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!

Keystone
Keystone
The superpowered CMS for developers. Keystone helps you build faster and scale further than any other CMS or App Framework with a powerful GraphQL API & beautiful Management UI.
Ghost
Ghost
Ghost is a powerful platform for professional publishers to create, share, and grow a business around their content. It integrates publishing, newsletters, memberships, and payments seamlessly.

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.

Looking for a better alternative to Keystone & Ghost? Try Wisp.
Wisp is the best solution for blogging. Try it free today!

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.

Keystone:
Not Suitable for Mobile

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:
Not Suitable for Mobile

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:
No Automatic Content Linking

Keystone JS does not support automatic related blog linking, relying instead on manual relationships.

"Keystone facilitates building structured content but does not automate linking similar blog posts."
Source
"Keystone requires developers to manually define relationships between content."
Source
Ghost:
No Automatic Content Linking

Ghost CMS does not support automatic related blog linking; users must manually configure related posts in their themes.

"Ghost automatically creates and updates an XML sitemap for your website to help search engines understand the structure of your site and find all of its content."
Source
"To create a related posts section in Ghost, you'll need to make some modifications to your theme."
Source

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.

Keystone:
No Automatic CTA Linking

KeystoneJS does not support automatic linking of CTAs to content through AI.

"The document field does not include AI-based automatic CTA linking."
Source
"No built-in support for automatic call-to-action linking."
Source
"KeystoneJS does not feature automatic CTA linking in any form."
Source
Ghost:
No Automatic CTA Linking

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:
No Comments Supported

Keystone.js does not support built-in external commenting features out of the box. Custom fields can be created, but not natively.

"Keystone.js does not provide native support for external commenting features."
Source
"The platform focuses on content management but lacks built-in comment mechanisms."
Source
"Keystone can be extended with custom fields, but external commenting is not a built-in feature."
Source
Ghost:
Comments Supported

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.

Keystone:
No Multi-tenancy

KeystoneJS does not support multi-tenancy for managing multiple client accounts in a single framework.

"KeystoneJS does not support multi-tenancy."
Source
"KeystoneJS is not optimized for multi-tenancy."
Source
Ghost:
No Multi-tenancy

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.

Ease of Integrating Keystone:
Medium
Integration of Keystone JS is moderately complex, with some specific challenges noted.
Ease of Integrating Ghost:
Medium
Integration is achievable but requires technical knowledge and manual setup for optimal function.

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.

Keystone:
Customisable Content Types

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:
Limited Customisation

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:
Custom React Components Supported

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:
No Custom React Components Supported

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:
Full Text Search Supported

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:
Limited Search

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.

Keystone:
Available

KeystoneJS offers a starter kit to quickly create a new project.

(Expand section to see a list of Keystone templates and starter kits.)

Ghost:
Available

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.

Keystone's Pricing
Open Source
$0 / forever
- Unlimited users
- Unlimited content
- Community support
Ghost's Pricing
Starter
$9 / month
- 500 Members
- 1 staff user
- 18 free official themes
Creator
$25 / month
- 1,000 Members
- 2 staff users
- Unlimited custom themes
- 1,000+ integrations
- Build custom integrations
Team
$50 / month
- 1,000 Members
- 5 staff users
- Priority support
- Higher usage limits
Business
$199 / month
- 10,000 Members
- Unlimited staff users
- Advanced configuration
- 99.9% uptime SLA

Compare with other technologies

Looking for a better alternative to Keystone & Ghost? Try Wisp.
Wisp is the best solution for blogging. Try it free today!