Ghost vs. Jekyll

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Ghost
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Ghost is a CMS for new-media creators to publish, share, and grow a business around their content. Available open source and free (e.g. for blogging), it can also come with tools for business' content marketing.
$0
Jekyll
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Jekyll is an open source static site generator useful as a blog publishing system.N/A
Pricing
GhostJekyll
Editions & Modules
Ghost (community)
$0
Starter
$11
per month 1 staff user, 500 members
Creator
$31
per month 2 staff users, 1000 members
Team
$63
per month 5 staff users, 1000 members
Business
$249
per month unlimited staff users, 10,000 members
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GhostJekyll
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GhostJekyll
Considered Both Products
Ghost
Chose Ghost
It is simpler, headless, faster than WordPress. The core functionality is focused on subscription membership which is a bloated add on for WordPress.

The simplicity has a cost as WordPress, while complicated, offers more expansion opportunities.
Jekyll
Chose Jekyll
The big alternatives to Jekyll are of course things like WordPress or Drupal, but they are almost something completely different: a full-blown CMS with a backend language and a database. Jekyll loses some of the niceties of these CMS solutions, like easily updating content from …
Chose Jekyll
Jekyll has a much lower technical overhead in terms of server and hosting requirements to launch a site, but at the same time has a much more technical "interface" and doesn't have the dynamic capability, user management, or permission system as a standard CMS like Drupal or …
Chose Jekyll
All the other CMS's I've used try to make it easy for the nontechnical user to manage a website, at the expense of adding complexity and weight to the system. Jekyll takes the exact opposite approach, eschewing all unnecessary complexity. If you know what you're doing in a code …
Chose Jekyll
Jekyll is integrated into GitHub Pages, which made it an easy choice. Using Jekyll was also easier as there's not really a server or a database to configure and you can just get things started from day one. Running and verifying content changes locally for developers is super …
Best Alternatives
GhostJekyll
Small Businesses
ManageWP
ManageWP
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium
Medium
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium
Medium
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Quora Blogs
Quora Blogs
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GhostJekyll
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GhostJekyll
Likelihood to Recommend
It is well suited for distributed writing and publishing with a subscription component
Read full review
Jekyll is well suited for users who would like to have all content within source control (Git) along with the code used to produce the website. Because everything it produces is static assets (HTML, CSS, etc.), sites created with Jekyll are super fast, with very little needed on the server side of things. There are also a few really great free solutions for deploying and serving Jekyll websites. Jekyll will be tough to maintain for users who are not web developers, comfortable using Git to update content. There are 3rd party solutions for maintaining Jekyll-based sites without having to touch the code, but this will cost extra money. Also, because there is no server-side language, you will need to look elsewhere to handle things like contact forms.
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Pros
  • Creating a newsletter for web and email simultaneously
  • Allowing for paid subscriptions
  • Allowing content to be segmented by subscription type
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  • Static site generation
  • Dynamic templates
  • Single-page applications
  • Advanced, multi-page navigation and organization with template hierarchy
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Cons
  • They wysiwig editor is missing critical functions like superscript and subscript
  • The markdown complement has those features but it doesn’t integrate well with the wysiwig editor
  • Footnoting is hard to do
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  • Straight out of the box, Jekyll lacks a friendly WordPress-style back-end. You'll be working in Liquid (HTML), Sass (CSS), and Markdown (content) files. If you're already comfortable with these languages, you'll feel at home in no time. If not, you may need to consider getting someone else's expertise to set up the site, and then use another back-end (probably paid) to make editing your site's files less intimidating.
  • If you use GitHub Pages for the free hosting, be forewarned that GitHub only white lists a few plugins for their own compilation. This usually isn't a problem (you can compile on your own computer if need be), but can be annoying at times.
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Alternatives Considered
It is simpler, headless, faster than WordPress. The core functionality is focused on subscription membership which is a bloated add on for WordPress.
The simplicity has a cost as WordPress, while complicated, offers more expansion opportunities.
Read full review
All the other CMS's I've used try to make it easy for the nontechnical user to manage a website, at the expense of adding complexity and weight to the system. Jekyll takes the exact opposite approach, eschewing all unnecessary complexity. If you know what you're doing in a code editor, Jekyll will probably feel like a breath of fresh air to you.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Our business is totally built around this product
  • It has allowed us to easily and quickly scale our free and (soon) our paywalled content
Read full review
  • Jekyll has improved our time to market in cases of new projects
  • Jekyll has reduced the cost of hosting a website
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ScreenShots

Ghost Screenshots

Screenshot of the Ghost dashboardScreenshot of Ghost postsScreenshot of Ghost member managementScreenshot of Ghost member profile