Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ghost VS SpreadSimple

Compare Ghost VS SpreadSimple 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.

SpreadSimple logo SpreadSimple

A blazing-fast way to create and manage sites using Google Sheets
  • Ghost Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-10
  • SpreadSimple Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-09-05
  • SpreadSimple Details page
    Details page //
    2024-09-05
  • SpreadSimple Checkout settings
    Checkout settings //
    2024-09-05
  • SpreadSimple Add-ons
    Add-ons //
    2024-09-05
  • SpreadSimple Image uploader extension
    Image uploader extension //
    2024-09-05

Turn your Google Sheet into a beautiful ready-to-go website in a snap, no coding required!

Add a variety of customizable features such as:

  • search, sorting, filtering
  • order form and shopping cart
  • Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay, and other payment gateways
  • SEO settings
  • item variations
  • related items
  • promo codes, shipping rates, taxes, and fees
  • content pages & navigation menu
  • product pages
  • password protection and access rules
  • multiple integrations: chats, analytics, etc.

You can also:

  • Add any 3rd party services like forms, chats, maps, etc using embed as a pop-up feature or adding your custom code
  • Connect your custom domain
  • Customize the website design with CSS code
  • Embed 3rd party widgets with custom scripts and HTML
  • Manage your website in your Google Sheet in a few clicks as the spreadsheet becomes the content management system and automatically syncs the changes you make to your website

Ghost

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

SpreadSimple

$ Details
freemium $17.9 / Monthly (Starter plan)
Platforms
Web
Release Date
2020 July
Startup details
Country
Romania

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.

SpreadSimple features and specs

  • Free Trial
  • Card payments
  • Customer Support
  • Customizable
  • Secure

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

SpreadSimple videos

Introduction to SpreadSimple | SpreadSimple Tutorial

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to add cart and accept payments on your website โ€” Checkout setup guide
  • Tutorial - How to create an affiliate website in 10 minutes
  • Tutorial - How to set up Item Variations
  • Tutorial - SpreadSimple Image Uploader Extension โ€” Image Hosting for Websites

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ghost and SpreadSimple)
Blogging
100 100%
0% 0
No Code
0 0%
100% 100
CMS
100 100%
0% 0
Google Sheets
0 0%
100% 100

Questions & Answers

As answered by people managing Ghost and SpreadSimple.

What's the story behind your product?

SpreadSimple's answer:

After years of working with clients who struggled with complicated website builders, our team set out to create a tool that would simplify the process and open up web design to a broader audience. This is why we launched SpreadSimple โ€“ a no-code website builder that empowers anyone to create and manage a website from Google Sheets, a tool most people are already familiar with.

What makes your product unique?

SpreadSimple's answer:

SpreadSimple differentiates itself with its simplicity, smart defaults, and a focus on rapid content updates, allowing users to quickly adapt to market changes without getting bogged down in complex configurations.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

SpreadSimple's answer:

We aim to provide everyone with a simple, straightforward tool for website creation, regardless of their coding skills. SpreadSimple solves multiple problems: it allows businesses to optimize their efforts and resources in building a digital presence and provides a feature-rich tool to create an e-commerce platform.

How would you describe the primary audience of your product?

SpreadSimple's answer:

Our primary target users are small and medium-sized business owners in the e-commerce industry, as well as digital creators and enthusiasts.

User comments

Share your experience with using Ghost and SpreadSimple. 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 SpreadSimple

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

SpreadSimple Reviews

We have no reviews of SpreadSimple yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Ghost seems to be a lot more popular than SpreadSimple. While we know about 196 links to Ghost, we've tracked only 1 mention of SpreadSimple. 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 / 7 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 / 11 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 / 12 months ago
View more

SpreadSimple mentions (1)

  • Build a directory website using WordPress at 1/10th of the cost of using Softr.
    Since you are willing to use Google Sheets instead of Airtableโ€™s for data storage, maybe SpreadSimple would be cheap any easy for youโ€ฆ https://spreadsimple.com. Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ghost and SpreadSimple, 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.

Sheet 2 Site - Generate a website from ๐Ÿ“— Google Sheets

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

Siteoly - The fastest way to build websites using Google Sheets

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.

Glide - Send lightning fast video messages, see responses live or whenever it's convenient. Get closer to the ones you love with video communication.