Over the past 16 years, WordPress has grown to power more than 43% of all websites on the internet. Throughout this period, we have utilized the platform to manage our blog and have successfully created various online stores to sell our software products.
Consequently, many individuals inquire about how WordPress stacks up against other blogging platforms like Ghost.
Both WordPress and Ghost are well-known platforms for blogging and website creation. However, each has its own advantages and disadvantages that you should consider before launching your new blog. Having extensively used both, we will outline the key differences to assist you in choosing the ideal platform.
In this article, we will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of WordPress and Ghost, enabling you to determine which platform is more suitable for your needs.
What Should You Consider When Choosing a Blogging Platform?
Before we delve into the comparison between WordPress and Ghost, let’s identify the key factors you should consider when selecting a blogging platform for your upcoming project.
We will use these criteria for our comparison of WordPress and Ghost. Feel free to click on any of the quick links below to navigate directly to the relevant section.
- Overview – A brief introduction to WordPress and Ghost
- Costs – What are the expenses involved in starting a blog?
- User-Friendliness – How simple is it for complete beginners to learn and navigate?
- Design and Customization – What options do you have for designing and personalizing your blog?
- Ecommerce Capabilities – Is it possible to sell products directly from your blog?
- Search Engine Optimization – How easily can you optimize your site for search engines to attract visitors?
- Extensions and Integrations – Can you enhance the platform’s features with plugins and third-party applications?
- Customer Support – Is assistance readily available when you need help?
Important Note:This comparison focuses on Ghost and self-hosted WordPress.org. For further information, please refer to the distinctions between self-hosted WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
Overview: Comparing WordPress and Ghost
Before diving into a detailed comparison of these two popular blogging platforms, it’s essential to understand the fundamentals of each.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is the leading website builder and content management system (CMS) globally. It powers more than 43% of websites on the internet and has been in operation for over 18 years.
It can be utilized to create virtually any type of website or blog and is employed by some of the most successful WordPress blogs worldwide.
To launch a new WordPress blog, you will need a domain name and web hosting. Numerous reliable WordPress hosting providers offer one-click installations and simple blog setup.
What is Ghost?
Ghost was established in 2013 with the mission of providing a streamlined publishing platform tailored for writers, publishers, and journalists.
It boasts over 3 million installations and an active monthly user base exceeding 10,000.
Ghost features a clean and minimalist design with rapid loading times. Beginners can start blogging within just a few minutes.
Ghost can be used as a hosted service or as software that you can install and manage on your own server. For this comparison, we will focus on the more widely used hosted version of Ghost, as the self-hosted option can be quite complex to set up.
Cost Comparison: Ghost vs WordPress
For many users, the cost of creating a blog will be a key consideration when choosing a platform.
If you are new to blogging, you will likely want to minimize your expenses initially. This approach allows you to reinvest more as your blogging income grows.
Let’s examine the costs associated with starting a blog on Ghost and WordPress, along with strategies to keep expenses low.
WordPress — Pricing
WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS). However, to launch your website online, you will need to buy a domain name and hosting.
Typically, a domain name costs around $14.99 per year, while website hosting starts at approximately $7.99 per month when billed annually. This can represent a significant investment for beginners.
Fortunately, Bluehost is offering our readers a special discount on hosting, along with a complimentary domain name and SSL certificate. You can get started for as little as $1.99 per month.
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Bluehost is recognized as one of the top WordPress hosting providers and is officially recommended by WordPress.org.
WordPress boasts a vast ecosystem of free plugins and themes that can help you manage your expenses effectively.
There are over 59,000 free plugins available in the WordPress.org plugin repository and more than 9,000 free themes to choose from.
If you decide to purchase premium WordPress themes, plugins, or third-party services and software, this may increase your overall costs for using WordPress.
You can create your blog using free plugins and themes, allowing you to minimize expenses. Many premium plugins and themes also offer free versions with limited features. As your website expands, you can invest in premium themes or plugins as necessary.
One of the advantages of WordPress is that you have full control over your website. You can modify the code and add as many users or members as you wish without incurring extra costs.
For more information, check out our guide on the costs associated with building a WordPress site. It provides a comprehensive breakdown of various scenarios and tips on how to minimize your expenses.
