The list of blogging platforms is quite long. And, it is increasing rapidly. But, everyone wants to work with the best one out of this long list. The main war is Wix vs WordPress but Ghost is smashing into the game like a rocket. In this post, the battle is between WordPress and Ghost. WordPress has expanded its usability to become a true content management system (CMS). Apart from blogging, it has started powering websites, e-commerce businesses and multiple online solutions. Having roots within the WordPress community, Ghost has emerged as a great competitor of WordPress.
So, which one is suitable for your blogging needs. Here is the comparison between a sought after solution named WordPress and a rising star Ghost. Choose the one after comparing the following aspects.
An Introduction To Ghost Blog
Ghost is an open-source blogging platform that allows bloggers to easily publish their content with almost no learning curve. Ghost also aims to provide useful statistical insights into your content and give a real time preview of how your posts would appear on a live site.
The history behind Ghost
On November 2013, John O’Nolan posted on his blog an idea for a new blogging platform that focussed only on one thing, blogging. The post generated a lot of buzz and many acknowledged the need for a new blogging platform that reduced the steps to getting started and made digital publishing quicker and easier.
What started out as an idea to create a simpler and more focused fork of WordPress, turned into a huge project of its own and made its way to Kickstarter. The Ghost project received £190,000+ in backing and version 0.3 was successfully made available on 19th September 2013 to the early backers before releasing publicly few weeks later.
WordPress vs. Ghost
Let's see which one is the best blogging platform for you:
Dashboard
WordPress
WordPress dashboard offers multiple options. For new users, it proves to be intimidating. It offers easy navigation to create fresh posts, write first post, edit content, etc. But, the interface does not appear much clean.
Ghost
Ghost dashboard earns points for its simplicity. The first thing that appears after login is the most recent post. If it is fresh installed, you can see the demo content. The menu owns three options, settings, new posts, and content. This eases the way to write a post.
As per dashboard simplicity Ghost emerges as the winner for beginners. Its dashboard is easier and clearer than WordPress. But, WordPress provides more flexibility and options.
Registration Ease
WordPress
For wordpress.org, you do not have to do registration for installing and downloading the CMS on the server.
Ghost
Ghost.org demands registration. And, users find it frustrating to type usernames, passwords, and email address. This further leads to receiving undesired e-mails. It is more distressing for the people who want to create different accounts for work, home or friends to keep things sorted.
Speed Score
WordPress
WordPress has been built using PHP that leads to taking more time in request processing. But, the availability of different cache and optimization plugins enhances the speed.
Ghost
Ghost has been built with Node.js. And, this makes it advantageous especially in terms of loading time. It gains more speed scoring than WordPress. Ghost responds to 19 requests while WordPress responds to a mere 1 in this amount of time.
Community Support
Ghost
This blogging tool is new and due to this reason, its community is limited to countable support forums and developers. Though this number may increase in the future with its popularity. But, it is lagging behind WordPress presently.
WordPress
If we discuss WordPress in terms of community, then it does not have competition. It owns a broad community of developers. Whether it is about getting help or finding forums, videos, and blogs on WordPress, it is quite easy.
Layout and Design
There is not much difference in default themes for Ghost and WordPress. All of them are beautiful, functional and simple.
Ghost
Due to blog-centric nature of Ghost, you get limited options in terms of design and layout. It brings great options for those who are clear about codes to customize themes. People who do not comprehend coding, then you have only limited options.
WordPress
This platform comes with superb variation to try for layout and design. It offers a great monitoring capability over your website’s design without deep knowledge of coding. This provides flexibility to change backgrounds, container sizes, color schemes, fonts, etc. Adding to this, drag-and-drop plugins and themes work as icing on the cake. Themes and plugins allow users to create varied pages such as portfolio, landing pages, etc.
Content Management
Managing Content
WordPress allows you to create varied types of posts and articles from standard to custom ones. The list includes a testimonial, product, portfolio, staff, etc. Here, Ghost does not gain many marks. It does not offer many useful features. Ghost focuses on creating blog posts and personalized the blogging experience.
Content Preview
Both Ghost and WordPress come with the flexibility to preview whatever you have written before final publishing. But, in WordPress, you require to alter editors from the text editor to visual editor. And, the last one is not quite correct as compared to Ghost platform. Ghost possesses a two-pane system that showcases the changes in a live preview that you made.
Image Uploading
WordPress
In WordPress, for image uploading, you require to click the place wherever you wish to upload the image. Click the image directly or upload it from the path of your computer or from a link or media library. You have the flexibility to upload the image from different means.
Ghost
In Ghost, you merely require to complete an image element using Markdown. After this, with drag and drop, it is easy to drop the desired image directly on the built element.
Flexibility
WordPress
Flexibility is the prime USP (Unique Selling Point) of the WordPress content management system. Being open-source in nature, it offers the ease to build any sort of website. Thousands of plugins and themes are available to make a choice. In case, you need such functionality that WordPress does not fulfill, then plugins are available for it. Animated galleries, maintenance mode, etc can be accomplished with plugins.
Ghost
This platform is for blogging. Therefore, things are quite different from it. There are some APIs/apps, but they do not go far beyond stereotypical blogging requirements.
Conclusion
After evaluating the above factors, we can say that WordPress is an old player and Ghost is a new one. But, it gives a tough competition when it comes to blogging. Thus, as per specific requirements, both emerge as a winner. One can choose either one on the basis of particular requirements.
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You have sharing a wonderful blog, keep more sharing
AVOID Ghostblog -the customer service rep finally admitted their platform did delete my posts (after essentially calling me a liar for several emails). I provided screenshots that those posts still were indexing on google. They aren't exporting my posts in a way I can use or letting me cancel the account (the person whose credit card set up the account left). Only one word terrible. Its also not cheap and doesn't have features such as pop-ups etc. to help conversion.
Worth reading, Thanks for sharing
One of the top-notch articles. Thanks.
Your conclusion is right. WordPress is old but it is very easy to use. You have only some knowledge and you can use the wordpress but yes ghost is new we should use once.
I am appreciative of your thoughtfulness in this matter.