Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ghost VS Carrd

Compare Ghost VS Carrd and see what are their differences

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.

Carrd logo Carrd

Simple, responsive one-page site creator.
  • Ghost Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-10
  • Carrd Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-02

Build one-page sites for pretty much anything. Whether it's a personal profile, a landing page to capture emails, or something a bit more elaborate, Carrd has you covered. Simple, responsive, and yup — totally free.

Ghost

Website
ghost.org
$ Details
paid Free Trial $36 / Monthly (100k views/month, 2 users)
Startup details
Country
United Kingdom

Carrd

Website
carrd.com
$ Details
freemium $9 / Annually (Pro Lite)
Startup details
Country
United States

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.

Carrd features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Carrd is user-friendly, requiring no extensive technical knowledge. It features a drag-and-drop builder that makes it easy for anyone to create a website quickly.
  • Affordability
    Carrd offers competitive pricing with a generous free tier, plus inexpensive paid plans starting at just a few dollars per year.
  • Simplicity
    The platform is designed to build simple, one-page sites, which is perfect for portfolios, personal profiles, landing pages, and simple business sites.
  • Responsive Design
    All Carrd templates are designed to be fully responsive, ensuring your site looks good on all devices including desktops, tablets, and smartphones.
  • Customizability
    While Carrd focuses on simplicity, it still offers a decent level of customization options, including custom CSS, a variety of fonts, and color schemes.
  • Speed
    Websites built on Carrd load quickly, which enhances user experience and can positively impact SEO.

Possible disadvantages of Carrd

  • Limited Functionality
    Carrd is primarily for creating simple, one-page websites. It may not be suitable for more complex websites requiring multiple pages or extensive features.
  • Lack of Advanced Features
    The platform lacks advanced features such as e-commerce capabilities, blogging functionality, and extensive SEO tools.
  • Scale Restrictions
    The simplicity that makes Carrd easy to use also restricts scalability. Businesses that grow beyond a certain point may find Carrd limiting.
  • Integration Limitations
    While Carrd does offer some integration options (like forms and custom scripts), it doesn't support a wide array of third-party integrations compared to other website builders.
  • Branding on Free Plan
    The free plan includes Carrd branding on your site, which might not be desirable for professional or business websites.

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

Analysis of Carrd

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Carrd is a good choice for anyone looking to create a simple, elegant, and functional one-page website without a significant investment of time or money.

Why this product is good

  • Carrd is a popular website builder known for its simplicity and affordability. It is user-friendly, allowing users to create one-page websites quickly without needing extensive technical skills. Carrd offers a variety of templates and customization options, making it versatile for different use cases. Additionally, its cost-effective pricing makes it accessible for individuals and small businesses.

Recommended for

  • Freelancers looking to create a personal portfolio
  • Small businesses needing a landing page
  • Individuals wanting to start a personal blog or resume site
  • Event organizers needing a quick informational page
  • People looking for an easy-to-use website builder with minimal setup

Ghost videos

Why I Moved My Blog From WordPress to Ghost

More videos:

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

Carrd videos

CARRD.CO - build a landing page in minutes - TUTORIAL

More videos:

  • Review - Best tools for building a startup without code: Carrd vs Webflow vs Bubble
  • Tutorial - How to make a one page website - Carrd.co

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ghost and Carrd)
Blogging
100 100%
0% 0
Website Builder
24 24%
76% 76
CMS
75 75%
25% 25
Personal Website
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Ghost and Carrd. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

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

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 platform’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 don’t already have a website, Ghost may be an appealing option as a Patreon alternative. However, customizations are limited, and you’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

Carrd Reviews

Best Linktree Alternatives of 2024
What sets Carrd apart is its customizability. With Carrd, you can design a professional-looking Link In Bio page or a landing page without needing any coding experience. It provides users with a variety of elements to choose from, including, videos, images, sliders, and forms. Carrd’s forms allow users to both collect leads (using tools like MailChimp) and receive payments...
Linktree vs Carrd [Comparison Table Inside]
Carrd is more of a versatile, single-page website builder. It supports everything from basic text and image blocks to more advanced elements like forms, widgets, videos, and galleries. Carrd’s rich feature set allows users to create anything from simple landing pages to more complex sites that could act as mini-portfolios or detailed personal profiles. This makes Carrd a...
15 Best Link In Bio Tools of 2024 [Free and Paid]
#4Carrd✅ Extremely flexible with over 100 design templates. ✅ Suitable for personal sites and complex one-page designs. ✅Affordable premium features. ❌ Steeper learning curve compared to simpler tools. ❌ Lacks built-in analytics.Free plan; premium starts at $9/year.
14 Best Linktree Alternatives To Check Out in 2024
Carrd is a microsite builder that’s a popular Linktree alternative. Choose from dozens of templates, or start from scratch to create your own page. Designs are responsive, and you can even build up to three sites per account for free.
Top No Code Website Builders in 2023
Distinguishing itself in the realm of no-code website builders, Carrd is known for its simplicity and specialization in creating single-page websites that are impressively functional. Its intuitive editor, coupled with an array of diverse templates, significantly simplifies the process of website creation, even without any coding expertise.

Social recommendations and mentions

Carrd might be a bit more popular than Ghost. We know about 223 links to it since March 2021 and only 196 links to Ghost. 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.

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 / 8 months ago
  • Bye Bye Big Tech: How I Migrated to an Almost All-EU Stack (and Saved 500€/Year)
    Https://ghost.org — Open-source run by a non-profit headquartered in Singapore. - Source: Hacker News / 8 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 / about 1 year ago
  • Typepad Is Shutting Down
    They should provide an option to move to https://ghost.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year 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 / about 1 year ago
View more

Carrd mentions (223)

  • How to Validate a SaaS Idea With No Money
    The free stack: Carrd has a free tier that handles a one-page site fine, or throw plain HTML on any free subdomain you already have access to. For the form, Google Forms is free forever, and Tally's free tier embeds cleanly if you want it to look less like a survey. Wire the CTA to the form, and you have a functioning validation machine for exactly $0. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Just launched my dating advice blog built with Next.js - feedback welcome!
    It started as a personal dating profile builder (kind of like a Carrd for dating) but after concerns around privacy, scope creep, and some brutally honest Reddit feedback (quoting, "it's cringe, you should delete it and never mention it again"), I pivoted to focus on a dating advice blog instead. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • What's the best SaaS landing page you've seen recently?
    Not something I’ve seen recently, but Carrd’s landing page is stuck in my mind as a great example of a landing page. It’s beautiful, to the point, and provides immediate access to a demo, without the need to create an account. You can see for yourself: https://carrd.co/. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 years ago
  • Tools for Starting a Business or Testing an Idea: A Beginner's Guide
    Website Builder - carrd.co - free An intuitive platform that allows you to create simple, responsive one-page websites for free, perfect for landing pages or quick MVPs. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
  • Awesome-no-code-tools
    Carrd - Build simple, fully responsive one-page sites. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

Linktree - Connect your audience to all of your content with just one link.

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

Webflow - Build dynamic, responsive websites in your browser. Launch with a click. Or export your squeaky-clean code to host wherever you'd like. Discover the professional website builder made for designers.

Blogger - Publish your passions, your way. Create a unique and beautiful blog. It’s easy and free.

WiX - Create a free website with Wix.com. Customize with Wix' website builder, no coding skills needed. Choose a design, begin customizing and be online today