Ghost vs WordPress: Blogging

Story by Neil Harlow

07.07.2015

Looking to start a new blog? Or even find a new blogging platform? We will be comparing two great platforms, WordPress and Ghost, to hopefully point you in the right direction.

WordPress is the worlds most popular blogging platform, with over 400 million page views a month (not including self-hosted WordPress sites). It has also been around for a long time (since 2003), has a great community of developers, and easy access to support. On the other hand, WordPress has grown into a full on CMS (content management system) capable of handling everything from blogs to e-commerce. Ghost is a relatively new platform (since 2013) with the goal of being “Just a blogging platform”. Although young, Ghost does a great job of focusing on blogging as well as simple and intuitive interfaces. As Ghost has gained in popularity, the Ghost vs WordPress debate has come up much more often. Keep in mind that the following is simply a comparison of each platforms blogging tools/capabilities (as WordPress is so much more than just a blogging platform).

Ghost Pricing

The basic Ghost plan starts at $8/month. If you have ever looked at web hosting costs, this is not bad at all. It is also important to point out that all of Ghost plans include unlimited storage, as well as custom domain names.

WordPress Pricing

WordPress offers a free tier, but free comes with a cost. The free tier is great for trying out WordPress, but you are limited to 3 GB of storage, no custom domain, and ads showing up on your blog. The premium plan costs $8.25/month ($99/yr), which offers custom domain names, 13 GB storage, and more…

Ghost Input Page

This is where I think Ghost outperforms WordPress. The great thing here is that you get a live preview of the rendered markdown as you go. This is a very nice feature and makes creating/editing posts very easy. Things just feels more intuitive with this layout as well.

WordPress Post Input

WordPress’s post input page can be a little overwhelming and cluttered at times. This is especially true when you start adding plugins, and the only way to see your blog post is to preview the entire page.

Ghost SEO

SEO is a key feature for generating traffic to your blog. The Ghost platform only allows you to edit the meta title and description of your post (this is what is displayed on search engine results), which seems limiting compared to the capabilities of WordPress. It does appear to generate other meta tags, such as og, twitter, and article properties but no option to edit them (yet).

WordPress SEO

WordPress definitely wins the SEO comparrison. There are over 1000+ SEO plugins for WordPress alone. You can edit meta tags like og and twitter to give you full control over what your social sharing looks like. There are even advanced features that let you edit how search engines crawl your site!

Final Thoughts

If you simply need a blog, I would highly recommend trying out the Ghost platform. Ghost definitely has a clean and intuitive approach to blogging, which is also easy for beginners. WordPress has the benefit of being a full on CMS though, so if you ever need to extend your blog into e-commerce or something beyond just a blog you have that option. They also have a huge number of developed plugins that allow you do customize your site in many ways (which Ghost is lacking at the moment).