Craft CMS vs Ghost

Overview

Ghost

Stacks518

Followers506

Votes219

GitHub Stars51.1K

Forks11.1K

Craft CMS

Stacks104

Followers114

Votes5

Craft CMS vs Ghost: What are the differences?

Content Management System Type: Craft CMS is a flexible and customizable content management system that is typically used for complex and large-scale websites or web applications. On the other hand, Ghost is a simplistic and straightforward content management system that is focused solely on blogging and publishing content. Craft CMS offers more flexibility and depth in terms of content structure and customization options compared to Ghost.
Target Audience: Craft CMS is more suitable for developers, agencies, and organizations looking for a robust and customizable solution for managing large amounts of content with various content types. In contrast, Ghost is more geared towards individual bloggers, writers, or small publishing teams who prioritize simplicity and ease of use over advanced features and customization options.
Theme Development: In Craft CMS, themes are built using templates and markup languages like Twig, giving developers more control and customization options. Ghost, on the other hand, offers a more streamlined approach to theme development with its Handlebars-based templating system, making it easier for non-developers to create and customize themes.
Extensibility and Plugins: Craft CMS has a wide range of plugins and modules available in its ecosystem, allowing users to extend the functionality of their websites as needed. Ghost, on the other hand, has a more limited selection of official plugins and integrations, primarily focusing on essential blogging features.
Cost and Pricing Model: Craft CMS follows a traditional licensing model, where users purchase a license for the software based on the specific edition and features they require. Ghost, on the other hand, operates on a subscription-based pricing model, offering different pricing tiers based on the number of websites and features needed. This difference in pricing models can influence the total cost of ownership for each platform.
Hosting and Deployment: Craft CMS does not provide hosting services and users are responsible for finding their own hosting provider and setting up the CMS on their server. In comparison, Ghost offers a managed hosting solution called Ghost(Pro), where users can host their Ghost website on the official Ghost platform, simplifying the deployment and maintenance process for users without technical expertise.

In Summary, Craft CMS is more suited for complex websites requiring extensive customizations and content structures, while Ghost is ideal for individual bloggers focusing on simplicity and ease of use.

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Advice on Ghost, Craft CMS

Xander

Founder at Rate My Meeting

Mar 30, 2020

Decided

So many choices for CMSs these days. So then what do you choose if speed, security and customization are key? Headless for one. Consuming your own APIs for content is absolute key. It makes designing pages in the front-end a breeze. Leaving Ghost and Cockpit. If I then looked at the footprint and impact on server load, Cockpit definitely wins that battle.

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Detailed Comparison

Ghost	Craft CMS
Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It's beautifully designed, completely customisable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do.	It is a flexible, user-friendly CMS for creating custom digital experiences on the web and beyond. It is a WordPress alternative for development-oriented publishers who want deeper control and more powerful performance from their content management tools. It is built to be exceptionably scalable, and offers native features for complex content management relationships.
An intuitive, minimal editor; Ultra-fast content management; All SEO features built-in natively; Native desktop & mobile apps; Publish once, distribute everywhere; Headless CMS with Node.js REST APIs; Over 19x faster than WordPress; Secure & independently audited; Custom theme or any JAMstack front-end	Robust support and SLAs ; Fully custom content modeling; Powerful templating; Built-in localization
Statistics
GitHub Stars 51.1K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 11.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 518	Stacks 104
Followers 506	Followers 114
Votes 219	Votes 5
Pros & Cons
Pros 45 Beautiful 35 Fast 29 Quick/simple post styling 20 Open source 20 Live Post Preview	Pros 1 Easy to use 1 Extensible 1 Secure 1 Graphql 1 Headless
Integrations
No integrations available	Mailchimp Xero

What are some alternatives to Ghost, Craft CMS?

WordPress

The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.

Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.

Strapi

Strapi is100% JavaScript, extensible, and fully customizable. It enables developers to build projects faster by providing a customizable API out of the box and giving them the freedom to use the their favorite tools.

Wagtail

Wagtail is a Django content management system built originally for the Royal College of Art and focused on flexibility and user experience.

OctoberCMS

It is a Laravel-based CMS engineered for simplicity. It has a simple and intuitive interface. It provides a consistent structure with an emphasis on reusability so you can focus on building something unique while we handle the boring bits.

Twill

Twill is an open source CMS toolkit for Laravel that helps developers rapidly create a custom admin console that is intuitive, powerful and flexible.

ProcessWire

ProcessWire is an open source content management system (CMS) and web application framework aimed at the needs of designers, developers and their clients. ProcessWire gives you more control over your fields, templates and markup than other platforms, and provides a powerful template system that works the way you do

Typo3

It is a free and open-source Web content management system written in PHP. It can run on several web servers, such as Apache or IIS, on top of many operating systems, among them Linux, Microsoft Windows, FreeBSD, macOS and OS/2.

Directus

Let's say you're planning on managing content for a website, native app, and widget. Instead of using a CMS that's baked into the website client, it makes more sense to decouple your content entirely and access it through an API or SDK. That's a headless CMS. That's Directus.

Joomla!

Joomla is a simple and powerful web server application and it requires a server with PHP and either MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server to run it.

Related Comparisons

Craft CMS vs Ghost: What are the differences?

Content Management System Type: Craft CMS is a flexible and customizable content management system that is typically used for complex and large-scale websites or web applications. On the other hand, Ghost is a simplistic and straightforward content management system that is focused solely on blogging and publishing content. Craft CMS offers more flexibility and depth in terms of content structure and customization options compared to Ghost.
Target Audience: Craft CMS is more suitable for developers, agencies, and organizations looking for a robust and customizable solution for managing large amounts of content with various content types. In contrast, Ghost is more geared towards individual bloggers, writers, or small publishing teams who prioritize simplicity and ease of use over advanced features and customization options.
Theme Development: In Craft CMS, themes are built using templates and markup languages like Twig, giving developers more control and customization options. Ghost, on the other hand, offers a more streamlined approach to theme development with its Handlebars-based templating system, making it easier for non-developers to create and customize themes.
Extensibility and Plugins: Craft CMS has a wide range of plugins and modules available in its ecosystem, allowing users to extend the functionality of their websites as needed. Ghost, on the other hand, has a more limited selection of official plugins and integrations, primarily focusing on essential blogging features.
Cost and Pricing Model: Craft CMS follows a traditional licensing model, where users purchase a license for the software based on the specific edition and features they require. Ghost, on the other hand, operates on a subscription-based pricing model, offering different pricing tiers based on the number of websites and features needed. This difference in pricing models can influence the total cost of ownership for each platform.
Hosting and Deployment: Craft CMS does not provide hosting services and users are responsible for finding their own hosting provider and setting up the CMS on their server. In comparison, Ghost offers a managed hosting solution called Ghost(Pro), where users can host their Ghost website on the official Ghost platform, simplifying the deployment and maintenance process for users without technical expertise.

Craft CMS vs Ghost

Overview