Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Distill VS Ghost

Compare Distill VS Ghost and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Distill logo Distill

Tracking website updates, automated and simplified

Ghost logo Ghost

Ghost is a fully open source, adaptable platform for building and running a modern online publication. We power blogs, magazines and journalists from Zappos to Sky News.
  • Distill Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-26
  • Ghost Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-10

Ghost

Website
ghost.org
$ Details
paid Free Trial $36.0 / Monthly (100k views/month, 2 users)
Startup details
Country
United Kingdom

Distill features and specs

  • Clarity and Accessibility
    Distill publications are designed to be highly readable and visually appealing, making complex machine learning concepts more accessible to a wider audience.
  • Interactive Content
    Distill often includes interactive elements such as visualizations and simulations that help readers explore the content in a hands-on manner, enhancing understanding.
  • Open Access
    All content on Distill is freely available to the public, promoting open access to high-quality educational resources on machine learning and AI.
  • Focus on Insights
    Distill prioritizes the explanation and communication of key insights and intuitions behind machine learning research, rather than just technical details.

Possible disadvantages of Distill

  • Niche Audience
    While Distill is celebrated for its depth and clarity, its focus on niche academic topics primarily attracts an audience already interested in machine learning.
  • Limited Publication Frequency
    Compared to larger journals, Distill publishes fewer articles, which may limit the breadth of topics covered and the speed of content updates.
  • Resource Intensive
    The creation of interactive and visually compelling content can be resource-intensive, requiring significant time, effort, and technical skill from authors.
  • Technologically Demanding
    To fully engage with some of the interactive elements, readers may need modern, capable browsers and a reliable internet connection, which can be a barrier for some users.

Ghost features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Ghost offers a clean and intuitive interface that makes content management straightforward, even for those without technical expertise.
  • Speed and Performance
    Ghost is built on modern technology like Node.js which makes it faster and more efficient compared to some traditional CMS platforms.
  • SEO Optimized
    Ghost comes built-in with SEO features like clean URLs, meta tags, and sitemaps which help in improving search engine rankings.
  • Customizable Themes
    Ghost supports a variety of themes that can be easily customized to fit the branding and functionality needs of a website.
  • Markdown Support
    Content creation in Ghost is made easy with Markdown support, allowing writers to focus on text rather than formatting.

Possible disadvantages of Ghost

  • Limited Plugin Ecosystem
    Compared to WordPress, Ghost has a more limited selection of plugins, which might restrict some functionalities users are looking for.
  • Higher Hosting Costs
    Ghost's official hosting is relatively expensive, making it less suitable for users on a tight budget.
  • Technical Knowledge Requirement
    While Ghost is user-friendly, setting it up on a custom server can require a higher level of technical knowledge compared to some other platforms.
  • Less Community Support
    The user community for Ghost is smaller compared to more established platforms like WordPress, which can make it harder to find support and resources.
  • Limited Ecommerce Capabilities
    Ghost is primarily a publishing platform and lacks the more advanced eCommerce functionalities that other CMS platforms might offer out of the box.

Analysis of Ghost

Overall verdict

  • Ghost is a highly regarded platform for serious bloggers and publishers who want a minimalistic yet powerful content management system. It is especially beneficial for those who prefer a distraction-free writing environment with the capability to scale and customize as their needs grow.

Why this product is good

  • Ghost is a popular open-source platform designed for professional bloggers and publishers. It is known for its clean design, speed, and ease of use. Ghost offers robust features for content creation, management, and distribution while focusing on providing an optimal writing experience. Additionally, Ghost is built on modern technology stacks and offers flexibility through themes and integrations. It also supports membership and subscription models, making it ideal for those looking to monetize their content.

Recommended for

  • Professional bloggers
  • Content creators looking for a minimalist interface
  • Publishers seeking to monetize their content
  • Developers looking for an open-source platform
  • Organizations that require a fast and reliable CMS
  • Writers who value a focused writing experience

Distill videos

How To Monitor Website Changes? - Distill.io Chrome Extension

More videos:

  • Review - What does DISTILLED COFFEE taste like??? | Will It Distill?
  • Review - DISTILLING DAY (PART 1)

Ghost videos

Why I Moved My Blog From WordPress to Ghost

More videos:

  • Review - Ghost review - CMS for creators to build a membership

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Distill and Ghost)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Blogging
0 0%
100% 100
Search Engine
100 100%
0% 0
CMS
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Distill and Ghost

Distill Reviews

We have no reviews of Distill yet.
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Ghost Reviews

