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  5. Discourse vs Ghost

Discourse vs Ghost

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Discourse
Discourse
Stacks278
Followers246
Votes115
GitHub Stars45.5K
Forks8.7K
Ghost
Ghost
Stacks518
Followers506
Votes219
GitHub Stars51.1K
Forks11.1K

Discourse vs Ghost: What are the differences?

What is Discourse? The 100% open source, next-generation discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. Discourse is a simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line. Replies are attached to the bottom and top of each post, so you can optionally expand the context of the conversation – without breaking your flow.

What is Ghost? Just a blogging platform. 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.

Discourse can be classified as a tool in the "Forums" category, while Ghost is grouped under "Self-Hosted Blogging / CMS".

"Open source" is the primary reason why developers consider Discourse over the competitors, whereas "Beautiful" was stated as the key factor in picking Ghost.

Discourse and Ghost are both open source tools. Ghost with 30.3K GitHub stars and 6.55K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Discourse with 28.6K GitHub stars and 6.47K GitHub forks.

Pubu, Ghost, and Deveo are some of the popular companies that use Ghost, whereas Discourse is used by Twitter, Heroku, and CodeCombat. Ghost has a broader approval, being mentioned in 60 company stacks & 39 developers stacks; compared to Discourse, which is listed in 42 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

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Advice on Discourse, Ghost

Xander
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.

243k views243k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Discourse
Discourse
Ghost
Ghost

Discourse is a simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line. Replies are attached to the bottom and top of each post, so you can optionally expand the context of the conversation – without breaking your flow.

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.

Remembers your place;Log in with … anything;Paste to share images;Search that actually works;Scalable moderation;Bring your friends;Your stuff belongs to you;Comprehensive API
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
Statistics
GitHub Stars
45.5K
GitHub Stars
51.1K
GitHub Forks
8.7K
GitHub Forks
11.1K
Stacks
278
Stacks
518
Followers
246
Followers
506
Votes
115
Votes
219
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 28
    Open source
  • 19
    Fast
  • 13
    Email digests
  • 9
    Better than a stereotypical forum
  • 8
    Perfect for communities of any size
Cons
  • 3
    Heavy on server
  • 2
    Notifications aren't great on mobile due to being a PWA
  • 2
    Difficult to extend
Pros
  • 45
    Beautiful
  • 35
    Fast
  • 29
    Quick/simple post styling
  • 20
    Live Post Preview
  • 20
    Open source
Integrations
WordPress
WordPress
Zapier
Zapier
Zendesk
Zendesk
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Discourse, Ghost?

WordPress

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

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

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

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

OctoberCMS

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

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

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

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

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.

Flarum

Flarum

Flarum is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun. It's simple, fast, and free.

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