Ghost
Open-source publishing with built-in memberships and email.
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform that ships with newsletter sending and paid memberships. Self-host on your own infrastructure or use Ghost Pro. Great fit for publishers who want to own their stack.
A SaaS product sends on behalf of its customers, so the deciding factors are tenant isolation, whether suppressions can be scoped rather than global, and whether support can answer why one specific account did not receive one specific email. Lifecycle automation and transactional sending usually need to coexist.
Against trial expiry notices, dunning, onboarding sequences, and per-tenant transactional mail, Ghost covers the suppressions API, scheduling, and webhook coverage, and does not cover multi-tenant support, event stream, and operating track record. Whether that gap matters depends on how central those are to the build.
- Multi-tenant: No
- Event stream: No
- Suppressions API: Yes
- Operating since: 2013
- Scheduling: Yes
- Best published rate per 1,000: Tiers not published in comparable form
- Deliverability: Depends on the SMTP provider configured (often Mailgun for Pro).
- Webhooks: Yes
- Starts at: Ghost Pro from $9/mo
Depends on the SMTP provider configured (often Mailgun for Pro).
Independent publishers who want to own their content and stack.
- › Full ownership in self-hosted mode
- › Memberships and Stripe integration
- › Beautiful default themes
- › Requires another SMTP provider for sending at volume
- › Heavier than Buttondown for plain newsletters
Features at a glance
| API | Yes |
| SMTP | Yes |
| SDKs | node |
| Webhooks | Yes |
| Templates | rich |
| React Email | No |
| Batch send | Yes |
| Scheduled send | Yes |
| Suppressions | Yes |
| Multi-tenant | No |
| Inbound parsing | No |
| Event stream | No |
| Idempotency keys | No |
| Dedicated IP | No |