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  1. Stackups
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  4. Self Hosted Blogging Cms
  5. Ghost vs Wagtail vs WordPress

Ghost vs Wagtail vs WordPress

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

WordPress
WordPress
Stacks99.3K
Followers41.4K
Votes2.1K
GitHub Stars20.6K
Forks12.9K
Ghost
Ghost
Stacks518
Followers506
Votes219
GitHub Stars51.1K
Forks11.1K
Wagtail
Wagtail
Stacks163
Followers288
Votes132

Ghost vs Wagtail vs WordPress: What are the differences?

Introduction

When it comes to selecting a content management system (CMS) for a website, it's essential to consider the key differences between Ghost, Wagtail, and WordPress to determine which platform best suits your needs.

  1. Core Purpose: Ghost is primarily focused on blogging and content creation, providing a sleek and minimalistic interface for writers. Wagtail, on the other hand, is more robust and geared towards developers and designers looking to create complex and customized websites. WordPress, being the most popular of the three, offers a versatile platform that can be tailored to suit various needs, from blogging to e-commerce.

  2. Ease of Use: Ghost is known for its simplicity and user-friendly interface, making it easy for writers to focus on content creation without distractions. Wagtail, while offering more advanced features, may have a steeper learning curve for beginners due to its complexity. WordPress strikes a balance between the two, providing a user-friendly experience with a wide range of customization options.

  3. Customization and Flexibility: Ghost offers limited customization options compared to Wagtail and WordPress, focusing more on content creation than design. Wagtail provides extensive customization capabilities, allowing developers to build complex websites with tailored functionalities. WordPress, with its vast library of themes and plugins, offers unparalleled flexibility for customization to suit various website needs.

  4. Community and Support: WordPress boasts a large community of users and developers, making it easy to find resources, tutorials, and support. Ghost and Wagtail, being more niche platforms, have smaller communities but offer dedicated support and documentation for their users. Depending on your preference for community size and support availability, this difference can impact your choice of CMS.

  5. Performance and Speed: Ghost is known for its lightweight design and fast performance, ideal for websites that prioritize speed and efficiency. Wagtail and WordPress, while capable of high performance, may require optimization and caching to achieve comparable speed. Depending on your website's requirements for performance, this factor can influence your decision when choosing a CMS.

  6. Cost and Hosting Options: Ghost offers a hosted platform with a subscription-based model, providing convenience and support for users without the need for managing hosting. Wagtail and WordPress can be self-hosted or hosted on various platforms, offering more control over hosting options and cost management. Depending on your budget and preference for hosting control, this difference can play a significant role in selecting a CMS.

In Summary, understanding the key differences in core purpose, ease of use, customization, community support, performance, and cost can help you choose the right CMS between Ghost, Wagtail, and WordPress for your website needs.

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Advice on WordPress, Ghost, Wagtail

Kamaldeep
Kamaldeep

CEO at Zhoustify Agency

Nov 13, 2020

Decided

I usually take a slightly different tack because the technical level of people I usually am dealing with is lower. I tend to be pitching to decision makers and not tech people. A bit of my standard answer is below.

Wix and Squarespace are proprietary systems meant for unsophisticated users who want to build their own websites quickly and easily. While they are good for that specific use case, they do not offer any way to move beyond that if your needs arise. Since they are proprietary closed systems if you need something more advanced at some point your only option is to start over.

WordPress is an Open Source CMS that allows much more freedom. It is not quite as simple to setup and create a new site but if you are talking to me then you are not looking to build it yourself so that is really a non-issue. The main benefit of WordPress is freedom. You can host it on virtually any decent web hosting service and since it uses PHP and MySQL you can have virtually any developer take over a project without problem.

I believe in open source because of that freedom. It is good for me as a developer and it is good for my clients. If something were to happen to me or my company you would have no problem finding another qualified WordPress developer to take over the site in a totally seamless fashion. There would be no need to start from scratch.

Additionally the extensible nature of WordPress means that no matter what your future needs, WordPress can handle it. Adding things like e-commerce and custom quoting systems are just two examples of advanced solution's that I have added to WordPress sites years after they were first built.

WordPress is used by tiny one person businesses all the way up to major websites like the NY Times and I think it is right for this project as well.

69.2k views69.2k
Comments
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
Dragos
Dragos

Jan 6, 2020

Decided

10 Years ago I have started to check more about the online sphere and I have decided to make a website. There were a few CMS available at that time like WordPress or Joomla that you can use to have your website. At that point, I have decided to use WordPress as it was the easiest and I am glad I have made a good decision. Now WordPress is the most used CMS. Later I have created also a site about WordPress: https://www.wpdoze.com

244k views244k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

WordPress
WordPress
Ghost
Ghost
Wagtail
Wagtail

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.

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.

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

Flexibility;Publishing Tools;User Management;Media Management;Full Standards Compliance;Easy Theme System;Extend with Plugins;Built-in Comments;Search Engine Optimized;Multilingual;Easy Installation and Upgrades;Importers;Own Your Data
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
A fast, attractive editor interface;Complete control over design with standard Django templates;Configure content types through standard Django models;Tightly integrated search (with an Elasticsearch backend for production);Strong document and image management;Wide support for embedded content;Simple, configurable permissions;Support for tree-based content organisation;Optional preview->submit->approve workflow;Fast out of the box. Varnish-friendly if you need it;A simple form builder;Optional static site generation;Excellent test coverage
Statistics
GitHub Stars
20.6K
GitHub Stars
51.1K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
12.9K
GitHub Forks
11.1K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
99.3K
Stacks
518
Stacks
163
Followers
41.4K
Followers
506
Followers
288
Votes
2.1K
Votes
219
Votes
132
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 418
    Customizable
  • 369
    Easy to manage
  • 357
    Plugins & themes
  • 259
    Non-tech colleagues can update website content
  • 248
    Really powerful
Cons
  • 13
    Plugins are of mixed quality
  • 13
    Hard to keep up-to-date if you customize things
  • 10
    Not best backend UI
  • 2
    Complex Organization
  • 1
    Great Security
Pros
  • 45
    Beautiful
  • 35
    Fast
  • 29
    Quick/simple post styling
  • 20
    Open source
  • 20
    Live Post Preview
Pros
  • 23
    Highly customizable
  • 18
    StreamFields are amazing
  • 18
    Very Flexible
  • 15
    Web content management
  • 13
    Non-tech colleagues can update website content
Cons
  • 3
    Not a full CMS: basic components require heavy coding
  • 2
    Small developer community
  • 1
    Expensive to develop
Integrations
ClickTale
ClickTale
Clicky
Clicky
Disqus
Disqus
Formstack
Formstack
GoSquared
GoSquared
HipChat
HipChat
Hipmob
Hipmob
KickoffLabs
KickoffLabs
KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics
LiveChat
LiveChat
No integrations availableNo integrations available

What are some alternatives to WordPress, Ghost, Wagtail?

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.

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.

Craft

Craft

Craft is a content management system (CMS) that’s laser-focused on doing one thing really, really well: managing content.

Statamic

Statamic

The open source, developer & designer-first, Laravel + Git powered CMS built to make managing websites easy with Git.

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