What is Ghost CMS?

Ghost CMS is an open-source publishing platform built for blogs, newsletters, and paid memberships. It runs on Node.js, ships a clean editor, and includes subscriptions and email sending natively, so creators skip the plugin stack WordPress needs for the same features.

Ghost is free to self-host, and the code is MIT licensed. Ghost(Pro), the managed hosting run by the nonprofit foundation behind the project, is paid. Most solo publishers pick managed hosting to avoid running Node updates themselves.

For SEO it is solid out of the box: fast pages, clean markup, built-in sitemaps and canonical tags. The trade-off is a smaller theme and integration ecosystem.

If you publish on it, BlazeHive handles automated content publishing for Ghost with one researched post a day.