Ghost
Modern open-source publishing platform for blogs and newsletters
Overview
Ghost is a Node.js publishing platform built for professional content creators, supporting posts, pages, memberships, and paid newsletter subscriptions. It includes a rich editor, SEO tools, built-in email newsletters via Mailgun, and a theme marketplace. Ghost can be self-hosted via Docker or its official CLI, and Ghost(Pro) provides fully managed hosting. It is one of the most polished self-hostable blogging platforms available.
Where it falls short of Substack
- Membership and newsletter features require Stripe integration for paid tiers
- Plugin/theme ecosystem is much smaller than WordPress
- No built-in e-commerce beyond memberships and paid newsletters
- Self-hosted email delivery needs a transactional email provider (Mailgun, Postmark) configured separately
We list the gaps honestly so you can decide if the trade-off is worth owning your data.
Tags
Claim this listing to keep it accurate, add a deploy template, or feature it on relevant pages.
Embed the Ghost difficulty badge in your README — it links back here.
[](https://openreplace.com/ghost)Similar open-source projects
Other self-hostable tools in the same space worth comparing.
Leading open-source headless CMS with flexible API and content type builder
Developer-first headless CMS and application framework built with TypeScript
World's most widely used open-source CMS and blogging engine
Flexible Django CMS built for developers and editors