Ghost
by TryGhost
Ghost is a publishing platform for running a website, blog or newsletter with free and paid memberships. It lets writers and small publishers sell subscriptions and email their readers from one system.
- Stars
- 55.6k
- Licence
- MIT
- Runs on
- A small server
- Setup
- Moderate
- Language
- TypeScript
- Age
- 4926 days
What you can do with it
- Publish a blog or website with a built-in editor and custom themes
- Send newsletters by email to free and paying subscribers
- Charge for memberships and subscriptions to gated content
Could replace
- Substack
- Patreon
- Medium
Our suggestion based on what it does, not a feature-by-feature comparison.
Make money with it
Start a paid newsletter or membership site on a niche topic and charge subscribers for premium content.
An idea, not financial advice. Check the licence before charging for anything built on it.
Ways a business could use it
- Run a company blog and customer newsletter without paying monthly fees to a third-party newsletter platform
- Sell paid subscriptions or members-only content as a consultant, trainer or creator
Can you use it commercially?
Free to use, change and sell, including in paid products. Keep the copyright notice.
Not legal advice. Read the project's licence file before building a product on it.
Getting it running
Install the Ghost command-line tool with npm, then run "ghost install local" for a local site or "ghost install" on a server; a paid managed service, Ghost(Pro), is also available.
Follow the official instructions in the project README.
Things to check
- Self-hosting needs a server and ongoing maintenance and updates
- Sending newsletters and taking payments needs separate email and payment provider accounts, which may cost money
Who's talking about it
Checked 29 Oct 2026. Summary drafted by AI from the project's README.