Ghost — Pricing
With Ghost, you pay a monthly fee that varies based on your audience size and the plan you select. The most affordable option is the Starter plan, which costs $9 per month when billed annually.
This plan allows for one user and supports up to 500 members, providing access to official Ghost themes for your blog. A complimentary domain name and hosting are included when you sign up.
If you wish to add another user to your team and gain access to custom themes and integrations, you will need the Creator plan, which costs $25 per month when billed annually. There are also higher-tier plans available for larger teams requiring support for 5 or more users.
Ghost considers ‘members’ as individuals who can subscribe to your newsletter or purchase paid memberships. If your membership exceeds 500, the cost of any plan will increase. For instance, the Creator plan rises to $65 per month with 5,000 members.
Take advantage of the 14-day free trial to thoroughly explore the platform and determine if it meets your needs.
Winner — WordPress
WordPress offers the same features as Ghost at a lower price point. Additionally, you can enhance your site with free plugins. With WordPress, you can also create an email newsletter and an online store without incurring extra costs.
As your blog expands, you can choose to invest more, but when starting out, it’s easy to keep expenses minimal.
User-Friendliness: WordPress vs. Ghost
Most individuals launching a blog are not tech-savvy. They require an intuitive platform that allows them to quickly set up a blog and publish content without needing coding skills.
Let’s compare how WordPress and Ghost perform against each other.
WordPress – User-Friendliness
In general, WordPress is quite user-friendly, though there is a minor learning curve. Being open-source software, you must install it yourself and handle updates and backups.
If you’re new to blogging, take some time to familiarize yourself with WordPress terminology, themes, plugins, and more.
To quickly enhance your skills, check out our guide on learning WordPress for free in a week or less.
Once you grasp the fundamental concepts, customizing your blog and creating content becomes straightforward.
WordPress features an intuitive visual editor known as the block editor, which you will use to create your posts and pages. It allows you to design stunning layouts without any coding knowledge.
You can also create custom pages using a drag-and-drop page builder.
These page builders are available as plugins that you can install on your site, enabling you to easily drag and drop various elements onto your page and customize them.
WordPress boasts an extensive library of plugins that empower you to enhance your blog without needing coding skills.
Ghost – User-Friendly Experience
Ghost enables users to easily write and publish content. As the platform focuses on content creation and monetization, it is very accessible for beginners.
Upon logging into your account, you will be directed to your account dashboard, where you can create posts and pages, customize your website, and manage your members.
The post dashboard closely resembles the block editor found in WordPress.
You can easily incorporate images, HTML, galleries, buttons, videos, and more.
Ghost is designed for writers and bloggers who want to publish and monetize their content quickly.
Winner — Tie
Both WordPress and Ghost offer a point-and-click editor, customizable templates and layouts, along with a similar interface for editing pages and posts.
The Ghost platform is user-friendly, but it offers fewer customization options, primarily focusing on content publishing.
Once you grasp the fundamental concepts of WordPress, customizing your site, publishing posts, and creating pages becomes straightforward.
Design and Templates: Ghost vs WordPress
As a beginner, you want a simple way to create a blog that looks professional.
Let’s explore how WordPress and Ghost approach design, customization, and the overall website-building experience.
WordPress — Design and Templates
As mentioned earlier, WordPress provides access to thousands of free themes that you can use to design and customize your blog. Many of these themes are feature-rich and mobile-friendly right from the start.
Begin your blogging journey with any theme of your choice to achieve a professional look for your blog. You have the flexibility to change your WordPress theme whenever you wish, ensuring you are never locked into a single design.
Each theme can be tailored to your preferences using the built-in WordPress theme customizer. Additionally, some themes offer their own options panel for further customization.
WordPress maintains a clear separation between your site’s design and its content. This approach not only ensures a cohesive design but also allows for easy theme changes in the future without any loss of your content.
Alternatively, you can enhance your WordPress experience by using a theme alongside a page builder plugin like SeedProd, which allows you to create personalized pages and landing pages.
Page builders come equipped with professionally designed templates that you can fully customize using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, perfect for beginners.
