Ghost is a powerful digital publishing platform, but it has several primary competitors that offer similar features (and in some cases, some of the same features at a lower price). This article contains Blogging Guide’s overview of the best Ghost alternatives.

Your Ghost site is connected directly to your own Stripe account and Ghost does not charge any extra transaction fees. The only fees you’ll need to pay are Stripe’s own processing fees (2.9% + 30¢). Beyond that, all of your revenue is yours to keep.

When using Ghost, Views refer to the number of requests to your site each month. These are tracked much like an analytics ‘pageview’ – and are incremented with each page or API request. Ghost never disable sites for traffic spikes. If you exceed your limit consistently on a 3 month rolling average, Ghost will let you know that you need to upgrade.

Staff users refers to the total number of team members invited to Ghost Admin whom you collaborate with. For the purposes of billing, Ghost only counts users who have logged in at least once in the last 30 days.

Ghost allows users to assign members various roles to help manage or contribute to their website.

Contributors
This is the base user level in Ghost. Contributors can create and edit their own draft posts, but they are unable to edit drafts of others or publish posts. Contributors are untrusted users with the most basic access to your publication.

Authors
Authors are the 2nd user level in Ghost. Authors can write, edit  and publish their own posts. Authors are trusted users. If you don’t trust users to be allowed to publish their own posts, they should be set as Contributors.

Editors
Editors are the 3rd user level in Ghost. Editors can do everything that an Author can do, but they can also edit and publish the posts of others – as well as their own. Editors can also invite new Contributors+Authors to the site.

Administrators
The top user level in Ghost is Administrator. Again, administrators can do everything that Authors and Editors can do, but they can also edit all site settings and data, not just content. Additionally, administrators have full access to invite, manage or remove any other user of the site.

The Owner
There is only ever one owner of a Ghost site. The owner is a special user which has all the same permissions as an Administrator, but with two exceptions: Owners can never be deleted, and in some circumstances the owner will have access to additional special settings. For example: billing details, if using Ghost(Pro), and members settings in Labs.

Ghost accepts all major credit and debit cards such as Visa, Mastercard or American Express. For annual pre-paid accounts on Business or Enterprise plans they also accept bank transfers or Bitcoin. Ghost does not accept PayPal.