Ghost
Share newsletters and blog posts for free – in the same place you sell courses and digital products
Podia gives you a full website with blogging and advanced email features, all on the free plan. Plus you can sell coaching, community plans, and a digital download to earn money before you spend a dime.
Podia vs. Ghost
Ghost works for blogging and newsletters, but you’ll need other tools to sell downloads, courses, webinars, or coaching. Podia includes everything in one place so growing your business – and audience – is simple.
Podia
✓ Free plan
✓ Blogging
✓ Email newsletters
✓ Build a website
✓ Memberships
✓ Sell digital products
✓ Sell online courses
✓ Online community platform
✓ Email campaigns & automations
Ghost
x No free plan
✓ Blogging
✓ Email newsletters
✓ Build a website
✓ Memberships & subscriptions
x No digital products
x No online courses
x No online community platform
x No email campaigns & automations
Podia vs. Ghost
Podia
Ghost
Free plan
Podia is yes
Ghost is yes
Price
Podia isFree, or $4/month - $89/month
Ghost isFree + hosting costs, or $9/month - $249/month
Remove transaction fees
Podia is yes
Ghost is yes
Website
Podia is yes
Ghost is yes
Blogging
Podia is yes
Ghost is yes
Connect a custom domain
Podia is yes
Ghost is yes
Newsletters
Podia is yes
Ghost is yes
Email list
Podia is yes
Ghost is yes
Memberships & subscriptions
Podia is yes
Ghost is yes
Digital products
Podia is yes
Ghost is no
Online courses
Podia is yes
Ghost is no
Community platform
Podia is yes
Ghost is no
Webinars
Podia is yes
Ghost is no
Coaching
Podia is yes
Ghost is no
Affiliate marketing
Podia is yes
Ghost is no
Customer chat messaging
Podia is yes
Ghost is no
The Podia blogging tool is super simple, yet you can create a really great looking and personalized design that fits your brand. And cherry on the cake, you have everything in one place, your store, your blog, your website, and even your CRM.
Daniele, Swiss Innovation Academy
Why creators are making the switch from Ghost to Podia
Here are some of the reasons creators have shared for why they’ve chosen Podia to power their business.
Sell digital products and courses
With Podia, you can sell digital downloads, webinars, courses, coaching, community tiers, and any other digital product that makes sense for your business. You can also set up cohort courses, product bundles, email drip courses, upsells, free lead magnets, and product waitlists.
Subscriber tagging, filtering, and segmentation
Podia is automatically connected to your email so you can tag and filter your audience in just a few clicks. Create segments and send messages based on recent activity, link clicks, products purchased, and just about anything else.
Built-in community platform
Build your own community and offer free or paid tiers to your audience. Let fans support your work, charge for exclusive membership content, and let your audience members connect – all included in Podia’s free plan.
A free plan that doesn’t require your own server
Technically you can use Ghost for free, but you’ll need to do it in your own server environment. Podia’s free plan comes with everything you need to blog, build a website, and start earning money out of the box – no techie knowledge required.
Video demo
Podia blogging in action
Wondering if Podia is the best blogging platform for you? Go behind the scenes in this video walkthrough and we’ll show you the ins and outs of Podia’s blogging features.
Podia vs. Ghost: Which one is right for me?
Podia and Ghost are both solid tools for sharing your blog content and building a website. Both allow you to send newsletters, offer membership subscriptions, and grow an audience with email sign-up forms.
But Ghost is heavily focused on blogging, paid newsletters, and written content, and it’s not set up for selling digital products and courses. Plus, the email newsletter feature is pretty straightforward so it’s difficult to build sales funnels and run advanced automations.
Podia is an all-in-one option where your website, blog, products, email, customers, and subscribers are all connected. You don’t have to add any extra tools (unless you want to), and you have more ways to earn money from your work right out of the box.
Let’s take a closer look at the features, plans, and pricing for Podia and Ghost so you can choose the best platform for you.
All prices and features are accurate at the time of writing, but they may change over time.
Plans and Pricing for Podia and Ghost
You can use both Podia and Ghost for free, but the free version of Ghost is complicated if you’re not tech-savvy.
Ghost is free and open-source software, so you can self-host it on your own server if you want. If you’ve got the technical experience, this can be a good option, but if managing a server makes your head spin (like me!), then you’ll probably want to use one of their managed plans.
The rest of this article talks about the managed version of Ghost where you pay a monthly or annual fee and they take care of the techie stuff for you.
With Ghost’s managed hosting, everything is set up for you. Ghost does not have a free managed plan, and the paid plans increase in price as your audience grows.
Ghost defines subscribers as anyone with a free or paid account on your site using the membership/subscription feature, and the lowest-tiered Starter plan starts at $11/month for 500 members.
After you have 1000 members, you’re only eligible for the Creator plan and above, which starts at $31/month for 1000 members.
Here’s a closer look at Ghost’s managed hosting plans and prices:
- Starter: $11/month for up to 500 members, $19/month for up to 1,000 members
- Creator: $31/month for up to 1,000 members
- Team: $63/month for up to 1,000 members
- Business: $249/month for up to 10,000 members
As you move up through the plan tiers, you get more staff user seats, more distinct newsletters, and more pricing options for subscribers. You can also upload larger-sized files – Ghost’s Starter plan caps each file at 5 MB while the Business plan lets you upload files as large as 1 GB.
