The dominant general-purpose CMS versus a focused publishing platform built for newsletters and paid subscriptions.
Pick WordPress when you need a flexible, plugin-driven CMS that can be anything from a blog to a small ecommerce site, and you're willing to manage themes, plugins, and updates. Pick Ghost when publishing is the entire job — newsletters, members, paid subscriptions — and you want a focused, opinionated platform that does that out of the box without a plugin marketplace.
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| Attribute | WordPress | Ghost |
|---|---|---|
| Category | CMS | CMS |
| Pricing Model | open-source | open-source |
| Starting Price | Free | Free / $9/mo |
| Free Tier | Yes | Yes |
| Open Source | Yes | Yes |
| Platforms | web | — |
