From Ghost perspective:
https://ghost.org/vs/substack/ for 2025, March Ghost has fixed price 9 (I am not sure about that)
|Share your writing on Twitter|✅ Yes|❌ No, Substack links are penalised & hidden|
From https://www.reddit.com/r/Substack/comments/1bs2ep6/ghost_vs_substack_help/
Substack actively prevents new newsletters from being indexed on Google until they meet some secret “quality” metric known only to them.
It seems very arbitrary in that writers who move to the platform bringing already established followings and subscriber lists get indexed and also boosted on the platform, while new writers are effectively sabotaged.
I plan to still keep my substack, it would be there just to drive traffic to my actual website, just like any other social media. This ways I also get to keep my brand on substack.
I haven’t used ghost but Susbtack’s algorithm is extremely good. We get the majority of our paid subscribers through it and/or the recommendation system from other publications on the platform. Plus the chat function is a huge driver of subs for us, which I’m not sure other newsletter companies have.
If you want to make money via premium subscriptions, I do think it makes sense to leave substack. No other major provider takes a percentage of your sales, and the quality of substack’s network effect does not justify the high cost (10 percent). Ghost is a flat rate depending on the size of your list. Ghost is WAY most customizable and open, but it’s also much more complicated. If you are not tech savvy, I’d recommend you budget a little money to pay a dev to help set your site up the way you want it. Ghost is also open source (good and bad imo) and rolls out new features slowly. It’s also not much for network effects. If you’re willing to invest the time to tinker, ghost is awesome. If you just want to write and don’t care about premium subs, I think substack can still be fine. Neither platform is going to be elite at growing your pub for you. Nobody will ever do a better job at that than you
From https://expressionbytes.com/ghost-vs-substack/
