didn't regret moving from WordPress to Ghost. Not even for a second!

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