Ghost versus BeeRanked
October 28, 2026
Ghost is a publishing platform for a whole site: posts, pages, newsletters and paid memberships, run by you on your own server or by the Ghost Foundation on Ghost(Pro). BeeRanked is a content section that mounts onto a website you already have. The two overlap on one question, where a blog should live, and differ on nearly everything else. Every Ghost fact below comes from ghost.org and the Ghost repository on GitHub, read in September 2026.
What Ghost is
Ghost is open source under the MIT licence; the first line of the licence file reads "Copyright (c) 2013-2026 Ghost Foundation". The about page describes "a non-profit organisation building open source technology for modern publishing", and explains the money: "We've built a sustainable business around a free core application, funded by a premium managed-service to run it on." Ghost 6.0 shipped on 4 August 2025, and a minor version follows most weeks; 6.65.0 came out on 22 September 2026.
The strengths are publication features. Newsletters and paid memberships are built in, Stripe is "the only natively supported payment provider", and Ghost takes no cut: "Ghost charges 0% transaction fees." On the search side, the pricing page lists "meta tags, structured data, XML sitemaps, and canonical URLs" on every plan.
What running it costs
You can self-host. The official stack is Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 or 26.04, Node.js 22 LTS, MySQL 8.0 or 8.4, NGINX and "A server with at least 1GB memory". Newsletters from a self-hosted install need Mailgun, "the only supported bulk email provider". Ghost's own docs add: "For heavy users of Ghost, self-hosting generally works out to be more expensive vs Ghost(Pro), but for lightweight blogs it can be cheaper."
Or you pay for Ghost(Pro). The pricing page shows USD only, also to a visitor from Belgium, and opens on the yearly view: Starter at 15 USD a month billed yearly (18 USD monthly), Publisher at 29 USD a month billed yearly (35 USD monthly) and Business at 199 USD a month billed yearly (239 USD monthly), each for up to 1,000 members on the base tier, with a Custom plan above. Starter comes with "Official Ghost Themes" only; custom and marketplace themes start at Publisher.
The subdirectory question
If you want the blog at yoursite.com/blog next to an existing site, read the pricing page's own row on it: "It's also possible to run sites on a subdirectory, like example.com/blog, however this requires customers to run their own self-hosted reverse proxy with a custom configuration. Supporting this setup is non-trivial, and is a $50/month addon only available on our Ghost(Pro) Business plan." A self-hosted Ghost accepts a subpath in its config ("If using a subpath, enter the full path, https://example.com/blog/"), and the proxy in front of it is yours to build and keep.
BeeRanked starts from the other end. A subfolder is the normal case: you paste one generated block into the Caddy, nginx, Apache or Traefik config that already fronts your site, or you point a subdomain at BeeRanked with one CNAME record. The options are in Get your content live: hosting and domains, and the choice between the two paths in Subdomain or subfolder for your blog.
What BeeRanked is
BeeRanked is a hosted content section: a blog, documentation, a wiki or a custom type, published as ready-made HTML from Cloudflare's edge, with structured data, an automatic sitemap, managed redirects and translations on every page. There is no server to run and no theme to maintain. Writing happens in the studio or through the built-in MCP server; Connect your AI agent to your website with MCP shows that setup. The company is in Belgium, and the Standard plan is 49 USD a month billed yearly, or 59 USD monthly, with a 14-day free trial.
BeeRanked has no newsletter sending and no paid memberships. If the plan is to sell subscriptions to readers, Ghost is built for that and BeeRanked is not.
Side by side
| Ghost | BeeRanked | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | A whole publication site | A content section of a site you keep |
| Who runs it | You (Ubuntu, Node, MySQL, NGINX), or Ghost(Pro) | BeeRanked |
| Blog at yoursite.com/blog | Self-hosted behind your own proxy, or a 50 USD a month add-on on the Business plan | The standard setup: one config block or one DNS record |
| Newsletters and memberships | Built in, 0% fees, Stripe only | None |
| Search plumbing | Meta tags, structured data, sitemap, canonical URLs | Structured data, sitemap, redirects, hreflang on every page |
| Languages | "Present your website in any language" | Auto-translate into up to seven languages |
| Where the data sits | Ghost(Pro) servers "in Amsterdam, The Netherlands" | Cloudflare's network, operated from Belgium |
| Price | Free software, or 15 to 199 USD a month billed yearly | 49 USD a month billed yearly |
| Leaving | Posts as JSON, members as CSV | Every page as Markdown through the Content API |
Choose Ghost if
You are building a publication with a newsletter and paid members, and want one system for all of it.
You want to own the software and will run the stack Ghost documents, or pay Ghost(Pro) to run it.
The blog is the site, on its own domain or subdomain, so the subdirectory add-on never comes up.
Choose BeeRanked if
You have a website you like and want to add the content that brings search traffic, under a path of it.
Nobody on the team wants to run servers, updates or a proxy for the blog.
You publish in more than one language, or want structured data, canonical URLs and 301 redirects handled once and kept.
Moving between them
Ghost exports "your posts and settings in a single JSON file" from Settings, Advanced, Import/Export. BeeRanked's importer reads a Ghost site by URL, sitemap included, and turns the posts into drafts, so you can see your own writing as a BeeRanked section before deciding. In the other direction, every BeeRanked page is available as Markdown through the Content API.