If you want a blog that can grow into anything, the answer to Ghost vs WordPress is WordPress. Ghost is a good place to write and send a newsletter, built on newer technology than WordPress and focused on publishing. That focus is also a fence: the further a blog wants to go, the more limits it runs into.
- Ghost(Pro) starts at
- $15 a month, billed yearly
- Share of all websites
- WordPress 39.6%, Ghost 0.1%
- Free themes on the official shelf
- WordPress 8,723, Ghost 22
- How you extend it
- WordPress plugins, Ghost 108 integrations
Below, we compare what each one costs today, what a Ghost(Pro) plan leaves out, what a Ghost theme gets you next to a WordPress one, and whether the old line about WordPress being outdated PHP holds up. Every price and count here was checked on October 22, 2026.
Ghost vs WordPress: what is the difference?
Ghost is a publishing app with memberships and newsletters built in. WordPress is a general content management system that you shape with themes and plugins. That one difference explains almost everything else in this comparison.
Ghost is open source, built on Node.js, and its current release is Ghost 6.72.0 from October 20, 2026. You either pay for Ghost(Pro), the official hosted service, or run the software on your own server. WordPress runs on PHP and MySQL, and it is the default for most of the web: the W3Techs CMS survey counts it on 39.6% of all websites and Ghost on 0.1%, as of October 22, 2026.
| Ghost | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Blogs and newsletters | Any kind of site |
| Runs on | Node.js | PHP |
| Members and newsletter | Built in | With plugins |
| Extending it | 108 integrations | Plugins and code |
| Free official themes | 22 | 8,723 |
| Hosting | Ghost(Pro) or a server | Almost any host |
If you are still choosing between more than Ghost and WordPress, we compared WordPress with Ghost, Framer, Webflow, Wix and Squarespace in a separate post.
What Ghost does well
Ghost handles memberships and newsletters better out of the box than WordPress does, and that is the reason people pick it. You publish a post and it goes to your site and to your subscribers in one step, with no plugin to install and, on Ghost(Pro), no separate email service to pay for.
- Free and paid members, with tiers and payments through Stripe. On the paid Ghost(Pro) plans, Ghost takes 0% of your subscription revenue; the payment processor still charges its fee.
- Unlimited newsletter sends on every Ghost(Pro) plan.
- Built-in comments for your members.
- Social web distribution on every plan, so people can follow your publication from Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, Flipboard and other networks.
- Advanced native analytics on Publisher and above.
The editor is clean, and a writer who opens it for the first time knows what to do. For someone who wants to write a newsletter and never think about the website, that is worth a lot.
Ghost pricing: what each Ghost(Pro) plan holds back
Ghost(Pro) starts at $15 a month billed yearly, or $18 billed monthly, but that Starter plan has no paid subscriptions, no marketplace or custom themes, and no Admin API or webhooks. All of those begin on Publisher at $29 a month, and from there the price climbs with the number of members on your list.
- Starter
- $15 a month yearly, 1,000 members, 1 staff user, official themes only, no paid members
- Publisher
- $29 a month yearly at 1,000 members, 3 staff users, any theme, paid members, API
- Business
- $199 a month yearly up to 10,000 members, 15 staff users
- Self-hosted
- Free software; you pay for the server and email delivery
On Publisher, 10,000 members cost $88 a month on a yearly bill and 100,000 members cost $274. Paid monthly, the same plan costs $35 at the start and $105 at 10,000 members. Members means everyone with an account, free subscribers included, so a free newsletter that grows also raises the bill.
Self-hosted Ghost: free software, your server
Ghost is free to self-host, but its own hosting docs say that route is best for teams comfortable managing servers. The recommended stack is Ubuntu, Node.js 22, MySQL 8 and at least 1 GB of memory, and installs, updates and server maintenance are manual.
Two details catch bloggers. Newsletters need Mailgun: basic SMTP cannot send bulk email, and Mailgun is the only supported provider. And the install tool is changing: Ghost is deprecating Ghost-CLI with Ghost 7.0 in favor of a Docker Compose setup, which went into beta on October 21, 2026. WordPress, by comparison, asks for PHP and MySQL or MariaDB (WordPress requirements), which almost every web host offers.
Where Ghost runs out
Ghost runs out the moment your blog needs to do a second job. It does publishing, members and newsletters, and it does them well. A shop, a directory, a booking form, custom fields on the signup form or a second payment provider are not part of that job, and there is no plugin system to add them.
Our view, as a studio that has built for publishers since 2019: Ghost is for people who want a text box and a place to write how their week went. For that, it is close to perfect. For anything bigger, these are the walls:
- There are no plugins. Ghost lists 108 integrations in its official directory and calls an integration its equivalent of a plugin. The directory is curated and closed to submissions, so anything else means code injection or your own app talking to the API.
- There is one payment route. Paid subscriptions run through Stripe. As an answer on the Ghost forum puts it, Ghost only directly supports Stripe, and the workaround is taking payments elsewhere and granting access by hand.
- Comments are for members only. Native commenting is limited to logged-in members, so a casual reader cannot reply without signing up.
- Theme settings stop at 20. A Ghost theme can expose at most 20 custom settings in the design panel. Past that, you edit templates.
- Starter has no API. Custom integrations, the Admin API and webhooks start on Publisher.
- Media export is a Ghost(Pro) feature. Posts and members export anywhere, but the one-click media export exists only there; self-hosters copy images off the server.
WordPress avoids the limits on plugins, payments, comments and theme settings because it is a core plus whatever you add: a shop, memberships, forms, any payment provider, open comments, a multilingual site, and themes with as many settings as their authors decide to build.
What about the speed claim?
