Ghost
Ghost is a relatively simple, open-source content management system (CMS) from Singapore-based nonprofit Ghost Foundation, which also offers the 'Ghost Pro' fully managed service.
- The platform's primary benefit lies in free and/or inexpensive newsletter publishing with subscription management; think of it as a potentially superior alternative to Substack
- As a more general-purpose CMS, Ghost Pro is best suited for microindependent news organisations with little or no technical resources that want to quickly deploy an inexpensive and very out-of-the-box platform with simple configuration offerings
- Some of the named customers include The Stanford Review, The Atlantic, Madison Minutes, The Browser and Harvard International Review (all US-based)
Likely fit
Ghost is suitable for very small editorial teams — especially those that lack technical resources and where the business model focuses on memberships and newsletter subscriptions — that would benefit from an unusually low platform total cost of ownership. The platform would likely prove a poor fit for more complex websites or those that require customisations or heavy integrations. Finally, since each website is a freestanding Ghost Pro instance, it may not work well for multisite publishers that want to manage multiple titles from a single interface.
At a glance
Primary customer fit
Microindependent news organisation
Secondary fit
Small independent news organisation
Most active geographies
North America
Official support hours
Email: 9.00 a.m. (GMT) to 6.00 p.m. (EST)
Officially supported languages for user interface
EN
Third-party language support available?
Yes
Licence model
$9–$199 per month, depending on number of users, support levels and usage limits. For example, $9 per month allows a single user deploying official themes. $199 per month supports unlimited users, priority support and better uptime agreements.
Scope summary
Publishing platform focused on small independent publishers and newsletters with capabilities for subscription management
Tech base
Based on Node.js with a JSON API
Cloud model
Managed service (PaaS)
Headquarters
Foundation is based in Singapore
Head count
35
What customers report
- Publisher-friendly for simpler use cases (think newsletters but also blogs/podcasts)
- Focused on newsletter publishing; doesn't charge a share in revenue unlike some others
- Comparatively inexpensive for what you get
- Customer service gets good reviews
- Membership lies at the core and subscription management features are handy
- Has built up a strong and supportive customer community
- Lacks useful features such as referral capabilities or basic reporting
- No way to personalise newsletters for different types of subscribers
- Lacks any approval workflows, even basic ones
- Focused on English-speaking journalists; you can publish content in other languages but the templates and admin interface are English-only (past history in the CMS market suggests that this could prove difficult to redress anytime soon)
Background
- Ghost was founded in 2013 with a sole focus on professional publishing. Ghost Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Ghost, is a virtual company, technically headquartered in Singapore. The Foundation has 35 employees (including 19 developers) spread across all continents.
- The Ghost platform is open source and available for free if you install and self-host it on your own servers. Alternatively, you can obtain hosted Ghost installations from one of several hosting providers. However, most media firms would opt for Ghost Pro, a fee-based Platform as a Service from the Ghost Foundation, currently with about 18K active licensees. Ghost Pro also includes access to the Foundation's support team, as well as a concierge programme that helps you migrate your old content and membership lists for free.
- Unlike most legacy CMS platforms, the concept of 'membership' lies at the core of the platform, with publishing capabilities for a website and newsletters centred around memberships and subscriptions. Unlike some other competitors (e.g. Substack), Ghost doesn't take a cut of revenue. The Ghost platform sees regular updates, most recently some new capabilities around audience feedback for newsletters, membership attribution analytics, newsletter click analytics and an ability to update links in newsletters after they've been sent.
- Each Ghost site or newsletter is a separate instance (aka installation), with only trivial capabilities to manage content or capabilities uniformly across multiple titles. So while Ghost could potentially stretch from micropublishers to meet the needs of small single-title firms, it would not prove suitable for multititle news organisations of any size.
- It seems that most licensees just use the platform as is, without recourse to technical resources for advanced customisation and integration. Note that the Ghost Foundation doesn't have a big services team, so if you do need help customising or extending the platform, you'll likely want to turn to an outside consultant. Ghost maintains a directory of such experts. You can also find a marketplace of Ghost themes and a directory of supported integrations. In addition, you can find good documentation as well as community forums.
Package scope (as reported by vendor)
| Core platform - i.e., bundled in product (yes/no/beta) | Add-On (yes/custom/3rd party) | |
|---|---|---|
|
Content lifecycle: author / classify / edit / approve / publish / re-purpose / archive / dispose
|
Yes
|
|
|
Basic digital / voice / media asset management
|
Yes
|
|
|
Support print publishing
|
No
|
|
|
Simple social media re-publishing
|
Yes
|
|
|
Optional modules: forms / polls / social widgets / etc
|
Yes
|
|
|
Connector library (OOTB connectors, APIs, etc.)
|
Yes
|
|
|
Bundled CDN (with DDOS protection)
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
User registration
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Subscription management and fulfillment - digital
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Subscription or membership
|
No
|
|
|
Personalisation
|
Yes
|
|
|
Ad management - digital
|
Yes
|
|
|
Ad management - print
|
No
|
|
|
Content management
|
No
|
|
|
Research
|
Yes
|
|
|
Content management
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Video management / OVP
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Audio management / podcasting
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Data journalism and visualisation
|
Yes
|
|
|
Classifieds
|
Yes
|
|
|
Commenting / community features/
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Newsletter production and management
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Notifications and alerts
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
A/B testing
|
Yes
|
|
|
SEO
|
Yes
|
|
|
Multi-title management with variable inheritance
|
Yes
|
|
|
Complex layout and subsite / subsection cloning
|
Yes
|
|
|
AR- / VR- enhanced services
|
|
|
|
Audience segmentation
|
Yes
|
|
|
Online user / partner forums
|
Yes
|
|
|
Regular user group meetings
|
No
|
|