Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ghost VS SMTP

Compare Ghost VS SMTP 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.

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.

SMTP logo SMTP

SMTP provides scalable affordable email infrastructure for all your sending needs.
  • Ghost Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-10
  • SMTP Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-09-13

Ghost

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

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.

SMTP features and specs

  • Reliability
    SMTP.com is known for its reliable email delivery service, ensuring that emails reach the intended recipients without unnecessary delays.
  • Scalability
    The platform is designed to handle large volumes of emails, making it suitable for businesses that need to scale their communication efforts.
  • Analytics
    SMTP.com provides detailed analytics and reporting features, allowing users to track delivery rates, open rates, and more to optimize their email campaigns.
  • Integration
    The service offers easy integration with various platforms and applications, providing flexibility for businesses looking to incorporate email marketing into their existing workflows.

Possible disadvantages of SMTP

  • Cost
    For smaller businesses or individuals, the pricing might be higher compared to some other email services, which can be a barrier for those with limited budgets.
  • Complexity
    While powerful, the range of features and options might be overwhelming for users who are not experienced with email marketing platforms.
  • Learning Curve
    New users might face a steep learning curve in understanding and fully utilizing all the features provided by SMTP.com.
  • Support
    Some users have reported that support responses can be slow, particularly for non-enterprise clients, which might affect the speed at which issues are resolved.

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

Ghost videos

Why I Moved My Blog From WordPress to Ghost

More videos:

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

SMTP videos

8 Best SMTP Services for Email Marketing

More videos:

  • Review - What is SMTP? and how it works? the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Explained in 3 Minutes
  • Review - Introduction to SMTP Relay for Servers

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ghost and SMTP)
Blogging
100 100%
0% 0
Email Marketing
0 0%
100% 100
CMS
100 100%
0% 0
Email Marketing Platforms

User comments

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Reviews

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

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

SMTP Reviews

Top 10 Bulk Email Verifier and Validation Services Compared
ListWiseโ€™s approach to email list validation is quite unique. Firstly, ListWise checks the email provider MX records to check it is a valid email provider. Then ListWise performs a real-time SMTP handshake with the email provider to verify each individual email address. This approach makes ListWise incredibly accurate. The ListWise team also recently made changes to ListWise...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ghost seems to be a lot more popular than SMTP. While we know about 196 links to Ghost, we've tracked only 5 mentions of SMTP. 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 / 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 / 10 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
View more

SMTP mentions (5)

  • SMTP provider without sending\hourly limitation?
    I will confront it with smtp2go, they look very similar, also in terms of cost smtp.com is 10$ more, but we'll see which one suits us better. Thanks for the suggestion! Source: over 3 years ago
  • Cold Email Software
    Phplist is free, then you will need to plug that into an SMTP relay like smtp.com or sendgrid.com. Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Google workspace vs dedicated IP SMPT
    Let's say I need about 3k emails per day. Is it better to create 3 domains with google workspace or create smpt server and dedicated IP with AWS SES or smtp.com ? Source: over 4 years ago
  • The hell did this user do? They have corp gmail.
    We push customers to smtp.com or mailjet. Mostly because we can pull data from their respective API's directly into our software. Source: over 4 years ago
  • ProtonBridge, SMTP and Symfony
    Don't abuse ProtonMail for spamming. If you want to spam folks, use dedicated spam services - such as sendgrid, mailjet, smtp.com, Sendinblue, etc, etc. There's a ton of these services who does the spamming in the proper ways. Source: over 5 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ghost and SMTP, 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.

Postmark - Postmark is the easiest and most reliable way to be sure your important transactional emails get to the inbox. Simply & reliably parse recieved email to JSON for your webapp.

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

Mandrill - Mandrill is a new way for apps to send transactional email. It runs on the delivery infrastructure that powers MailChimp.

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.

Mailgun - A set of powerful APIs that enable you to send, receive and track email from your app effortlessly whether you use Python, Ruby, PHP, C#, Node.js or Java.