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What is Ghost?

Ghost lets a publisher, creator or company run a website and an email newsletter from one place. Readers can sign up as members, and you can charge for paid tiers with payments going through your own Stripe account. Because the software is open source, you can host it yourself and keep control of your content and member list.

Ghost is an open-source publishing platform for websites, blogs and newsletters. It has a writing editor with media cards, sends posts to members by email, and supports free and paid membership tiers through Stripe. Sites use marketplace or custom themes, and a Content API lets Ghost act as a headless CMS.

Core capabilities

  • Sends posts as email newsletters, with separate newsletters by member choice.
  • Sells monthly and yearly paid tiers through Stripe, with offers and discounts.
  • Uses marketplace or custom themes, or works headless through the Content API.

Writing and site design

The editor is built for writing long-form posts, with cards for image galleries, video, audio, products, accordions, downloadable files and bookmarks. The site's design comes from a theme, either one of hundreds in the marketplace or a custom theme built from scratch. Integrations connect Ghost to services such as Zapier, Slack, Discord and Google Analytics. For teams that want their own front end, the Content API serves posts to any website or app.

  • Editor
  • Themes
  • Integrations
  • Headless CMS

Members, newsletters and payments

Built-in sign-up forms turn visitors into members, who can join free or pay for monthly or yearly tiers. Payments run through Stripe, which Ghost names as its only payments partner. Posts can be sent as email newsletters, and members can choose between several newsletters. Native analytics show which posts get attention, and offers set up discounts and promotions. On a self-hosted site, bulk newsletter sending needs a Mailgun account, as basic SMTP is not supported for it.

  • Memberships
  • Newsletters
  • Stripe
  • Mailgun

Self-host it under MIT

The recommended self-hosted setup is an Ubuntu server with at least 1 GB of memory, using Ghost-CLI: install it with npm install ghost-cli -g, then run ghost install, which also sets up SSL through Let's Encrypt. A Docker Compose install is available as a preview, and ghost install local runs a copy on your own computer. Ghost is released under the MIT licence, and the name and logo are trademarks of the Ghost Foundation. Ghost(Pro) is the paid managed hosting service from the same team.

  • Self-hosted
  • Ghost-CLI
  • Docker
  • MIT

Where it fits

Use cases

  1. 01

    Launch a paid newsletter

    Connect your Stripe account under Settings, Memberships, Tiers and create monthly and yearly paid tiers. Visitors sign up through Ghost's built-in forms as free or paid members. Publish a post and send it as an email newsletter, and use an offer such as an early subscriber discount to grow sign-ups.

  2. 02

    Run a company blog with its own design

    Install a theme from the marketplace or build a custom one. Write in the editor using cards for image galleries, video, audio, downloadable files and bookmarks. Connect integrations such as Slack, Zapier or Google Analytics to fit Ghost into your existing tools.

  3. 03

    Feed articles to another website or app

    Use Ghost as a headless CMS, where editors write in Ghost and your own front end fetches posts through the Content API. Publishing stays in one place while the public site is built with whatever framework you prefer. The official docs cover the API and theme development.