Ghost
Open-source publishing with built-in memberships and email.
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform that ships with newsletter sending and paid memberships. Self-host on your own infrastructure or use Ghost Pro. Great fit for publishers who want to own their stack.
Growth work lives or dies on targeting and measurement. What matters is whether behavioral triggers can be built without engineering time, whether the event stream supports attribution past the open, and whether deliverability holds when broadcast volume shares a reputation with product email.
Against behavior-triggered journeys, broadcasts, and winback campaigns measured on revenue, Ghost covers scheduling and the suppressions API, and does not cover event stream, operating track record, and multi-tenant support. Whether that gap matters depends on how central those are to the build.
- Scheduling: Yes
- Event stream: No
- Deliverability: Depends on the SMTP provider configured (often Mailgun for Pro).
- Operating since: 2013
- Suppressions API: Yes
- Best published rate per 1,000: Tiers not published in comparable form
- Multi-tenant: No
- Free tier: Self-hosted is free (your infra cost)
- Starts at: Ghost Pro from $9/mo
Depends on the SMTP provider configured (often Mailgun for Pro).
Independent publishers who want to own their content and stack.
- › Full ownership in self-hosted mode
- › Memberships and Stripe integration
- › Beautiful default themes
- › Requires another SMTP provider for sending at volume
- › Heavier than Buttondown for plain newsletters
Features at a glance
| API | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes |
| SDKs | node |
| Webhooks | Yes |
| Templates | rich |
| React Email | No |
| Batch send | Yes |
| Scheduled send | Yes |
| Suppressions | Yes |
| Multi-tenant | No |
| Inbound parsing | No |
| Event stream | No |
| Idempotency keys | No |
| Dedicated IP | No |