I've used six blogging platforms in twelve years. I kept Ghost.
WordPress, Squarespace, Medium, Substack, Wix, Ghost. A short tour, the honest annoyances, and why Ghost is the only one I'm still on.
I've had a blog on six different platforms in the last twelve years. WordPress.com when I was 19 and didn't know any better. Self-hosted WordPress when I figured out plugins existed. Squarespace for a brief, expensive holiday. Medium when everyone said it was the future. Substack when newsletters got fashionable again. And Ghost, where I've been for the last two years and where I'm not going anywhere.
If you came here looking for nuance, I'll save you the read. Ghost is the best of them. Not because it does the most. Because it does the right things, and it doesn't try to do the wrong ones.
What every Ghost review gets wrong
Most "Ghost review" posts open with a stat. Ghost is built on Node.js so it serves pages in a fraction of the time WordPress takes. Ghost doesn't take a 10% cut like Substack does. Ghost has SEO built in so you don't need Yoast. The reviews on G2 average above 4 out of 5. All of that is true.
None of it is the actual reason.
The reason is harder to put on a feature list. Ghost is a tool that has decided what it is. You open the editor and there is one cursor and one column and a slash menu. You write a post. You hit publish. It goes out as a webpage and as an email at the same time. Members get it in their inbox. Readers get it on the site. There is no "build a page" step, no "compatibility mode", no plugin you forgot to update.
This sounds boring. It's the entire point.
A short tour of the ones I left
WordPress is what most people are running away from when they find Ghost. I ran too. By month six on a self-hosted WordPress site I had Yoast for SEO, WP Rocket to fix the speed problem Yoast caused, Wordfence for the security holes, Smush for the images, Contact Form 7 because the contact form didn't work, and a backup plugin because the other plugins kept breaking. I was a part-time sysadmin for a website nobody read. WordPress technically runs 40% of the internet. Mine ran 0% of the time anyone clicked anything.
Squarespace is a beautiful trap. Pretty templates, slow pages, a CMS designed for restaurants and yoga studios. The blog feature exists in the same way a glove compartment exists. It's there. It's not the point.
Medium is the worst kind of free. Free as in "we'll show your post to a million people", and also free as in "those are our readers, not yours." When Medium decides next quarter that your topic is no longer in the algorithm, your numbers go to zero and there is nothing you can do about it. Owning the relationship with your reader is the only durable asset a writer has. Medium does not let you have it.
Substack sells you the dream of focus, then takes 10% of every subscription, forever. If you build a $5,000-a-month newsletter on Substack, you're paying them $500 a month, every month, for software that does roughly what a Mailchimp template did in 2012. Substack has its own gravitational pull (the Notes feed, the recommendations, the discovery surface), and that pull is real. It is also not your pull. They own the URL. They own the design. They decide who shows up next to you.
Wix I will not dignify.
What Ghost actually feels like
I'll keep this short because I get nothing from convincing you. I just like writing on it.
The editor is empty. The cursor blinks. You type. If you want a heading, you press hash. If you want an image, you drag one in. There is no "Are you sure?" dialog when you try to do something normal. There is no popup asking you to upgrade to the Plus tier. There is one keyboard shortcut for everything, and it's usually the right one.
The membership system, which is the headline feature in most reviews, is a small toggle in settings and a tier you create with a Stripe key. You don't manage it. You don't think about it. People sign up. They get an email. They can read paid posts. That's the whole story.
The newsletter goes out when you publish. Not on a schedule. Not via a third party. Same content, two surfaces, one click. People who think this is normal have not used the alternatives.
And the bit nobody writes about: the admin panel is genuinely nice. The dashboards have rounded corners. The empty states are thoughtful. The error messages are written by someone who has apparently been on a website before. You don't notice it until you go back and use a WordPress admin for an afternoon and realise the bar was on the floor.
The annoying bits, because there are some
I am not going to pretend Ghost is perfect.
The themes are limited. There are maybe twenty good ones and a few hundred indifferent ones, against the WordPress thousand-theme bazaar where every option is at least mediocre. If you want a wildly custom design you'll be writing Handlebars, and Handlebars is fine but it isn't React.
There is no plugin marketplace, which is the point but is also genuinely a thing you give up. If you want to add a forum, a directory, a course, a shop, you're either using a separate tool or you're building one. (This is also why I built xVoid, but I am trying very hard to keep this post about Ghost.)
Self-hosting is straightforward but not zero. There is a CLI, a database, a reverse proxy. If you've never SSH'd into anything in your life you'll want Ghost(Pro), which is good but not free.
Email deliverability is "use Mailgun, please." Mailgun is fine. It is also a second invoice.
So who should actually use it
If you publish words and you want people to read them and possibly pay for them, Ghost. End of analysis.
If you need a shop, a forum, a learning portal and a wedding registry on the same domain, WordPress. The plugin economy is wild, but it's wild because it has to be.
If you want a free home for half-finished thoughts and you're fine with someone else owning the audience, Medium will do, until you grow up.
If you want somebody else to handle the entire newsletter stack, Substack is the easy answer. Just remember the 10% is a tax you pay forever in exchange for not learning the alternative.
I've been on Ghost for two years. I've written more there than anywhere else, including Twitter, which is a sentence I did not expect to type. The platform isn't why I write more. The platform is why I stopped finding excuses not to.