A WordPress blog is as fast as its theme, its plugins and its host. Ghost says on its own comparison page that independent tests found it up to 1,900% faster than WordPress; read that as a vendor claim. In our Core Web Vitals analysis, loading (Largest Contentful Paint) is where WordPress sites fail most, and loading is the part the theme decides.
Ghost themes vs WordPress themes: what you get and what you pay
The Ghost theme marketplace lists 250 themes: 22 are free, 18 of them made by Ghost, and the other 228 cost $35 to $149, with $89 in the middle. The WordPress.org theme directory alone lists 8,723 free themes, and a premium WordPress theme usually ships more than a design.
The paid shelves show the same gap. On ThemeForest, the Ghost category has 166 items, while the WordPress blog and magazine category alone has 1,021, and two of its biggest sellers, Newspaper and JNews, with 157.6K and 30.1K sales, cost $59 each.
A Ghost theme is a set of Handlebars templates that you upload as a zip file. You install it from Ghost Admin and adjust it through its settings (the Ghost help page on installing themes). On Ghost(Pro) Starter you cannot install one at all: only official themes run on that plan.
What a premium WordPress theme includes
A premium WordPress theme is usually a package: the design, a one-click import of the demo content, color and font settings, documentation, and updates and support from the developer. Our own themes work that way. The demo you saw lands on your site with its content, and a license bought on jkdevstudio.com delivers new versions to the WordPress updates screen for as long as we release them, with support from the people who wrote the code. Our blog and magazine themes are in the jkdevstudio theme catalog.
So set $89, the median price of a paid Ghost theme, next to what it buys: on Ghost, a design; on WordPress, usually a design plus the content, settings and updates around it.
Is WordPress outdated? The PHP argument
No. Developers who write WordPress off as old PHP are judging the language, while what decides whether a site is good is the architecture, the experience of the people who build it and the quality of the work.
PHP is still the language behind 69.3% of websites whose server-side language is known, according to the W3Techs language survey on October 22, 2026. It is not frozen either: PHP 8.5 came out on November 20, 2025 and gets security fixes until the end of 2029.
The language matters even less now that so much code is written with AI. In the Stack Overflow 2025 developer survey, 84% of developers said they use or plan to use AI tools in their work. When an assistant drafts the code in PHP or in TypeScript, what separates good code from bad is knowing what to build and how the parts fit together, and that comes from experience.
We wrote about what happens when that experience is missing: plugins that work on day one and break on the first vulnerability.
Who runs their blogs on WordPress?
NASA, Microsoft and Meta run their sites and blogs on WordPress. We checked the page source of each on October 22, 2026:
- nasa.gov and science.nasa.gov run WordPress 7.0.7. NASA replaced Drupal with WordPress for its flagship site in 2023.
- Microsoft runs its official blog and its news center on WordPress.
- Meta runs its newsroom on WordPress 6.9.10 and its engineering blog on WordPress 7.1.3.
If PHP were the problem, NASA, Microsoft and Meta would have moved their blogs to Ghost long ago. They are not short of developers who could run something else. Our reading: they stay on WordPress because a mature editor, a known security process and a huge pool of people who know the platform matter more to a publication that has to last than the language under it.
Who should use Ghost, and who should use WordPress?
Pick Ghost for a nonprofit, a personal or journal blog, or a small news site whose business is its newsletter. Pick WordPress for a big blog, a portfolio blog that has to do several jobs, or anything you expect to grow in directions you cannot list yet.
Ghost does carry serious independent newsrooms: its founder names 404 Media, Platformer and the Kyiv Independent among the publications on it. What they have in common is that the newsletter is the business.
If the blog only has to publish, Ghost is enough. If it may ever have to do something else, start on WordPress.
Moving between Ghost and WordPress
You can leave either one with your content. Ghost exports posts, pages, tags and settings as JSON, members as a CSV file and each theme as a zip; only the media export is limited to Ghost(Pro). WordPress exports posts as an XML file from Tools, Export, and your uploads are ordinary files on your host.
The step people miss is the URLs. WordPress blogs often use dated links such as /2018/06/15/post-name/, while Ghost serves posts at /post-name/. In a Ghost forum thread from September 2026, the redirects pointed at the old date-based structure, so links from the WordPress years ended in 404 errors. Map every old URL to its new address before you switch, and test the old links after.
Ghost vs WordPress: common questions
Is Ghost free?
The Ghost software is free and open source, so self-hosting costs only your server and email delivery through Mailgun. Ghost(Pro), the hosted version, starts at $15 a month billed yearly, and paid memberships start on the $29 Publisher plan.
Is Ghost better than WordPress for SEO?
Ghost covers more SEO basics out of the box: it adds canonical tags, an XML sitemap, structured data and social cards on its own. WordPress core adds canonical tags on posts and, since version 5.5, a sitemap; a good theme or an SEO plugin adds the rest, with more control past the defaults.
Can I use a WordPress theme on Ghost?
No. Ghost themes are Handlebars templates and WordPress themes are built from PHP files or HTML block templates, so a theme made for one cannot run on the other. Switching platforms means a new theme.
Does Ghost have plugins?
No. Ghost has integrations, which connect outside services through embeds, webhooks or the API, and code injection for snippets. Nothing installs inside Ghost the way a WordPress plugin does.
What to do next
The WordPress vs Ghost decision comes down to one list: write down what the blog will have to do two years from now. If the list is posts and a newsletter, try Ghost(Pro) on Publisher, since Starter limits you to the official themes. If the list has anything else on it, start on WordPress, and pick a theme built for long reading and a growing archive. That is what we make, and every theme in our catalog has a live demo.
