Ghost: An Alternative To Substack

I love blogging on Substack, but what else is available?

The other day while I was searching Google for some help information about the Substack blogging platform where TannyTalk is hosted, I came upon a sales page for Ghost, a blog hosting service which appears to competing directly with Substack. I’m not really interested in moving my blog right now, but I’m always interested in learning, so I thought I’d give Ghost a quick look. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far.

The first Ghost page I landed on provides a summary comparison between Ghost and Substack, so that seems a good place to start an investigation.

Pricing

A key difference between Substack and Ghost appears to be in how they price their service.

Substack

Substack charges 10% of what the blogger earns, plus a payment processing fee for each transaction, which comes to a total of around 20% of the blogger’s income from paid subscriptions. If you don’t charge your subscribers, you get to host your blog on Substack for free. Substack only charges you if and when you earn income from paid subscriptions.

Ghost

Ghost uses a more traditional web host pricing system, their fee is determined by how many subscribers you have. Their pricing page lists four tiers, starting at $9/month (500 or less subscribers) up to $199/month (10,000 subscribers). I’m not sure what the fee is if you have more than 10,000 subscribers. Ghost has both monthly and yearly payment options, with the yearly payment option being slightly cheaper. They also have a 14 day free trial.

Which Is Cheaper?

So, if you don’t charge your readers a subscription fees, then Substack would be cheaper, because in that case Substack is free. If on the other hand you’re making a ton of money with your blog then Ghost would likely be cheaper, because they charge a flat fee instead of a percentage of income.

The Ghost Network

You can explore the blogs on Ghost by searching from this page. You can learn more about their network on their About Ghost page. You can learn more about the Ghost team on this page.

Based on a very quick look, my guess for now is that the Ghost network is probably considerably smaller than the Substack network. If true (I really don’t know) this could be an important consideration if you don’t already have a significant readership.

Ah wait, check this out, Ghost reports data about their business about a third of the way down this page. 19,000+ active customers on Ghost.

I can’t seem to find how many publishers are on Substack, but they report this about their network, “Today, there are more than 20 million monthly active subscribers and 2 million paid subscriptions to writers on Substack.” So it seems likely that the Substack network is far bigger than Ghost.

Customization

As best I can tell, Ghost has far more customization options than does Substack. There appears to be far more design options available for Ghost, and an ability to add plugins to extend the feature set.

In my almost 30 years of experience using and coding blog and forum software, I’ve come to feel that customization options are a double edge sword. On one hand, having lots of design and feature options is very popular with a great many content creators. On the other hand, many users will waste a great deal of time fiddling around with all the options when what they probably should really be doing is writing, writing, writing, and marketing, marketing, marketing.

Ghost offers their software in the open source model. This means that if the Ghost company were to vanish, you could still operate your blog on your own server, as you would have access to the blog platform software that Ghost runs on. Having this level of control over your investment becomes more important as a blog becomes more successful.

Substack has enough features for me (except for stats), but those who want maximum options will probably be happier on Ghost.

About Ghost The Company

Ghost describes themselves this way, at the bottom of this page.

Ghost is an independent non-profit organisation. We build publishing tools for modern journalism & publishing because we believe freedom of speech is important. Our software is released under a free open source license, our business model is completely transparent, and our legal structure means that 100% of the money we make is reinvested into making Ghost better.

You can meet the Ghost company team about halfway down this page.

At the bottom of that same page Ghost says they will help Substack users migrate to their platform for free.

If you’d like to compare Ghost to other blogging platforms besides Substack, check out this page.

Analysis

One business equation to keep in mind is that because Substack is free, it will likely attract a great many novice bloggers who will typically generate little to no income for Substack the company. This is a potential problem, which seems to have already resulted in friendly but mediocre support.

On the other hand, given that Ghost charges each of their publishers a flat fee, we can guess that no matter how big Ghost gets they will have the income to support the operation. I’m tempted to guess that Ghost support will be better than Substack, but given the large number of customization options at Ghost (which will generate more support tickets) it’s hard to say.

User Reviews

Here’s a pretty thorough review of Ghost from a Ghost user, who experimented both with self hosting and a Ghost Pro plan.

You can find a considerable number of other reviews on Google.

Ghost has a user forum where you can talk with other Ghost users.

My Conclusion

TannyTalk will be staying here on Substack for now, but I’m happy to have a found what seems to be a reasonable alternative, just in case. After almost 30 years of working online host hopping is no longer that appealing to me, but sometimes it is indeed necessary. Ghost looks like a pretty good company, I’ll keep them in mind, and may even set up a test account to learn more.