Ghost
Open source publishing platform with newsletters and memberships
1/3Ghost is publishing software for people who make a living from what they write: a website, an editor, an email newsletter and paid memberships in one application, rather than a blog with subscription plugins bolted on. Posts are written in an editor built around rich media cards - galleries, video, audio, files, bookmarks and toggles - and can be published to the web, sent to a newsletter segment, or both. Native signup forms turn readers into members, free or paying across monthly and yearly tiers, with offers and promotions to convert them and analytics showing who is reading and who is paying. Themes come from a marketplace of hundreds or you can build your own, and Content and Admin APIs plus thousands of integrations connect the rest. The source is MIT licensed and can be self-hosted at no cost; Ghost(Pro) is the managed hosting from the same company, priced by member count and cheaper billed yearly, with the figures here quoted for up to 1,000 members.
- Editor with rich media cards, galleries, files and embeds
- Publish to the web and send as an email newsletter
- Native memberships with free and paid subscription tiers
- Signup forms, offers and promotions built into the site
- Analytics on who is reading, signing up and paying
- Hundreds of themes in a marketplace, or build your own
- Content and Admin APIs, and thousands of integrations
- MIT licensed source you can self-host for nothing
What people are saying about Ghost
41% neutral“Ghost also functions as blog, you will be sending a link to the video.”
“Same with Ghost, same with everything else.”
“One of the main reasons I move to MagicPages. I couldn’t deal with the spam anymore. And I had been self hosting Ghost since 1.0.”
“Mailgun dependency is by far the biggest weakness in the Ghost ecosystem. Combined with spam signups, you can basically be the victim of malicious actors and then have your mailgun account banned. There's tons of evidence for this on the forums.”
“I think lots of self-hosters do, but if it isn't possible to sign up and cancel to get on it, that changes the math on getting a small Ghost site online. It also changes the math for the advanced email automations tool I built, since I set it up as BYO-Mailgun.”
“Ghost has had the Zapier integration forever, so a box that says paste your site URL and paste your key isnt an integration, its a login form. Every app does that.”
“In this case then, I would have just paid the $6 a month or $9 for Ghost pro for someone else to host and run for me, and just focused on writing and curating content.”
“Drupal and Ghost are even ore techy IMHO.”
“Ghost gives you a clean publishing workflow, good performance, decent SEO fundamentals, and you can focus on writing instead of configuring plugins or rebuilding templates. The cost is also fairly reasonable if this is something you want to use as a serious portfolio/project.”
“Ghost is a reasonable option for practicing things like on-page SEO, internal linking, sitemaps, indexing, redirects, and content structure.”
“I’d start with Ghost for a practice site. But before you write much, try moving five test posts out of it. If the URLs or images break, better to find out now.”
“For now, I'm likely to choose Ghost despite having to pay for 10-15$ annually, which I'm kinda okay with despite making no money for myself yet.”
“How BrooklynVegan Went From Indie Rock Blog to Ghost Site”
“I set it up on ghost and it helped me maintain a ton of long-distance friendships for 2-3 hours a month. Highly recommend.”
“If you are looking purely for an open-source publication engine, Ghost is another great tool for hosting newsletters and articles under your own domain. If you want raw, heavy forum architecture, Discourse is very established (though it requires more technical setup).”
“GhostOrg is doing the same, but i guess a lot of people are not ready to switch from WP to Ghost, try to intercept them. Also a lot of mid grade blogs could enjoy it.”
“Game dev newsletter platform: Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost, or something else?”
“Static site generator for Ghost CMS”
“Ghost is a solid choice for a magazine site. It's built specifically for publishing, so you get a clean editor, multi-author support, tags, and built-in newsletter/membership features without needing a pile of plugins. If you end up needing full design freedom, you can still pair it with a headless frontend.”
“if you plan to hand it to writers who don't know what a git repo is, look at ghost. it's built for exactly magazine style publishing, the self hosted version is free, galleries are a built in card in the editor. the catch is you host it yourself on a small vps, so "free" turns into 5 bucks a month”
“ghost cms sounds about right”
“Anyone else using Ghost seen newsletter open rates suddenly drop? Both my newsletters have had problems recently”
“- - WordPress blogs perhaps for the project, Ghost as a writing/publishing option, etc.”
“I discovered Ghost a while ago and really liked the direction of the platform, especially since it overlaps quite a bit with the kind of stuff I’ve been building with Astro, like content-driven sites, blogs, magazines, newspapers, etc.”
“Oh, go check out Magic Pages if you want a Ghost host:”