Ghost vs Strapi: What are the differences?

Ghost is a streamlined CMS for online content, while Strapi is a flexible headless CMS enabling API customization for content-rich applications. Let's explore the key differences between the two:

1. Content Management: Ghost is a headless CMS specifically designed for creating and managing content, focusing on writing experience and publishing blog posts. It offers a simplified interface for authors and provides intuitive tools for content creation and organization. On the other hand, Strapi is a fully-featured, self-hosted CMS that allows users to create and manage various types of content, including blog posts, static pages, and even complex web applications. It provides a flexible content model and extensive customization options for developers.

2. Front-end Development: Ghost focuses on providing an excellent writing experience for authors and simplifies the process of publishing content in a clean and minimalistic way. It comes with built-in templates and theme options, allowing users to customize the appearance of their blogs without extensive front-end development knowledge. Whereas, Strapi provides a powerful API-driven development experience, allowing developers to build custom front-end applications using their preferred frameworks and technologies. It offers a wide range of APIs and plugins, enabling developers to integrate their CMS with various front-end tools and technologies.

3. User Interface and User Experience: Ghost provides a user-friendly and distraction-free writing interface, emphasizing productivity and the creation of high-quality content. It offers a clean and minimalistic design, allowing authors to focus solely on writing without unnecessary distractions. On the other hand, Strapi offers a more robust and feature-rich user interface, providing powerful content management capabilities. It includes a comprehensive dashboard for managing content, user roles, and permissions, making it suitable for larger and more complex projects with multiple contributors.

4. Hosting and Deployment: Ghost offers a hosted platform that takes care of the infrastructure and hosting of your blog, allowing users to focus solely on content creation and publishing. This option is suitable for users who prefer a hassle-free setup and maintenance experience. Strapi, on the other hand, is a self-hosted CMS, which means users have full control over their infrastructure and deployment options. It can be deployed on various hosting providers or cloud platforms, offering more flexibility and scalability for projects with specific hosting requirements.

5. Extensibility and Customization: Ghost provides a limited number of built-in features and extensions, focusing on simplicity and performance. While it offers some customization options through themes and templates, the overall extensibility of Ghost is relatively limited compared to Strapi. Strapi, being a flexible and extensible CMS, allows developers to create custom plugins and extensions to add new features and functionalities to their projects. It provides a robust plugin ecosystem and a customizable admin panel, giving developers greater control over the CMS.

6. Community and Support: Ghost has a dedicated and active community of users and developers, providing support through forums, documentation, and official resources. It also offers premium support options for users who require additional assistance. Strapi, being an open-source CMS, has a growing community of developers and contributors. It provides extensive documentation, community forums, and official support channels to help users and developers with their projects.

In summary, Ghost is a focused, minimalistic CMS designed for content publishing with a simplified interface and hosting options, while Strapi is a flexible, extensible CMS suitable for various types of projects with a more feature-rich interface and self-hosted deployment capabilities.