Comparing 9 WordPress alternatives & competitors in 2024
Ghost specializes in creating a monetized blogging platform. Based on their subscription status, readers can create user profiles, sign up for newsletters, and browse your entire blogging calendar. The platformโ€™s singular focus on blogging makes it great for individuals and small teams, but it lacks features like real-time collaboration that are necessary for larger companies.
Source: webflow.com
19 Best WordPress Alternatives in 2025
Ghost is known for its simplicity and focus on content creation. It's a great option for writers and creators who want a clean and distraction-free environment to publish their work.
Source: www.pixpa.com
7 Best Buy Me a Coffee Alternatives
If you donโ€™t already have a website, Ghost may be an appealing option as a Patreon alternative. However, customizations are limited, and youโ€™ll need to choose a pre-built design from the theme library. There are a few themes available, but most are priced from around $80 to $150. The Ghost API also gives you a way to publish content you create on the platform to another...
Source: wpforms.com
Top 10 Web Content Management Systems
Ghost is here as one of the first entries that can be classified as a pure headless CMS. Ghost is not only one of the best headless CMS options, but it also does so while being focused primarily on the blogger community. So if you have or are thinking about starting a large blogging operation featuring many different presentation layers, then Ghost is definitely for you....
Source: cloudzy.com
25+ Medium Alternative Platforms for Publishing Articles
Ghost open-source blogging and the indirect medium alternative platform. Its interface makes blogging easy for users, but also offers SEO tools and other plugins that are built into the platform. This makes it simple for users to publish high-quality content without technical difficulties.
Source: forgefusion.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ghost should be more popular than Distill. It has been mentiond 196 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Distill mentions (26)

  • Ask HN: Alternative to Distill.pub?
    I love reading articles written at Distill (http://distill.pub/), but due to its indefinite hiatus (https://distill.pub/2021/distill-hiatus), I am looking for other online free resources which host such interactive, interesting and engaging material. Does anyone know about any such websites? - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • How Transformers Work
    Distill was a new take at publishing research/ideas in deep learning in a visual way: https://distill.pub/ I love their articles and while it was hard to sustain, the quality of the ones in their are pretty good. They provide some tips and templates on how to develop such visual storytelling articles. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • Reverse Engineer Hidden Algorithms
    Explainable AI is far from early stages. Read into anthropic aiโ€™s work in mechanistic interpretability like toy models of superposition along with the rest of the transformer-circuits papers. Read chris olahโ€™s distill papers. Read neel nandaโ€™s recent work on reverse engineering how language models grok modular addition. Read kevin mengโ€™s work on locating and editing facts inside of gpt. Read openaiโ€™s paper on... Source: about 3 years ago
  • Sharing a side project: Linear Algebra for Programmers
    I also wasn't aware of either The Pudding or distill.pub. So thanks for just mentioning those. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Ask HN: What's your favorite illustration in Computer Science?
    Anything from Setosa [0] is really good. It contains interactive, animated illustrations of several Machine Learning ideas. I _loved_ reading papers from Distill Pub [1] as they contained interactive diagrams. My most favorite one so far is the thread on Differentiable Self-organizing Systems [2]. I liked the lizard example very much as it is interactive, and lizards grow lost organs back. I think this is funny.... - Source: Hacker News / over 3 years ago
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Ghost mentions (196)

  • Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home
    Digital production has lowered the cost, and the Ghost platform in particular is a great value for small publishers, bundling together the blog, newsletter and subscriptions in one package, even now including ActivityPub federation. And Ghost themselves a non-profit org that doesn't mark up the Stripe transaction fees! One local news outlet recently switched to that, saving about %5 on Patreon fees and a second is... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Bye Bye Big Tech: How I Migrated to an Almost All-EU Stack (and Saved 500โ‚ฌ/Year)
    Https://ghost.org โ€” Open-source run by a non-profit headquartered in Singapore. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Ask HN: Looking for Headless CMS Recommendation
    If you're hell-bent on headless, I can personally recommend 11ty (https://www.11ty.dev/) and hugo (https://gohugo.io/). That said, for non-technical admins, you probably want a user interface. For that, Ghost (https://ghost.org/) and Grav (https://getgrav.org/). Or Wordpress! - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Typepad Is Shutting Down
    They should provide an option to move to https://ghost.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • Build an analytics agent to analyze your Ghost blog traffic with the Vercel AI SDK and Tinybird
    In this post, I'll show you how to build an agent with sufficient contextual understanding of underlying analytics data - and the tools to query it - so that you can have a chat with your data (any data!). Specifically, I'll build a simple analytics agent for a blog - hosted on the open-source publishing platform Ghost. The agent will tell us which content is performing the best, and why. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Distill and Ghost, you can also consider the following products

Visualping - Visualping is the easiest to use website checker, webpage change monitoring, website change detector and website change alert software of the web. Read more about Visualping.

WordPress - WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

ChangeTower - ChangeTower offers website monitoring toolsย for new content and content changes.

Medium - Welcome to Medium, a place to read, write, and interact with the stories that matter most to you.

Wachete - Track web page changes and get notified. Free Sign-up. Have all data in one place

Drupal - Drupal - the leading open-source CMS for ambitious digital experiences that reach your audience across multiple channels. Because we all have different needs, Drupal allows you to create a unique space in a world of cookie-cutter solutions.