Massive conflict of interest: I blog on ghost, know and like the people at ghost, and work at a company that moved from substack to ghost, get paid to help people use ghost, and a couple more COIs in this vein.
But if you’re soliciting takes from somebody from wordpress I think you might also appreciate the case for ghost, which I simply do think is better than substack for most bloggers above a certain size.
Re your cons, ghost:
1 - has a migration team and the ability to do custom routing, so you would be able to migrate your content
3 - supports total theme customisation
4 - supports analytics add-ons which would give you these details
5 - supports custom excerpts—doesn’t even have to be the first bit of the post
6 - is built on open-source software, and you have the option of self-hosting
Some other pros:
really nice post editor
the upper limit of what you can do with add-ons and custom html injection is really high
Notable points against would be:
no mechanism for discovery like substack’s
harder to set up than substack
analytics, commenting, and email click-through are not native, they’re separate add-ons (although imo pretty easy to add)
I am not personally sure how hard migrating comments from wordpress would be
I don’t know how to compare what degree of support you’d get from substack versus ghost
below a certain subscription threshold, more expensive (unlike substack’s percentage fee ghost charges a rate that scales with subscribers)
just the big meta point that I am really biased here—I really don’t want to give the impression of neutrality
Strong upvoting after our conversation so more people see it. Raymond made a strong case, I’m seriously considering it and would like everyone else’s take on Ghost, good or bad. Getting the experiences of others who’ve used it, and can verify that it works and can be trusted (or not, which would be even more useful if true!), would be very helpful.
The basic downside versus Substack is lack of Substack’s discovery, such as it is, not sure of magnitude of that, and that people won’t be used to it and won’t have already entered CC info, which will hurt revenue some (but again, how much? Anyone have estimates?) and the start-up costs would be more annoying.
In exchange you get full customization, open source that can easily be self-hosted in a pinch, lower costs given expected size of the audience, better analytics, better improvement in feature sets over time given track records, etc. But I’d have to do at least some work to get that (e.g. you need to add a comment section on your own).
Is ‘can be self-hosted in a pinch’ also a feature of Wordpress? Also, how does Ghost and WordPress stack up against ‘has anyone ever self-hosted?’ (More people doing that, might make it easier to find out how.)
I think you can self-host WP in a pinch as well. I’ve been chatting with someone from WP trying to better understand what it is offering. It does seem like I’m missing a lot of simple knowledge of how to use WP better, and it’s possible that WP is ‘good enough’ if things were explained properly, and then there’s a bunch of deep functionality and customization potentially hidden. Yet that doesn’t do any good if I don’t use it.
I have self-hosted WordPress and can confirm that it is possible (and not even very hard).
The big downside is security (but you can mitigate this substantially by using a managed host such as NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, and hosting only your WordPress blog on the site in question).
Thank you for being up front. My basic answer is that I’m vaguely aware Ghost exists, and I’d be open to a pitch/discussion to try and convince me it’s superior to Substack or Wordpress, although it would be an uphill battle. If there’s human support willing to make the migration and setup easy and help me figure out how to do things, then… maybe? Could set up a call to discuss.
Massive conflict of interest: I blog on ghost, know and like the people at ghost, and work at a company that moved from substack to ghost, get paid to help people use ghost, and a couple more COIs in this vein.
But if you’re soliciting takes from somebody from wordpress I think you might also appreciate the case for ghost, which I simply do think is better than substack for most bloggers above a certain size.
Re your cons, ghost:
1 - has a migration team and the ability to do custom routing, so you would be able to migrate your content
3 - supports total theme customisation
4 - supports analytics add-ons which would give you these details
5 - supports custom excerpts—doesn’t even have to be the first bit of the post
6 - is built on open-source software, and you have the option of self-hosting
Some other pros:
really nice post editor
the upper limit of what you can do with add-ons and custom html injection is really high
Notable points against would be:
no mechanism for discovery like substack’s
harder to set up than substack
analytics, commenting, and email click-through are not native, they’re separate add-ons (although imo pretty easy to add)
I am not personally sure how hard migrating comments from wordpress would be
I don’t know how to compare what degree of support you’d get from substack versus ghost
below a certain subscription threshold, more expensive (unlike substack’s percentage fee ghost charges a rate that scales with subscribers)
just the big meta point that I am really biased here—I really don’t want to give the impression of neutrality
Strong upvoting after our conversation so more people see it. Raymond made a strong case, I’m seriously considering it and would like everyone else’s take on Ghost, good or bad. Getting the experiences of others who’ve used it, and can verify that it works and can be trusted (or not, which would be even more useful if true!), would be very helpful.
The basic downside versus Substack is lack of Substack’s discovery, such as it is, not sure of magnitude of that, and that people won’t be used to it and won’t have already entered CC info, which will hurt revenue some (but again, how much? Anyone have estimates?) and the start-up costs would be more annoying.
In exchange you get full customization, open source that can easily be self-hosted in a pinch, lower costs given expected size of the audience, better analytics, better improvement in feature sets over time given track records, etc. But I’d have to do at least some work to get that (e.g. you need to add a comment section on your own).
Is ‘can be self-hosted in a pinch’ also a feature of Wordpress? Also, how does Ghost and WordPress stack up against ‘has anyone ever self-hosted?’ (More people doing that, might make it easier to find out how.)
I think you can self-host WP in a pinch as well. I’ve been chatting with someone from WP trying to better understand what it is offering. It does seem like I’m missing a lot of simple knowledge of how to use WP better, and it’s possible that WP is ‘good enough’ if things were explained properly, and then there’s a bunch of deep functionality and customization potentially hidden. Yet that doesn’t do any good if I don’t use it.
I have self-hosted WordPress and can confirm that it is possible (and not even very hard).
The big downside is security (but you can mitigate this substantially by using a managed host such as NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, and hosting only your WordPress blog on the site in question).
Thank you for being up front. My basic answer is that I’m vaguely aware Ghost exists, and I’d be open to a pitch/discussion to try and convince me it’s superior to Substack or Wordpress, although it would be an uphill battle. If there’s human support willing to make the migration and setup easy and help me figure out how to do things, then… maybe? Could set up a call to discuss.
Migration—they have a team that will just do it for you if you’re on the annual plan, plus there’s an exporting plugin (https://ghost.org/docs/migration/wordpress/)
Setup—yeah there are a bunch of people who can help with this and I am one of them
I’ll message you