Ghost vs Squarespace: a website builder against a publication
A website builder against a publication. Both pricing pages side by side, the fee on memberships, and the theme this site runs, built with Claude Code, as the thing a builder cannot give you.
Squarespace builds a website; Ghost builds a publication. For a personal brand the publication is the website, so Ghost's $29 plan with email, memberships and 0% fees beats Core at $29 plus an email add-on and a 5% cut on memberships. This site runs on Ghost with a theme built with Claude Code; here is the comparison with both pricing pages and the build.
Leave a CommentThe one difference that decides it
Squarespace builds a website. Ghost builds a publication. For a personal brand the publication is the website. That is why I run this site on Ghost with a theme I built with Claude Code, and why I would still choose Squarespace for a different kind of site.
Put plainly: if the site is a brochure, a portfolio, a store or a booking page, Squarespace's editor will get you there faster. If you write a post now and then, you will not miss anything. If the site is the body of work, the picture changes. Articles people search for, an email list that grows from them, members who pay for more: Ghost treats all three as one thing and lets you shape it down to the file. The rest of this page is the comparison at that level, with the numbers from both pricing pages and the build I can show you.
Pricing: the plan tables, and the fee on memberships
Both pages read on 23 October 2026. Prices are per month billed yearly, with the monthly-billing price after it where the page shows one.
Squarespace has four website plans. Basic is $19 ($25 monthly), Core $29 ($39), Plus $49 ($65), Advanced $99 ($139). Every plan takes a cut of digital content and memberships on top of card processing: 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus, 0% on Advanced. Newsletter signup blocks are on every plan, but sending email is a separate product, Email Campaigns, priced by send volume on top of the website plan.
Ghost(Pro) has three listed plans and a custom tier. Starter is $18, Publisher $29, Business $199. Starter has no custom themes, no Admin API and no paid subscriptions. Publisher and up charge 0% on paid memberships, take any theme, and open the Admin API. Every plan includes unlimited email sends, a custom domain, and 1,000 members in the base price before it scales.
So the fair comparison for a personal brand that publishes and emails is this. Squarespace Core at $29 plus an email product, against Ghost Publisher at $29 with email, memberships and 0% fees included. If you sell memberships, the 5% on Core is the number to watch, because it never goes away. On Ghost that line is zero on every plan that sells.
One honest caveat on the other side. Ghost's $18 plan is cheaper than Squarespace's cheapest, but it cannot do most of what this page describes. The real floor on Ghost is $29.
Blogging and publishing: a platform against a block
On Squarespace the blog is a page type. It is a good one, with a clean editor, categories and tags, and it is perfectly capable of holding a few posts a month beside the pages that are the real site.
On Ghost the post is the unit of everything. A post is a web page. The same post is an email if you choose. The same post can be gated to free or paid members. Posts can be organised into channels at top-level URLs, which is how this site has a /knowledge/ section and a /playlist/ section, defined in a routes file rather than a settings page. Writers get an editor, a membership system, a newsletter and an archive out of the one object they already make.
The practical difference shows up at volume. This site has 239 published posts and 10 pages. One hundred and twelve of those posts went out in a single month. A library of evergreen content acts as a personal agent that travels the world finding opportunities while you sleep; at that cadence you want a platform whose core object is the article, not a builder whose core object is the page.
Newsletter and email: built in against bolted on
Ghost sends the newsletter from the post. You write once, choose web, email or both, and members receive it from your domain. Sends are unlimited on every plan. Free and paid tiers, sign-up forms, and the reader's account all live in the theme, so the sign-up banner on this site's home page and the subscribe button in the bar are the same system as the posts.
Squarespace gives you the signup form on every plan and the sending on a separate product with its own bill. It works, and for a site that emails occasionally it is fine. For a site whose list is the asset it is a second tool with a second price and a second place where the design lives.
Your social media following isn't truly yours; it's rented space on someone else's platform, and the list is the way out of that. The platform that treats the list as part of the publication, rather than an add-on to the website, is the one built for the job.
Memberships and monetisation: the fee that never goes away
Both platforms let you charge. The difference is the line item.
On Squarespace, members and digital content carry a percentage on every plan but the most expensive: 7% on Basic, 5% on Core, 1% on Plus, and 0% only on Advanced at $99 a month. On Ghost, every plan that can sell charges 0%, from $29.
Take 200 paying members at $8 a month, which is $1,600. On Squarespace Core that is $80 a month to the platform on top of the $29 plan and card fees. On Ghost Publisher it is $0 on top of the $29. The gap is small at the start and permanent. If memberships are part of the plan, the fee table is the whole comparison.
Design and customisation: templates against a theme you own
This is where the two products are most different, and where I can show rather than argue.
