Ghost vs Squarespace: Which Is Right for You?

Website Builder vs Publishing Platform

Squarespace builds websites. Ghost publishes content. This distinction matters more than any feature comparison.

Squarespace is an all-in-one website builder designed for portfolios, online stores, restaurants, and service businesses that also happen to have a blog. Ghost is a publishing platform designed for writers, bloggers, and newsletter publishers who need email delivery, paid memberships, and SEO as core functionality.

If your blog is one feature among many (alongside a store, portfolio, or booking system), Squarespace is built for that. If publishing and audience-building is your business, Ghost is built for that.

Newsletters

Ghost

Ghost’s newsletter system is native and included on every plan:

• Write a post and send it to subscribers’ inboxes in one action
• Multiple newsletters per site with independent subscriptions
• Segmentation by membership tier, label, or newsletter subscription
• Email-only content (send without publishing to the web)
• Custom email design: fonts, colors, buttons, headers
• Per-post analytics: open rates, click rates, per-link performance
• Unlimited sends on all plans at no additional cost

Squarespace

Squarespace Email Campaigns is a paid add-on, separate from the website plan:

• Starts at ~$8/month for 500 sends/month, scales to $68/month for 250,000 sends
• Blog and email are decoupled — to email a blog post, you must manually copy content into the Email Campaigns builder
• No A/B testing
• No advanced audience segmentation or tagging
• No email sequences or behavioral triggers
• “Powered by Squarespace” branding on the lowest email tier
• When your monthly send limit is reached, no further campaigns until next billing cycle

The workflow difference is critical: on Ghost, publishing a post and sending it as a newsletter is one action. On Squarespace, it’s two separate processes with manual content duplication.

Memberships and Monetization

Ghost

• 0% platform fee on all subscription revenue (Stripe ~2.9% processing only)
• Multiple custom tiers with your own pricing
• Per-post content access rules (free, paid, specific tier)
• Server-side content gating — member-only content never reaches the browser without authentication
• One-time payments and tips (Ghost 6.0)
• Revenue dashboard: MRR, churn, customer LTV

Squarespace Member Sites

Available on Core plan ($23/month) and above:

Plan	Membership Transaction Fee
Basic	Not available
Core	5%
Plus	1%
Advanced	0% (at $99/month)

To reach 0% transaction fees on Squarespace, you need the Advanced plan at $99/month — more than 3x the cost of Ghost Publisher at $29/month.

Additional Squarespace membership limitations:

• No free trial periods for memberships
• No content dripping (scheduled release)
• Cannot move members between pricing plans — they must cancel and re-subscribe
• Each pricing plan holds a maximum of 10 content pages
• Member site pages are not indexed in sitemaps (no SEO value)
• Client-side content gating — Squarespace states it “cannot prevent members from sharing direct links to protected files”

Ghost’s server-side gating means paywalled content literally doesn’t exist in the page source unless you’re authenticated. That’s a meaningful security difference for paid publishers.

SEO

Ghost

Full SEO toolkit built in:

• Auto-generated XML sitemap linked from robots.txt
• Schema.org structured data on every page
• Custom meta titles and descriptions per post
• Canonical URLs (auto-set, overridable)
• Open Graph and Twitter Card tags
• Redirect management and noindex controls
• Clean, semantic HTML with fast load times

Squarespace

Basic SEO present but with notable limitations:

• Auto-generated XML sitemaps and SSL included
• Editable meta titles and descriptions
• Clean URLs
• Cannot override canonical URLs (auto-generated only)
• No automated structured data (must be manually injected via code, and cannot be applied in bulk)
• Cannot customize Open Graph or Twitter Card tags beyond defaults
• No redirect management tool
• Template structure can restrict heading hierarchy and HTML semantics
• Member site pages are excluded from sitemaps entirely

For writers producing evergreen content that should rank long-term, Ghost’s SEO capabilities are significantly more complete.

