Keystone vs Ghost
Compare Keystone and Ghost for your content needs. Find out what actual users are saying about each product and which one is best suited for you!


What Users Say
See what users who have used Keystone and Ghost have to say about their overall experience with the product.
Keystone's Key Strengths
Read what users love about Keystone.
Ghost's Key Strengths
Read what users love about Ghost.
Keystone's Key Issues
Read what issues users have with Keystone.
Ghost's Key Issues
Read what issues users have with Ghost.
What Marketers & Content Creators Say
Hear from the users who uses Keystone and Ghost daily about their experience with the editors.
Keystone's Editorial Experience Highlights
What marketers love about Keystone's editor.
Ghost's Editorial Experience Highlights
What marketers love about Ghost's editor.
Keystone's Editorial Experience Issues
What marketers dislike about Keystone's editor.
Ghost's Editorial Experience Issues
What marketers dislike about Ghost's editor.
Mobile Editing
Find out how the platforms handle the mobile-first experience for the new generation of workforce on the move.
KeystoneJS does not specifically support a mobile first editing experience; the editing capabilities are primarily designed for desktop use.
"Keystone helps you build faster and scale further than any other CMS or App Framework. Describe your schema, and get a powerful GraphQL API & beautiful Management UI for your content and data."Source
"KeystoneJS is a powerful Node.js content management system and web app framework built on express and mongoose. It features an intuitive Admin UI."Source
"... Strapi is more oriented towards providing a mobile-friendly and customizable interface compared to KeystoneJS which has a more traditional desktop-focused UI."Source
"Keystone has a beautiful auto-generated Admin UI that is primarily designed for desktop use without a mobile-first editing option."Source
"Keystone's Admin UI will save you time and make managing your data easy, but there is no mention of mobile editing capabilities."Source
Ghost CMS lacks a true mobile editor experience. Users report significant limitations while editing on mobile devices.
"I find it awkward that mobile Safari editing isn’t supported in Ghost admin... It would be tremendously useful to be able to write and edit blog posts on the go from mobile devices."Source
"Though WP is great it is not just for blogging... But what could I win by switching to Ghost if WordPress worked out very well?"Source
"Previewing, publishing and scheduling content is accessed from the top of the editor, with live previews for desktop, mobile, email and social."Source
"Ghost is not mobile friendly... mobile devices are not fully supported."Source
Automatic Content Linking
Find out if the platform supports automatic linking of related content to help user discover more content without additional manual effort from the marketer. This automatically create topical clusters of content and is essential for SEO.
Keystone JS does not support automatic related blog linking, relying instead on manual relationships.
Ghost CMS does not support automatic related blog linking; users must manually configure related posts in their themes.
Automatic CTA Linking
Find out if the platform supports automatic display of Call-to-Actions using AI to help users take actions that are relevant to the content they are reading.
KeystoneJS does not support automatic linking of CTAs to content through AI.
Ghost CMS does not support automatic CTA linking features based on current information obtained from various sources.
"This is indeed a built-in feature in Ghost. It's called public ... How to Use the Public Preview & Custom Content CTA in Ghost CMS."Source
"In Ghost 3.0 some Ghost themes had a hard coded (in most cases blurred) text when users did not have access to that post."Source
"Wondering how we can add an in-line button to a blog post? We have a that we have a..."Source
Comments
Find out if the platform supports comments from your users to improve user engagement. This is often a great way to collect feedback and user emails.
Keystone.js does not support built-in external commenting features out of the box. Custom fields can be created, but not natively.
Ghost has a built-in commenting feature integrated with memberships, allowing users to comment if they are registered members.
"Member commenting can be enabled for either All members or Paid-members only from within Ghost Admin."Source
"We built Ghost Comments with features that allow users to comment directly on your website."Source
"Ghost's built-in comments feature is a part of the memberships feature - there is no way to use it without being a registered member on your site."Source
"The complete guide to comments includes tutorials for using the built-in comment feature."Source
Multi-tenancy
Find out if the platform supports managing multiple clients or projects within a single account. This is useful for agencies, multi-client or multi-project scenarios.
Ghost CMS does not support multi-tenancy; each site needs a separate Ghost account.
