Ghost vs WordPress for a company blog or newsletter

Sources: Ghost pricing, Ghost hosting docs, Ghost’s WordPress migration guide, Ghost on GitHub and WordPress requirements, checked on 30 October 2026.

Ghost prices by the number of members, meaning anyone with a free or paid account, and that includes newsletter subscribers. Its pricing page shows only one number at a time, behind a slider, so we have laid the figures out in one table. Yearly billing is stated as the total for the year.

From ghost.org/pricing and the price data behind its slider, checked on 30 October 2026. Over 100,000 members, and on the Custom plan, you contact Ghost. Starter is limited to 1,000 members.

For most companies, Starter is too limited. A company blog usually needs more than one author, its own theme, a sender address on the company domain, and a connection to a CRM. Those all begin at Publisher. Payment processor fees still apply if you sell subscriptions, because Ghost’s 0% covers only Ghost’s own fee.

Three things in those numbers are easy to miss.

• Yearly billing saves real money. A newsletter with 5,000 members on Publisher pays $75 a month on monthly billing, which is $900 a year, against $756 on yearly billing.
• Business is flat up to 10,000 members. It costs $2,388 a year at 1,000 members and the same at 10,000. At 10,000, Publisher is still less than half that, at $1,056, so choose Business for its limits and support, not to save on members.
• Writers don’t always count as staff. Ghost counts Author, Editor, Administrator and Owner roles towards staff users. Contributors are free. So several occasional writers can draft as Contributors on Publisher while one editor publishes, which may keep you away from the jump to Business for a while.

Before you commit, count everyone who will sign up, including free subscribers. A company newsletter that imports a large contact list moves up the price table on day one, whether or not those people read it.

Self-hosted Ghost. There’s no licence fee, but Ghost’s hosting docs list “from” prices for what you’d add to match Ghost(Pro): hosting $10, CDN and firewall $20, email delivery $15, analytics $10, backups $5 and image editing $12 a month. That comes to $72 a month if you buy all of them at those starting prices. These are Ghost’s figures, and Ghost is selling the alternative. Ghost(Pro) vs self-hosted pricing goes further.

WordPress. The software is free. Hosting and any paid plugins vary so widely that a figure from us would be a guess, so take your real invoices, or ask for quotes. Email is a separate decision, either a newsletter plugin plus sending service or an external platform, and that platform’s price will usually rise with your list too. If you want us to handle upkeep, our WordPress care plans are published: Premium at USD 89/month and Enterprise at USD 159/month, invoiced in the customer's local currency.

Our time. Ghost work is quoted once we have seen your content and design. We don’t publish a price band for it, and we won’t invent one here.

A company blog on the main site

If your main site is already on WordPress, adding a blog there is usually simplest: one login, one design system, one place for redirects. Moving only the blog to Ghost gives you a second platform to run, and usually a subdomain such as blog.example.com, because a subdirectory is the expensive option above. If your marketing site is on something else and the blog is a separate thing anyway, Ghost is a good fit.

A B2B newsletter with a modest list

This is where Ghost does well. Writing, sign-up, sending, member labels and engagement data are in one tool, and every email also becomes a web page that can rank. With WordPress you can get the same result from several parts, and you have to keep them working together. For setup detail, see Ghost newsletter setup for B2B.

A publication with paid subscribers

Ghost was built for this, and Publisher’s 0% fee matters as revenue grows. Look elsewhere if you need a payment provider other than Stripe, or subscription rules that a plugin handles and Ghost doesn’t.

• You rely on custom content types: case studies, events or staff directories with their own fields.
• The site is mainly structured pages, or a shop, rather than articles.
• You need many plugins that talk to one another inside the CMS.
• Your team has no one to own a Node.js stack, and Ghost(Pro) doesn’t fit your data or budget requirements.

• You’re assembling a membership plugin, a newsletter plugin and a sending service, and the joins keep breaking.
• Publishing is the only job, and nobody wants to manage plugin updates.
• You don’t want to think about servers, and you want your CMS vendor to host it.

It is worth asking this of any platform before you start. With Ghost, Ghost’s pricing page says members can be exported as a CSV at any time, and the software is open source, so a Ghost(Pro) site can in principle move to your own server, keeping the same features. WordPress is similar: the export tool produces an XML file, and you can take the database and files to any host that runs PHP.

The harder part of leaving either platform is what sits around the content. On Ghost, that means your theme, your member tiers and your Stripe connection. On WordPress, it means whatever your plugins store in their own format, which an export can leave behind. Neither is a reason to avoid the platform, but it does belong in the decision if you expect to outgrow what you choose.

1. Does the site have to do anything other than publish articles and send email?
2. Do you rely on custom content types, or could everything be a post or a page with a tag?
3. Is your main site already on WordPress, and does the blog need to sit under its domain path?
4. How many contacts will be members on day one, and at what plan does that put you?
5. Who will fix things when they break: Ghost, your hosting company, your team or a supplier?
6. Will you sell subscriptions, and is Stripe acceptable if so?

If the first three answers are no, no and no, Ghost is likely to be simpler. If any of them is yes, WordPress deserves a closer look, because you would otherwise be adding a second system or working around a limit from the first day.

The move from WordPress to Ghost is well documented, but it has limits. Ghost’s migrator takes an XML export of up to 100 MB and 2,500 posts, and custom post types don’t come across. Migrate WordPress to Ghost, step by step has the order of work.

We work on both, so our Ghost development and WordPress development services don’t depend on your answer. Tell us about your site and we will say which we’d choose. Most of our work is delivered under NDA, so many projects cannot be named. The projects below aren’t Ghost builds. They show the parts of the work that carry over: content on a headless CMS behind Next.js, and fast Next.js sites with search tooling set up from the start.