Podia vs Ghost

Hey there! Thinking about moving over to Ghost? Or trying to decide which platform to use to create a membership business?

If you're wondering what the differences are between Ghost and Podia, we put together this no-nonsense overview.

What's the overall summary?

On Podia, you're running a membership business on their platform, along with everyone else. This means you can create a publication within the parameters set by the platform.

To get started with Podia, you'll need to build your site from scratch using their website builder tool, which offers a limited set of appearance settings and content blocks, and the Podia brand will always appear on the footer of your site.

With Ghost, you can get started right away with a beautiful purpose built theme that's ready to use. Spin up a new site, install a theme and connect a Stripe account to use the memberships and subscriptions features. Since Ghost is fully open source with a sensible theme layer, you have limitless ways to customise your site to suit your needs.

So what does Ghost do better?

Podia have a platform which is well suited for people who want to sell online courses or digital downloads, and don't mind using a limited website builder to do so. If this applies to you, it's probably fine. But if you're planning on building a serious membership business and a unique brand, you can probably do better.

When it comes to the user experience, Ghost has been built as a simple and beautiful platform for publishers, like you. It's explicitly focused on doing one thing really well: Publishing. This means you'll be able to focus your time on the most important things, creating unique content and building a direct relationship with your audience to generate sustainable recurring revenue.

Creating content in Ghost is familiar and clutter free, and it supports dynamic 'Cards' to allow you to drop in images, embeds (like video or audio), galleries, bookmark cards and more.

Publishers switch to Ghost because it provides a better writing experience, and stick around because it gives them ultimate control over their business.

The native members features within Ghost allow you to transform anonymous views into registered members, and it's possible to have both free and paid-only member tiers.

Everything you need to get started is built-in: member management, native payments with recurring subscriptions and email newsletters. All without any additional fees!

"I launched my membership site in under 3 hours without having to find a plugin or deal with a platform that would have been overkill for what I needed. I was amazed that within hours of launching the site I was already getting members signing up!"

Alex Older, Shutter Club

Build your brand + control your content

While Podia is a closed platform that you have little control over, Ghost is open source and extremely flexible. A Ghost publication can be completely customised to suit the needs of most publishers and creators.

The benefit of open source? You always own your content, subscriber lists and even the code itself. If Ghost the company disappears, you can continue to run your membership business in perpetuity.

Whether you're a writer, an educator, a video creator or a podcaster — professional creatives of all kinds use Ghost because it allows you to create a totally independent membership business. Each Ghost site is unique, and reflects the personality of its creator. Some examples:

Building a business around publishing

The most important aspect of any publication is understanding and growing a core readership base. Using Podia, you'd creating a new membership business from scratch and building a list of customers from there. With Ghost, you can migrate from other tools, or import your audience of subscribers from any other tool to get a head start with your new site.

The membership and subscription features in Ghost allow you to publish any combination of public, members only or paid-members only content on an entirely custom website that you own.

Ghost has SEO & social built-in

Getting traffic to an independent website can be challenging, of course. But the rewards are that you physically own the content and you're benefitting your own brand and business.

Ghost has the best support for search engine optimisation and social sharing features of any blogging platform in the world. You don't need any extra plugins or extensions, and you on't need to write any extra code. It just works.

All of the SEO work is taken care of with built-in XML sitemaps, Google AMP pages, canonical tags, optimised URLs, support for Twitter cards and clean semantic markup. All of this is done for you automatically, with no plugins needed. Leaving you more time to focus on creating content!

"Have been building paid membership newsletters with Ghost for two months now and ridiculously happy with the experience. It's the combination of amazing design with endless customisability if you want to have your own style. The writing interface is just SO nice — it feels like stepping inside a high-end minimalist house, you just want to live up to the beauty of it."

Uri Bram, The Listener

Switched from Substack to Ghost

Doing more than the basics

At its core, Ghost is a robust JSON API with a flexible architecture that any developer can use to extend, modify and customise your Ghost site in any number of ways.

All new Ghost sites are installed with a beautiful default theme that you can get started with right away, but it's worth having a look at the marketplace of free and premium themes, and our extensive directory of integrations. There's so much that's possible.

Looking for more information about running a membership business with Ghost? Check out the Members docs to find out how you can get up and running quickly.

One last thing you should know

Ghost is an independent non-profit organisation. We build publishing tools for modern journalism & publishing because we believe freedom of speech is important. Our software is released under a free open source license, our business model is completely transparent, and our legal structure means that 100% of the money we make is reinvested into making Ghost better.

We’re building a socially responsible, sustainable business which empowers people to share important stories and ideas. We’re in this for the long haul.

"I've been a blog minimalist from the start, and finding a truly open source platform which reflects that minimalism and focus is incredibly refreshing."

Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror

Switched from TypePad to Ghost

You’re now armed with knowledge! Hopefully this guide was useful to give you a general overview of Podia compared to Ghost.

We can help you migrate to Ghost from Podia, for free! Save time and let the Ghost team do all the work on your behalf; no coding, no configuration, no worries. This migration is included with any Ghost(Pro) Standard Annual plan or higher.

Still researching? Head back to the alternatives page.