With Podia, the free plan includes hosting, your full website, blogging, and your first 100 email subscribers. Podia’s free plan also comes with the ability to sell a digital download, a coaching product, and community tiers.
As your business grows, you can choose from three paid base plans with more features. You can also add email subscribers separately, so you only pay for what you need.
- Free, $0/month and 10% transaction fee: The free plan includes a full website, blog, landing pages, one digital download, one coaching session, and your community.
- Starter: $9/month and 8% transaction fee ($4/month when paid annually): Starter includes all the Free features plus custom domains and chat support.
- Mover: $39/month and 5% transaction fee ($33/month when paid annually): Mover includes all the Starter features plus unlimited digital products, courses, and third-party code.
- Shaker: $89/month and 0% transaction fee ($59/month when paid annually for the first year, then $75/month when paid annually after that): Shaker includes all the Mover features plus affiliates.
Podia Email is free for your first 100 subscribers, and the price only goes up as your list grows. All plans have all email features, so you can send beautiful newsletters, run advanced automations, build campaigns, and segment/filter your audience no matter your list size.
Blogging and websites with Podia and Ghost
Both Podia and Ghost let you set up multimedia blogs with unlimited articles. You can embed videos, audio files, and other media, and you can add design features like links, bulleted lists, buttons, and different font styles.
Both platforms have SEO features so you can customize the URL, SEO title, and meta description for your articles, and you can choose if you want to display the featured image, author, comments, and publish date.
And both platforms also allow you to build a full website, but a key difference is that Podia is already connected to your digital products. This means you can set up landing pages and sales pages with just a few clicks and add product features anywhere you want on your website.
If you use Podia Email, your email list is also automatically connected with your website and blog, so subscribers will instantly be added to your Podia contact list when they join. If they purchase a product in the future, that data will be automatically added to their subscriber profile so you can see all their information in one place.
Email marketing and newsletters
Both Podia and Ghost make it easy to send newsletters to your audience.
Ghost has email marketing built in, and the lowest tier Ghost plan comes with up to 500 subscribers. You can send unlimited emails on all plans, and to send a newsletter in Ghost, all you need to do is publish a blog post. You can decide if it should be displayed on your blog, sent to your email list, or both.
Podia also has email marketing built in. Podia includes 100 subscribers for free, and you can add up to 500 subscribers for $9/month. You can send unlimited emails on all plans, and just like Ghost, you can send newly published blog posts to your email list in just a click.
But a perk of using Podia is that you also get advanced campaigns, automations, segmentation, and triggers to work with. You can build sales funnels that direct people to your products, build customized welcome sequences, and create unlimited email opt-in pages. All of these features are included on all plans, so you get a full suite of email marketing tools at your disposal no matter how big your list is.
You can also use lead magnets to grow your list with both Ghost and Podia. Ghost gives you one type of lead magnet – you can add a paywall or subscription barrier to your blog post, and the reader has to sign up to read the rest of your article. You can also add files to the “subscriber only” portion of your post as a lead magnet workaround.
Podia has a traditional lead magnet setup where you can have a file automatically delivered to the new subscriber’s email address. All you need to do is add the file as a free digital download product and set the delivery to “free email delivery”, and your lead magnet will be ready to roll.
You can give away a video, file download, audio clip, access to a premium community tier, exclusive content, or even a full free course. Plus, Podia automatically keeps track of who subscribed through each lead magnet so you can create custom welcome sequences and sales funnels depending on their interests.
Ultimately, both Podia and Ghost make it easy to send email newsletters to your audience, but Ghost is best for simple newsletters while Podia is better for full-scale email marketing with newsletters, email campaigns, automations, welcome sequences, and audience tagging.
Selling digital products
Ghost is not designed for selling digital products – it’s only set up for blogging, newsletters, and paid subscriptions to those newsletters. If you have products to sell, you’ll need to link to your courses or ebooks on other platforms.
Podia, on the other hand, has digital products and checkout built in. You don’t need to connect with another platform to sell your courses, downloads, coaching, or community plans. Podia is a better fit for people who want to run their blog, website, and newsletter in the same place where they build and sell products.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that makes growing your email newsletter and running your online business simple, we built Podia just for you.
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Absolutely! You can check out our Podia demo site, which we’ve built to show you what the Podia experience will look like for both you and your customers.
There are also dozens of creator example sites on our Examples page, so you can see what other creators just like you have built using Podia.
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Yes! We offer free (and hassle-free) migrations on all annual Mover and Shaker plans. Get started here.
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Yes! Podia has a free forever plan that includes your full website, blogging, one digital download, one coaching product, customer chat messaging, and your online community. Sign up for free today to see for yourself!
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Absolutely! You can see how Podia stacks up to many of our competitors right here.
We also have some head-to-head comparisons of other leading platforms in case you’re choosing between those, including:
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We’d love to. Podia’s customer support is here for you, seven days a week. Just reach out to us on chat and a real, friendly person will be delighted to help you out.