As a blogger or content creator, choosing the right platform to create and publish your content can be a daunting task.
Two of the most popular platforms for bloggers and content creators are Medium and Ghost.
Both platforms offer various features to suit different users' needs.
In this article, we compare the differences between Medium and Ghost across different categories, including usability, cost, features, and more.
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Medium vs Ghost Usability
Medium is a user-friendly platform, designed to enable users to focus solely on their content. It has a minimalist interface that makes it easy to use, and it does not require much technical knowledge to create and publish content.
Medium has a clean editor tool, which is perfect for users to create simple blog posts. However, Medium's editors may not be robust enough for those looking to create more complex articles with extensive formatting, graphics or custom HTML.
Ghost, on the other hand, is also user-friendly with a clean and simple interface.
However, Ghost has evolved to be more flexible with an editor that offers a more powerful set of tools.
Users can create content through the visual editor or straight HTML for even more control over the layout of the article.
Medium vs Ghost Pricing
- Medium Pricing
Medium offers two pricing tiers – Free and $5/month. The free plan offers essential features like publishing, editing, user engagement and comment moderation.
The second tier offers more advanced features like customization of domains, the ability to subscribe to publications directly, and the ability to add images, audio, and video.
- Ghost Pricing
Meanwhile, Ghost offers a free and a self-hosted plan that start at $29/month.
The self-hosted plan provides features like custom domain, analytics, and email newsletters among others.
However, Ghost is quite flexible with its pricing, as it offers a $199/year plan for a custom, self-hosted installation of their software.
Medium vs Ghost Features
- Medium Features
Medium provides users access to a vast audience of readers, gaining more visibility than a self-hosted platform.
It's an excellent platform to start growing your audience and finding new readers.
Medium boasts of a clean design with a reading experience optimized for mobile devices, making it perfect for reading on the go.
- Ghost Features
Ghost provides users with more flexibility and control over their content.
Ghost offers a more robust editor with more features for formatting and designing your articles.
This added flexibility means that you can tailor your content to meet your needs precisely.
Ghost excels in delivering fast page load times, which means your audience will receive an excellent reading experience without any lag or downtime.
SEO & Analytics
Medium is not the best platform when it comes to SEO optimization. Medium's audience relies on the in-house search feature, and it's a very closed platform with limited opportunities for external promotion.
While Medium does offer some SEO-friendly features like the ability to add meta descriptions and tags, the platform does not provide much control for on-page content optimization.
In contrast, Ghost has a range of SEO tools to improve the visibility and rankings of your blog posts.
Ghost's SEO tools include custom domain name, meta description, tags, and other SEO-friendly features.
One of the advantages of being self-hosted is that you can access all your website's analytics data, which Ghost tracks effectively.
It's also easy to connect Ghost to Google Analytics, allowing more in-depth analysis of the website's data.
Medium or Ghost?
When it comes down to choosing between them, it depends on your requirements and how much control you want over your content.
If you prioritize visibility over customizations, then Medium is the best choice.
If you require more flexibility and control or care more about SEO, analytics and brand control, Ghost is the top pick.
Wrapping Up
Both Medium and Ghost are excellent platforms for bloggers and content creators, but they have differences in their features and functionalities.
Medium offers a minimalist interface that focuses solely on your content and features an extensive network to gain more readers.
Meanwhile, Ghost provides more flexibility and control over your content, powerful features like SEO optimization, analytics, and customization.
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