Hello! Thinking about moving over to Ghost? Or trying to decide which platform to use for the first time?

You’re probably wondering what the differences are between Ghost and Memberful to power a publication and membership business, so we thought we’d put together an overview.

Keep all of the revenue you make with Ghost

Memberful is a WordPress plugin that can be used to add a memberships overlay to a WordPress site. Using Memberful, you will be charged between 4.9%-10% on each transaction, plus fees for Memberful itself, on top of hosting costs for your WordPress site.

Using Ghost, the fee structure is simplified into a single monthly cost and there are zero transaction fees. No matter how large your audience – all the revenue you make is yours to keep.

What’s more – while Memberful is an additional service to overlay memberships and payments, Members in Ghost is native to the platform, which provides a stable and reliable solution for running a professional publishing business.

Focus on what you do best

Ghost has been built as a simple and beautiful platform for publishers like you. It’s explicitly focused on doing one thing really well: Publishing. What does this mean for you? No more wading through menus, complex options and extra plugins.

In fact, when comparing Memberful with Ghost, it’s also useful if you take a look at our comparison to WordPress, since this is what you’d need to use to build your site and manage your content.

Creating content in Ghost is familiar and clutter free, and it supports dynamic 'Cards' to allow you to drop in images, embeds, galleries, bookmark cards and much more.

Think of it like having Slack integrations right inside your editor. Publishers switch to Ghost because it provides a better writing experience.

The native members features within Ghost allow you to transform anonymous views into registered members. Ghost has member management, native payments, subscriptions and email newsletters built-in.

Everything you need to get started is ready to use, without any additional downloads or fees!

"Have been building paid membership newsletters with Ghost for two months now and ridiculously happy with the experience. It's the combination of amazing design with endless customisability if you want to have your own style. The writing interface is just SO nice — it feels like stepping inside a high-end minimalist house, you just want to live up to the beauty of it."

Uri Bram, The Browser

Switched from Substack to Ghost

Completely customisable

Ghost is fully open to being themed and modified to suit your needs and your style. You’re never locked into a single set of functionality or features for your site. So whether you’re starting from scratch or running one of the world’s leading online publications, Ghost can be adapted to suit your needs.

Each Ghost site is unique and reflects the personality of its creator. Some examples:

Growing an audience

The most important aspect of any publication is understanding and growing a core readership base. Getting traffic to an independent website can be challenging, but the rewards are that you own the content and you’re benefitting your own brand and domain.

With Memberful + WordPress, you’ll need to install additional plugins to handle things like SEO and social. Ghost has the best support for search engine optimisation and social sharing features of any blogging platform in the world. You don’t need any extra plugins or extensions, and you don’t need to write any extra code. It just works.

There are built-in XML sitemaps, Google AMP pages, canonical tags, optimised URLs, microformats, Facebook Open Graph tags, support for Twitter cards and clean semantic markup. All of this is done for you automatically, with no plugins needed.

"I launched my membership site in under 3 hours without having to find a plugin or deal with a platform that would have been overkill for what I needed. I was amazed that within hours of launching the site I was already getting members signing up!"

Alex Older, Shutter Club

Doing more than the basics

At its core, Ghost is a fully baked RESTful JSON API with a flexible architecture, which means it can be extended, modified and customised for your needs in an unlimited number of ways. It’s worth having a look at Ghost’s core concepts, detailed tutorials, extensive directory of integrations as well as beautiful themes to get you started. There’s so much that’s possible.

If you’re already using WordPress and thinking about making the switch, try the official Ghost migrator plugin.

One last thing you should know

Ghost is an independent non-profit organisation. We build publishing tools for modern journalism & publishing because we believe freedom of speech is important. Our software is released under a free open source license, our business model is completely transparent, and our legal structure means that 100% of the money we make is reinvested into making Ghost better.

We’re building a socially responsible, sustainable business which empowers people to share important stories and ideas. We’re in this for the long haul.

"I've been a blog minimalist from the start, and finding a truly open source platform which reflects that minimalism and focus is incredibly refreshing."

Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror

Switched from TypePad to Ghost

You’re now armed with knowledge! Hopefully this guide was useful to give you a general overview of Memberful compared to Ghost.

Still researching? Head back to the alternatives page.