Contentful vs Ghost
Contentful and Ghost are both CMS software. Contentful is a commercial product from Contentful. Ghost is open source under MIT, with 56k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Contentful when
- A company with developers needs one content source feeding several websites and apps.
- Pick Ghost when
- You publish content and want to run paid memberships or newsletters without taking a platform cut.
Side by side
A headless CMS where content is modelled as structured types and delivered by API to websites, apps and other channels.
A publishing platform for blogs and newsletters with built-in memberships, paid subscriptions through Stripe, email sending and themes.
Pricing jumps steeply from the free tier to paid plans, and editors find it less friendly than page builders.
Self-hosting requires Node.js and MySQL plus Mailgun for newsletters; Ghost(Pro) is the easier route.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Not published
JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js and MySQL
Closed source, sold by Contentful
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
181 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
56k GitHub stars
Not known
Established: started 13 years ago, latest release v6.73.0.
Other comparisons
More content management systems
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.