Ghost review
Best for publications and newsletters
Ghost is a publishing platform first and a headless CMS second, and the ordering is the point. Memberships, paid subscription tiers, email newsletters and an excellent long-form editor are all core product rather than plugins, which is the opposite of how WordPress arrives at the same feature set.
For headless use it exposes a read-only Content API, so you can render the front end in Next.js or Astro while editors stay in the Ghost admin and subscribers stay in Ghost's member system. What you cannot do is write content back through the API in the way a general-purpose CMS allows.
Who Ghost is for
Publications, newsletters and content-led businesses where the reader relationship, and possibly the subscription revenue, matters as much as the pages. Also a good fit for a company blog that wants an email list without wiring up a third service.
Wrong tool for a product marketing site with many page types and structured data.
Strengths and limits
What it does well
- Memberships, paid tiers and newsletters are built in, which removes an entire integration project for publications.
- The writing experience is the best here for long-form editorial, and writers notice.
- MIT licensed and self-hostable, so the hosted product is a convenience rather than a lock.
- Ghost(Pro) revenue funds a non-profit foundation, so the incentives behind the roadmap are unusually stable.
Where it falls short
- The Content API is read-only. Ghost is a publishing tool you write in, not a content store you write to.
- The content model is posts, pages and tags. There is no custom content modelling, so anything structured beyond an article is out of scope.
- Ghost(Pro) prices on member count rather than seats or usage, which is the right model for a publication and the wrong one for a company site.
- Self-hosting means running MySQL and handling upgrades, and the officially supported install path is narrower than most Node apps.
Ghost pricing
Self-hosting is free under the MIT licence; you provide a Node host and MySQL.
Ghost(Pro) starts at $18 a month for 1,000 members and 1 staff user. Publisher is $29 a month for 1,000 members and 3 staff users, Business is $199 a month for 10,000 members and 15 staff users, and Custom is quote-only with unlimited members and staff. Pricing scales with member count rather than with traffic or API usage.
Verdict
If what you are building is a publication, Ghost does more out of the box than anything else in this directory and the editor is a pleasure. The subscription and newsletter machinery alone is worth the entry price against assembling the same thing from three services.
If you need custom content types, or a CMS you can write to programmatically, this is not that product and no amount of API work will make it one.
Ghost FAQ
Can Ghost be used headless?
Yes, through the read-only Content API, with the front end rendered in Next.js, Astro or anything else. Editors keep using the Ghost admin. What you cannot do is create or update content through the API the way you would with a general-purpose headless CMS.Is Ghost free?
The software is MIT licensed and free to self-host on your own Node and MySQL. Ghost(Pro), the managed service, starts at $18 a month for 1,000 members and rises with member count rather than with usage.Ghost or WordPress for a blog?
Ghost if you want memberships, newsletters and a clean writing experience without assembling plugins. WordPress if you need arbitrary content types, a huge plugin ecosystem or an existing team that already knows it. Ghost is narrower on purpose.
Other platforms worth a look
This is an independent review. We have no affiliate relationship with Ghost, earn nothing if you sign up, and no vendor pays for placement in the directory. Prices were read from the vendor's own pages in August 2026 and change without notice.