Squarespace's design is a template plus a visual editor. You can go far inside it without touching code, and for most brochure sites that is the right trade. The limit is that you are arranging what the editor offers.
Ghost's design is a theme, which is a folder of template files, a stylesheet and a script that you upload as a zip. This site's theme is called Apex. I built it with Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent, on a Mac mini, starting on 10 October 2026 from the theme that was live before it. It is on its 10.4.16 build as I write this, more than twenty versions in under two weeks. Each one is proven on a headless browser before upload. The stylesheet and script run to about 8,000 lines.
A few of the things in it, so this is concrete. The home page opens on a full-screen brand field and rides the sign-up banner in with the wordmark. The hero has three tabs for Learn, YouTube and Newsletter, each a content query written into the theme. A Favorites carousel is driven by the page's own scroll. Every article has a contents rail on desktop and a swipe-in sheet on phones. Light and dark modes. And, built this week, placement rails on both sides of an article for my own call-outs, which are the ads you may see beside this one. Posts I tag, not a network.
None of that is possible on a builder, and that is not a criticism of builders. It is the trade. A personal brand defends with what others cannot easily copy: your own work, your own footage, your real results. A site that is literally your own code is on that list.
The reason I could do it at this pace is the one Jake-shaped fact in this comparison: Ghost is a theme folder and two APIs. Files are something a coding agent can write and I can read. A script converts my markdown and hands it to the Admin API, which makes the draft. So my posts live in a git repository, 180 of them, with 176 in Ghost that way. Publishing is still my click. That is what I mean by easy connection and customisation, and it is the reason the platform and the agent fit together.
What Ghost actually is, from running it
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform with memberships and a newsletter built into the posts. Ghost(Pro) is the company's hosting; self-hosting is free software on your own server. The posts on this site go back to September 2025.
The honest edges, from running it:
There is no drag-and-drop page builder. Pages are a lighter kind of post with their own template, and anything beyond the editor's cards is theme work.
There is no discovery. Nobody arrives because you are on Ghost. The traffic is earned, which is why this site's whole strategy is organised around search, video and the list.
The cheap plan is not the plan. Starter has no custom themes and no Admin API. Publisher at $29 is where the product starts.
The ceiling is the open web. If you are willing to touch a file, or to work with something that will, there is nothing the site cannot become.
SEO and performance: what each exposes to control
Squarespace does the basics well: titles and descriptions, clean URLs, sitemaps, mobile templates. There is a whole cottage industry of Squarespace SEO guides, which tells you two things: that it can be tuned, and that it needs tuning from outside the product.
Ghost exposes the page. On this site the channels are top-level URLs from a routes file, the video posts carry structured data the theme writes, the home page's tabs are content queries in the theme, and the templates are mine to change. The entity home for a personal brand is the about page on an owned site, extended into a cornerstone page per facet, and that is a structure you build in templates, not in a settings panel.
For a site with ten pages, none of this matters. For a site with a few hundred articles that are meant to be found, it is most of what matters.
Self-hosting against managed hosting
Squarespace is hosted and only hosted. Ghost comes both ways. Self-hosting is free software, and you pay for a server and your own time; Ghost(Pro) is the company running it for you, with email delivery and updates handled. I chose Ghost(Pro) so the time goes into the theme and the writing, not the server, and the comparison above is written against that.
Which to choose
Choose Squarespace when the site is a brochure, a portfolio, a store or a booking page; when you want a visual editor and no files; when you post occasionally and email rarely; and when a template you arrange is the right amount of control.
Choose Ghost when the site is a publication: when articles are the work, the list grows from them, members pay for more, and you want the domain, the pages and the design under your own control. If you want to build with a coding agent, choose Ghost, because a theme folder and an API are exactly the shape such a tool needs.
This page is itself part of the test. The site's own search loop forecasts about 1,020 impressions for it at ninety days, a directional number it will grade against Search Console. A builder would not have let me wire that up.
Questions people ask
Is Squarespace a good website builder? Yes, for sites that are sites: brochures, portfolios, stores, bookings. The editor is the best reason to choose it. It becomes the wrong tool when the site is a publication with a list and members, because those are add-ons and percentages rather than the product.
What is Ghost CMS? An open-source publishing platform where a post is a page, an email and a members-only item at once. Ghost(Pro) hosts it for you from $18 a month; the features a personal brand needs start at $29.
Which is better for a blog, Ghost or Squarespace? For a blog that is the site, Ghost. For a blog that sits beside a site, Squarespace is fine and simpler.
Can I move from Squarespace to Ghost? Yes. Posts export and import, the domain repoints, and the list moves with you. The pages built in the visual editor are the part you rebuild, as theme templates or as posts.