We've been using ghost for over 2 years now and we regret the lockin. It does a lot and does many things well but even more so it does a lot of things very badly:
- The mariadb support drop was a major complication.
- The codebase is amateur with a lot of todo comments, non functional areas and
- The admin API is very limited, meaning you have to reverse engineer backend API yourself to do more complex tasks.
- The front end is slow and very difficult to extend. Theming is a real mess with a lot of hard coded areas that require very awkward patching.
The front-end is making any long-term support almost impossible:
- There's no version control for articles. There's no individual article backup for implementing your own version control and automation. The admin API is there but it's very difficult to use.
- There's no way to extend or modify UI. For example there's no mass modification, tagging or any advance features that you'd expect from a long-term CMS.
- It's really slow and most components are not compatible with the modern web. There's no predictable media naming for lazy preloading and other small issues that severely damages SEO potential.
Honestly, the value provided by Ghost is overshadowed by things that are just broken or badly designed. We regret basing our project on it.
I'm quite confused to see this comment posted in November 2023, because it sounds like you're maybe using a very old version of Ghost that's about 7 years out of date? If you update to the latest version I think you'd find that almost all of the points you mentioned have already been fixed, added or improved :)
So far, LOVE 5.0 compared to previous versions. The multiple newsletter offerings present really cool new ways to monetize and audience, and the updated analytics is much more detailed than before. I feel very excited about the future of Ghost!
Thanks Sara! I guess the biggest differences are that Ghost is pretty much the only open source, independent platform with 0% fees — these tend to be the main reasons we hear about from people switching to Ghost from another platform :)
What can I say? I have been a satisfied user since 2021. A number of frustrations have been resolved in 5.0, such as the choice of whether or not to post a newsletter on the site or tweaking the features of the newsletter. The backoffice works quickly and conveniently. The advantage of Ghost I see is that what the platform can't do won't break, a big difference from generic platforms where you can mess things up. It's seems to be designed to be a platform for people who would rather spend their time creating content than managing the platform on which the content resides. The support is fast, but once it was very much by the book.
