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  4. Self Hosted Blogging Cms
  5. Ghost vs Grav

Ghost vs Grav

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ghost
Ghost
Stacks518
Followers506
Votes219
GitHub Stars51.1K
Forks11.1K
Grav
Grav
Stacks114
Followers158
Votes16
GitHub Stars15.2K
Forks1.4K

Ghost vs Grav: What are the differences?

  • Introduction: The following Markdown code highlights the key differences between Ghost and Grav, two popular content management systems.
  1. Hosting Platform: Ghost is a fully hosted platform, meaning it provides the hosting and maintenance of websites on its own servers. On the other hand, Grav is self-hosted, allowing users to choose their preferred hosting provider and have complete control over their website's infrastructure.
  2. CMS Architecture: Ghost is built with a Node.js stack, which offers better scalability and performance for handling large amounts of traffic. In contrast, Grav is built on a flat-file architecture using PHP, resulting in faster loading times and better efficiency for smaller websites or blogs.
  3. Theme and Plugin Ecosystem: Ghost has a limited number of themes and plugins available, with a strong focus on simplicity and minimalism. Grav, on the other hand, boasts a wider range of themes and plugins, offering more customization options and flexibility for users to tailor their website's design and functionality.
  4. Data Management: Ghost follows a content-first approach, providing a straightforward and user-friendly interface for creating and managing content. Grav emphasizes a file-based structure, allowing users to directly manipulate website data by editing markdown files and folders, giving more granular control over site contents.
  5. Learning Curve: Ghost has a more intuitive and user-friendly interface, which makes it easier for beginners to get started quickly with minimal technical knowledge. Grav, although offering extensive flexibility, requires more technical proficiency due to its file-based architecture and configuration settings.
  6. Pricing: Ghost offers a subscription-based pricing model, where users pay a monthly or yearly fee for hosting their website on Ghost servers. Grav, being self-hosted, is open-source and free to use, with users only incurring the cost of their chosen hosting provider.

In summary, Ghost provides a fully hosted platform with a simpler interface and limited customization options, while Grav offers self-hosting capabilities, a wider range of themes/plugins, and greater flexibility in content management, albeit with a steeper learning curve.

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Advice on Ghost, Grav

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
Grav
Grav

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 free, open-source and self-hosted content management system (CMS) based on the PHP programming language and Symfony web application framework. It uses a flat file database for both backend and frontend. It is more widely used, and growing at a faster rate, than other leading flat-file CMS competitors.

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
Twig; YAML; Markdown; Flat-file; CLI
Statistics
GitHub Stars
51.1K
GitHub Stars
15.2K
GitHub Forks
11.1K
GitHub Forks
1.4K
Stacks
518
Stacks
114
Followers
506
Followers
158
Votes
219
Votes
16
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 45
    Beautiful
  • 35
    Fast
  • 29
    Quick/simple post styling
  • 20
    Open source
  • 20
    Live Post Preview
Pros
  • 4
    Easy to Update
  • 3
    No Databases
  • 2
    Strong Security
  • 2
    Fast Performance
  • 2
    Full Control over customisation + functionality
Cons
  • 2
    Not easily to intergrate as an eCommerce (yet)
Integrations
No integrations available
NGINX
NGINX
Symfony
Symfony
PHP
PHP

What are some alternatives to Ghost, Grav?

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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