"Ghost is not multi-tenant, and does not have the ability to run multiple sites off a single instance."Source
"No, it is not possible (currently) to run many blogs under many domains, served by one installation of Ghost."Source
"If you need to create multiple sites each with their own domain, you would need to create separate Ghost(Pro) accounts."Source
What Developers Say
Hear from developers who've integrated and built on Keystone and Ghost about their experiences.
Keystone's DX Highlights
What developers love about building with Keystone.
Ghost's DX Highlights
What developers love about building with Ghost.
Keystone's DX Issues
What developers dislike about building with Keystone.
Ghost's DX Issues
What developers dislike about building with Ghost.
Content Modelling
Find out how developers model and manage their content with the platform with key highlights and limitations.
KeystoneJS offers extensive content modeling capabilities with various field types and GraphQL API.
"Keystone helps you build faster and scale further with the programmable open source GraphQL API back-end for structured content projects."Source
"KeystoneJs is an open source Node.js CMS with a wide range of features including a user-friendly admin UI, content modelling, and a powerful GraphQL API."Source
"KeystoneJs is an open-source Node.js CMS with a wide range of features including a user-friendly admin UI, content modelling, and a powerful GraphQL API."Source
Ghost CMS allows custom content types via collections and tags, but has inherent limitations compared to fully customizable CMS.
"Posts are created within Ghost-Admin using the editor to determine your site’s main content. Within them are all the fields which you might expect such as title, description, slug, metadata, authors, tags and so on."Source
"Using custom routing, it's possible to create content collections just like this. You can define a content collection with tags, allowing a post to live in only one collection at a time."Source
"The Content API provides access to Posts, Pages, Tags, Authors, Tiers, and Settings. All endpoints return JSON and are considered stable."Source
Custom React Components
Find out if the platform supports custom React components to go beyond the basic HTML components for content.
Keystone supports adding custom React components via Document fields in the rich text editor.
"The really cool stuff is behind the **`+`** button on the right of the toolbar – these are the **Custom Components**."Source
"They store structured data, and can be inserted (and edited!) anywhere in the document."Source
"If you need a field type which isn't provided, or you need a specialised version of an existing field type, you can define your own custom field type."Source
Ghost CMS does not support inserting custom React components directly in the content editor.
"Is there a way to insert a React component inside Ghost cms? I know I can consume the content API, but what I need is to be able to insert a React component from the admin panel."Source
"Ghost's RESTful Content API delivers published content to the world and can be accessed in a read-only manner by any client to render in a website."Source
"Manage content via Ghost's Admin API, with secure role-based authentication."Source
"Using the Content API means that attribute data, such as tags and authors, will be included in the post object data."Source
Full Text Search
Find out if the platform supports full text search across multiple fields to help users find content quickly.
Keystone.js supports native full-text search across entire datasets, allowing robust search functionality.
"Native full-text search. A way for you and editors to easily search for strings across your entire dataset."Source
"Keystone manages three models fundamental for the whole system. The role of Keystone is to manage the content of basic pages for the main frontend app."Source
"Thanks for posting. It looks like you are calling the findOne query using the non-plural name on GraphQL; you can see a list of example GraphQL queries Keystone generates."Source
Ghost CMS supports native search, but it's limited to titles, excerpts, authors, and tags, not full post content.
"The search feature indexes post titles, excerpts, authors and tags - but it does not search across post content."Source
"Ghost Search works out-of-the-box with any theme, and allows your readers to search across all published posts, tags and authors."Source
"The post title and excerpt are used to search post content from the most recent 10,000 posts."Source
"For full-text search capabilities, using a third-party solution like OpenSearch is recommended."Source
"Starting with Ghost v5.3.0 a native search function was added, but it’s limited in scope."Source
Starter Kits
Discover starter kits and templates to help you get started with the platform.
KeystoneJS offers a starter kit to quickly create a new project.
(Expand section to see a list of Keystone templates and starter kits.)
Ghost CMS provides a starter theme for custom development.
(Expand section to see a list of Ghost templates and starter kits.)
Pricing & Plans
Compare the prices of Keystone and Ghost.