Effortlessly create coming soon pages, sales pages, landing pages, and more without needing to write any code.
Ghost — Design and Templates
In comparison to WordPress, Ghost offers fewer design and customization options. While it features a theme repository similar to WordPress, there are only about 20 free themes available.
If you have a larger budget, you can invest in a premium theme, but there are only about 100 options available.
You can customize your theme through the settings panel, allowing you to adjust the color scheme, fonts, icons, site logo, and more.
The settings menu also allows you to configure your website’s navigation menus, email opt-in templates, and additional features.
The platform includes a built-in option to hire theme developers for creating a fully customized design.
Winner — WordPress
WordPress provides a wider selection of themes and an extensive array of plugins, ensuring you can find the ideal WordPress theme for any niche.
Additionally, you gain much more flexibility by separating content and functionality from the design.
Users can fully customize every aspect of their theme and utilize WordPress page builders to create unique pages without any coding.
Ecommerce: WordPress vs Ghost
Integrating eCommerce functionality into your site allows you to sell products online, including subscriptions, merchandise, courses, and more.
Let’s explore how Ghost and WordPress manage eCommerce capabilities.
WordPress — Ecommerce
To incorporate eCommerce features into WordPress, you can utilize the free WooCommerce plugin. It is the leading eCommerce platform globally, utilized by millions of online retailers, both large and small.
This plugin allows you to effortlessly sell a variety of products, whether they are digital or physical.
WooCommerce includes its own add-ons and plugins that enable you to enhance your online store with additional functionalities.
You also have access to hundreds of WooCommerce themes to help you design a professional-looking online store.
You can create any type of eCommerce website you desire, whether it involves selling online courses, subscription newsletters, digital and physical products, or implementing content paywalls.
Additionally, you can select from a diverse array of payment gateways, including PayPal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and more.
Ghost — eCommerce
Ghost approaches eCommerce in a unique way. Instead of building a traditional online store, it allows you to sell memberships for access to your content, similar to platforms like Substack.
While composing a post, you can determine the accessibility of your content, making it available to the public or restricting it to all members or only paid members.
In essence, Ghost enables you to place your content behind a paywall for your premium subscribers.
This feature is built into the platform, making it simple to manage members and create paid newsletters.
Winner — WordPress
WordPress provides a versatile platform that allows you to sell a wide range of products. You can easily get started with WooCommerce or other eCommerce plugins. It offers more add-ons, payment options, and various product types.
You can sell premium content, digital and physical products, membership subscriptions, and much more.
Ghost includes built-in eCommerce features, allowing you to start selling immediately after creating an account. However, your selling options are limited to premium content and paid newsletters.
SEO: WordPress vs. Ghost
To achieve high rankings in search engines and increase website traffic, it’s essential to choose a search engine-optimized platform.
Some platforms facilitate better rankings, while others can hinder your efforts.
Let’s compare which platform excels in SEO: WordPress or Ghost.
WordPress — SEO
Out of the box, WordPress is highly optimized for search engines. The core platform is designed with SEO best practices, making it easy to enhance your website’s traffic and search rankings.
There are numerous built-in settings available for you to customize in order to enhance your website’s performance.
For instance, you can modify your permalink settings to create SEO-friendly URLs, establish categories for content organization, add tags, edit image alt text, and more.
In addition to the default settings, you can further enhance your WordPress SEO using various SEO plugins and tools.
For example, the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin allows you to fully optimize your site without needing to understand complex SEO terminology or hire a professional.
This plugin enables you to add title tags and meta descriptions, select a focus keyword, and access detailed page analytics with suggestions to improve your blog posts.
It can also automatically generate XML sitemaps, manage and create redirects, apply the appropriate schema, and much more.
Additionally, you can manage how your site appears on social media, connect to Google Search Console, and incorporate breadcrumbs to facilitate easier navigation for your visitors.
Ghost — SEO
Ghost includes several built-in features designed to optimize your posts and pages for search engines. You have full control over your URLs, permalinks, page titles, and meta descriptions.
WordPress includes built-in features for automatically generating a website sitemap, assigning canonical tags to your posts, and connecting your site with Google Search Console.