Design

Squarespace

Squarespace’s design is its strongest feature:

• 120+ professionally designed, mobile-responsive templates
• Drag-and-drop visual builder — no coding required
• Blueprint AI generates a customized site from a text prompt
• Named a category leader for visual design quality
• Templates cover portfolios, restaurants, stores, services, and blogs

For visual impact and ease of setup, Squarespace templates are among the best in the website builder market. If you’re a photographer, artist, or creative professional, Squarespace’s design templates are excellent.

Ghost

Ghost uses a professional theme system:

• Themes available through the Ghost Marketplace and third-party providers
• Complete visual control through HTML, CSS, and Handlebars templating
• Custom themes on Publisher plan+ (Starter limited to one theme)
• Purpose-built for publishing: hero sections, post layouts, membership pages, dark mode

Our Rune theme shows what a purpose-built publishing theme looks like: visitor-controlled theme switcher, featured post highlights, and PWA support.

See Rune live demo →

Ghost’s theme ecosystem is smaller than Squarespace’s template library, but every Ghost theme is designed specifically for content publishing.

Pricing

Squarespace (as of February 2026)

Plan	Monthly (annual billing)	Membership Fee	Email Campaigns
Basic	$16/mo	N/A	Add-on ($8+/mo)
Core	$23/mo	5%	Add-on ($8+/mo)
Plus	$39/mo	1%	Add-on ($8+/mo)
Advanced	$99/mo	0%	Add-on ($8+/mo)

Email Campaigns is always a separate add-on. To match Ghost’s feature set (website + newsletter + 0% membership fees), you need Advanced at $99/month + Email Campaigns at $8+/month = $107+/month.

Ghost(Pro) (as of February 2026)

Plan	Monthly (annual billing)	Members	Staff
Starter	$15/mo	1,000	1
Publisher	$29/mo	1,000	3
Business	$199/mo	10,000	15

All plans: unlimited email sends included, SSL, CDN, backups, free custom domain, 0% membership fees.

The Math

For a blogger who wants a website, newsletters, and paid memberships with 0% platform fee:

• Squarespace: Advanced ($99/mo) + Email Campaigns ($8+/mo) = $107+/month
• Ghost Publisher: $29/month — everything included

Ghost costs 73% less for the same core publishing functionality.

For a simple blog without monetization:

• Squarespace Basic: $16/month
• Ghost Starter: $15/month

At the basic tier, pricing is similar. The gap opens when you add newsletters and memberships.

Feature Comparison

Feature	Ghost	Squarespace
Newsletter	Built-in, unlimited	Paid add-on ($8-68/mo)
Publish + email	One action	Manual two-step process
Paid memberships	0% fee (all plans)	5% (Core), 0% only at $99/mo
Content gating	Server-side (secure)	Client-side (can be bypassed)
SEO	Full toolkit	Basic (no canonical control, no schema)
Design templates	Publishing-focused themes	120+ templates (all categories)
Drag-and-drop	No	Yes
E-commerce	No	Built-in (all plans)
Visual builder	No	Blueprint AI
Self-hosting	Yes (MIT license)	No
Custom code	All plans	Core plan+ only

Who Should Choose Squarespace

• You’re a creative professional who needs a visually stunning portfolio
• You run a product-based business and need e-commerce as the primary function
• You want an all-in-one builder with drag-and-drop and no technical setup
• Your blog is secondary to your store, portfolio, or service pages
• You need appointment booking, restaurant menus, or service integrations

Who Should Choose Ghost

• Publishing content is your primary business
• You want newsletters and memberships without paid add-ons
• 0% membership fees matter to your revenue model
• SEO-driven organic traffic is part of your strategy
• You want a purpose-built publishing experience, not a general website builder
• Platform independence and open-source ownership matter

Your Publishing Foundation

Ghost themes are built specifically for publishing — not adapted from generic website templates. Every layout, feature, and page type is designed for content-first publications.

Our themes include dark mode, 46 language translations, membership pages, and multiple post layouts, starting at $69.

Browse Ghost themes →