Ghost vs MemberPress for Membership Sites

Quick answer: Both take 0% of your membership revenue — the real difference is architecture. Ghost is an integrated publishing platform (memberships + newsletter + website + SEO native, $29/mo all-in). MemberPress is a WordPress plugin ($179+/yr) that’s excellent at gating, but you assemble and maintain the hosting/SEO/security/email stack around it ($1,025+/yr all-in). Publishers pick Ghost; WordPress-committed sites pick MemberPress.

Prices verified June 2026 — confirm current figures on each vendor’s pricing page.

Same Economics, Opposite Architectures

This comparison is unusual: on fees, the two agree. No revenue share on either — just Stripe’s processing — which is exactly why both beat Patreon (10%) and Substack (10%) once real money flows. (The full fee landscape is in our best membership platforms comparison.)

So the decision isn’t about who takes a cut. It’s about what you want to operate:

• Ghost: one system. Posts, tiers, per-post gating (public / free / paid), payments in your own Stripe, a built-in newsletter that emails members when you publish, and SEO out of the box. Open-source (MIT), nonprofit-run.
• MemberPress: one excellent plugin inside a stack you own. Rules-based gating, drip content, coupons, courses via add-ons — riding on WordPress hosting, an SEO plugin, security, backups, caching, and a separate email service.

Costs, All-In

Self-hosting flips the floor: open-source Ghost runs from ~$4–6/month on a VPS if you’re happy doing ops — the same trade WordPress asks of you by default.

Where Each Wins

Ghost wins on:

• Email. Publishing a members-only post is the newsletter send — no Mailchimp/Kit bolted on, no list to reconcile.
• Maintenance. No plugin matrix to update; membership sites are where plugin conflicts hurt most, because breakage locks out paying customers.
• Speed + SEO defaults. Clean markup, sitemaps, schema, fast pages — no assembly.
• Focus. Tiers, gating, member analytics, and setup in an afternoon.

MemberPress wins on:

• The WordPress ecosystem. WooCommerce next to memberships, LMS add-ons for courses, forums, anything with a plugin.
• Granular gating rules. Very fine-grained protection rules and drip schedules.
• Existing WordPress sites. If the site already runs WordPress and you like it, adding MemberPress is an afternoon; migrating is a project.

How to Decide

Ask one question: is publishing the business, or a feature of the business?

• The business (gated articles, paid newsletter, premium archive) → Ghost. Everything you need is native, and everything you’d maintain on WordPress is someone else’s job. Start with building a membership website on Ghost.
• A feature (memberships beside a store, courses, custom workflows) → WordPress + MemberPress, and our WordPress membership site guide maps the full stack honestly. The broader platform decision lives in Ghost vs WordPress.

Either way you’ve chosen well on fees — 0% beats every percentage platform. The rest is choosing between a publication you run and a platform you build.