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  5. ExpressionEngine vs Ghost

ExpressionEngine vs Ghost

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ghost
Ghost
Stacks518
Followers506
Votes219
GitHub Stars51.1K
Forks11.1K
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine
Stacks445
Followers17
Votes0
GitHub Stars487
Forks129

ExpressionEngine vs Ghost: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this comparison, we will outline the key differences between ExpressionEngine and Ghost, two popular content management systems used for website creation.

  1. Customization and Flexibility: ExpressionEngine offers more flexibility and customization options compared to Ghost. With ExpressionEngine, developers have greater control over the design and functionality of the website due to its flexible structure and extensive template tags. On the other hand, Ghost is more focused on simplicity and ease of use, offering less customization options for developers.

  2. User Interface and User Experience: Ghost is known for its clean and minimalist user interface, which makes it easier for non-technical users to create and manage content. On the contrary, ExpressionEngine has a more complex and feature-rich admin interface, which may require a learning curve for beginners. Ghost prioritizes user experience by providing a simple and intuitive interface, while ExpressionEngine caters more towards developers looking for advanced features and customization.

  3. Cost and Licensing: ExpressionEngine is a paid CMS, requiring users to purchase a license for each site they build. In contrast, Ghost is an open-source platform that offers a free self-hosted version, making it more cost-effective for users with budget constraints. The pricing model of ExpressionEngine may be a barrier for small businesses or individuals looking to build websites without additional costs.

  4. Community Support and Resources: ExpressionEngine has a smaller community compared to Ghost, which means users may have limited access to online resources, plugins, and templates. Ghost, being an open-source platform, has a larger community of users and developers contributing plugins, themes, and support forums. This difference in community size can impact the availability of resources and support for users of both CMS platforms.

Summary

In summary, ExpressionEngine provides more flexibility and customization options at the cost of a complex user interface and paid licensing, while Ghost emphasizes simplicity, user experience, and cost-effectiveness with its open-source model and minimalist design.

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Advice on Ghost, ExpressionEngine

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

Ghost
Ghost
ExpressionEngine
ExpressionEngine

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, feature-rich, free open-source content management platform that empowers hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations around the world to easily manage their web site.

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
Your site content is stored in channels—flexible data containers with fields for any type of information;A Template may contain ANYTHING that a webpage might contain: HTML, JavaScript, PHP, whatever;Live Preview
Statistics
GitHub Stars
51.1K
GitHub Stars
487
GitHub Forks
11.1K
GitHub Forks
129
Stacks
518
Stacks
445
Followers
506
Followers
17
Votes
219
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 45
    Beautiful
  • 35
    Fast
  • 29
    Quick/simple post styling
  • 20
    Open source
  • 20
    Live Post Preview
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
HTML5
HTML5
JavaScript
JavaScript
MySQL
MySQL
PHP
PHP
Rocket
Rocket

What are some alternatives to Ghost, ExpressionEngine?

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.

Joomla!

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.

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