It also provides a built-in option to include multiple authors in post bylines, making it ideal for multi-author blogs where you want to showcase each writer.
However, much of your website’s content may be restricted to members only, which means it won’t be indexed by search engines. To improve your search rankings, you’ll need to publish additional free content.
Winner — WordPress
When it comes to search engine optimization for increasing blog traffic, WordPress provides more options and flexibility. You can leverage various SEO plugins to enhance your rankings and access additional features.
Ghost offers decent built-in SEO capabilities, but it doesn’t match the extensive options available with WordPress.
Add-ons and Integrations: Ghost vs WordPress
No blogging platform comes fully equipped with every feature you need. Utilizing add-ons and integrations allows you to enhance your site and connect with third-party services.
Let’s explore how Ghost and WordPress manage add-ons and integrations.
WordPress — Add-ons and Integrations
Unlock the full potential of WordPress by utilizing its extensive range of plugins, which function like applications for your website.
Enhance your site’s features and capabilities effortlessly by installing and activating a plugin.
With over 59,000 free plugins available in the WordPress plugin repository, along with thousands of premium options, you have plenty to choose from.
You can easily incorporate a wide array of features into your blog, such as contact forms, Google Analytics tracking, social media feeds, and much more.
WordPress seamlessly integrates with numerous popular tools and services essential for growing your blog.
This includes widely-used email marketing platforms, market research tools, live chat applications, CRM systems, business phone services, and more.
Ghost — Addons and Integrations
Ghost does not provide additional addons for enhancing your site; all necessary features are built directly into the platform.
However, it offers a variety of built-in integrations to connect your website with third-party services such as Google Analytics, Stripe, Zapier, ConvertKit, and others.
Detailed instructions are available to guide you through the process of adding integrations to your blog.
Winner — WordPress
WordPress excels in this area, offering thousands of plugins and third-party services that enable you to customize your blog with any functionality you need.
Support Options: WordPress vs Ghost
At times, everyone requires assistance with their blog, whether it’s related to site setup, adding new features, or fixing errors.
Let’s explore the various support options available for both Ghost and WordPress.
WordPress Support Overview
WordPress boasts a vast and supportive online community, providing a wealth of free resources. This includes the official WordPress support forums, tutorial websites like CanadaCreate, and active Facebook groups such as CanadaCreate Engage.
Additionally, most themes and plugins for WordPress come with their own support forums, either hosted on WordPress.org or on their respective websites.
For more information, check out our guide on how to effectively seek WordPress support and receive assistance.
Typically, you can find answers to your WordPress questions through a quick Google search.
You can also explore our WordPress tutorials for detailed, step-by-step guidance on enhancing WordPress functionality.
For more information, check out our comprehensive guide on maximizing CanadaCreate’s free resources.
If you require additional assistance, consider hiring a WordPress developer. With WordPress’s popularity, there are thousands of skilled and affordable developers available to support your blogging needs.
Ghost — Customer Support
Ghost provides an online help center featuring numerous detailed guides to assist you in getting started with the platform.
These tutorials cover topics such as website editing, content publishing, membership setup, social media integration, and more.
Additionally, you can contact their support team via email. Ghost also has an active resource section filled with valuable articles on building, growing, and monetizing your website.
Winner — WordPress
WordPress is the largest website-building platform globally, offering a wider range of support options for its users.
Support for WordPress is provided by plugin and theme developers, available in various languages, along with numerous free support resources.
In contrast, Ghost provides only one support channel and a limited collection of how-to articles.
WordPress vs Ghost – Which Platform is Superior?
Based on the comparison criteria we’ve established, WordPress is a superior choice for launching a new blog.
It provides greater flexibility, a wider range of design options and themes, eCommerce capabilities, and more—all at a lower monthly cost. You have complete control over your budget when creating your new blog.
Ghost provides users with a fast and straightforward blogging and monetization platform. However, it has limitations in customization options, monetization methods, and overall flexibility.
If you’re ready to begin with WordPress, check out our comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to create a WordPress website.
We hope this article has helped you compare the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress and Ghost. You may also want to explore our guide on checking grammar and spelling errors in WordPress, as well as the best content protection plugins.
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