Podia and Ghost are both solid tools for sharing your blog content and building a website. Both allow you to send newsletters, offer membership subscriptions, and grow an audience with email sign up forms. 

But Ghost is heavily focused on blogging, paid newsletters, and written content, and it’s not set up for selling digital products and courses. Plus, the email newsletter feature is pretty straightforward so it’s difficult to build sales funnels and run advanced automations. 

Podia is an all-in-one option where your website, blog, products, email, customers, and subscribers are all connected. You don’t have to add any extra tools (unless you want to), and you have more ways to earn money from your work right out of the box. 

Let’s take a closer look at the features, plans, and pricing for Podia and Ghost so you can choose the best platform for you. 

All prices and features are accurate at the time of writing, but they may change over time.

Plans and Pricing for Podia and Ghost

Podia plans and pricing: 

Podia has a 30-day free trial with access to every feature. When you’re ready to upgrade, you’ll start by choosing a base plan:

• Mover: $39/month or $33/month when paid annually (5% transaction fee): Includes your website, blog, landing pages, and customer chat messaging plus unlimited digital products, unlimited online courses, and our easier-than-drag-and-drop online course builder.

• Shaker: $89/month or $75/month when paid annually: Includes everything in Mover plus affiliates. There are no transaction fees on the Shaker plan.

All plans include your first 100 email subscribers for free. You can add more subscribers for an additional fee based on the size of your list.

There are no email send limits with Podia, so you can send as many messages as you like on all plans. All plans include tagging, automations, segmenting, templates, email scheduling, and email campaigns.

No matter your list size, you’ll have everything you need for building a welcome sequence, following up after delivering a lead magnet, or creating simple sales funnels to earn money on autopilot. 

And because Podia is an all-in-one option, your website, blog, email, digital products, courses, affiliates, and customers are all in one place. 

Ghost plans and pricing:

Ghost is free and open-source software, so you can self-host it on your own server if you want. If you’ve got the technical experience, this can be a good option, but if managing a server makes your head spin (like me!), then you’ll probably want to use one of their managed plans. 

The rest of this article talks about the managed version of Ghost where you pay a monthly or annual fee and they take care of the techie stuff for you.

With Ghost’s managed hosting, everything is set up for you. Ghost does not have a free managed plan, and the paid plans increase in price as your audience grows. 

Ghost defines subscribers as anyone with a free or paid account on your site using the membership/subscription feature, and the lowest-tiered Starter plan starts at $11/month for 500 members. 

After you have 1000 members, you’re only eligible for the Creator plan and above, which starts at $31/month for 1000 members. 

Here’s a closer look at Ghost’s managed hosting plans and prices: 

• Starter: $11/month for up to 500 members, $19/month for up to 1,000 members

• Creator: $31/month for up to 1,000 members

• Team: $63/month for up to 1,000 members

• Business: $249/month for up to 10,000 members

As you move up through the plan tiers, you get more staff user seats, distinct newsletters, and subscription pricing options. You can also upload larger-sized files – Ghost’s Starter plan caps each file at 5 MB while the Business plan lets you upload files as large as 1 GB.

That said, Ghost is primarily for your website, blog, and newsletter. If you want other features like courses and products, you’ll need to connect and pay for additional tools. 

Blogging and websites with Podia and Ghost

Both Podia and Ghost let you set up multimedia blogs with unlimited articles. You can embed videos, audio files, and other media, and you can add design features like links, bulleted lists, buttons, and different font styles. 

Both platforms have SEO features so you can customize the URL, SEO title, and meta description for your articles, and you can choose if you want to display the featured image, author, comments, and publish date. 

And both platforms also allow you to build a full website, but a key difference is that Podia is already connected to your digital products. This means you can set up landing pages and sales pages with just a few clicks and add product features anywhere you want on your website. 

If you use Podia Email, your email list is also automatically connected with your website and blog, so subscribers will instantly be added to your Podia contact list when they join. If they purchase a product in the future, that data will be automatically added to their subscriber profile so you can see all their information in one place.

Email marketing and newsletters

Both Podia and Ghost make it easy to send newsletters to your audience. 

Ghost has email marketing built in, and the lowest tier Ghost plan comes with up to 500 subscribers. You can send unlimited emails on all plans, and to send a newsletter in Ghost, all you need to do is publish a blog post. You can decide if it should be displayed on your blog, sent to your email list, or both. 

Podia also has email marketing built in. Podia includes 100 subscribers for free, and you can add up to 500 subscribers for $9/month. You can send unlimited emails on all plans, and just like Ghost, you can send newly published blog posts to your email list in just a click. 

But a perk of using Podia is that you also get advanced campaigns, automations, segmentation, and triggers to work with. You can build sales funnels that direct people to your products, build customized welcome sequences, and create unlimited email opt-in pages. All of these features are included on all plans, so you get a full suite of email marketing tools at your disposal no matter how big your list is. 

You can also use lead magnets to grow your list with both Ghost and Podia. Ghost gives you one type of lead magnet – you can add a paywall or subscription barrier to your blog post, and the reader has to sign up to read the rest of your article. You can also add files to the “subscriber only” portion of your post as a lead magnet workaround. 

Podia has a traditional lead magnet setup where you can have a file automatically delivered to the new subscriber's email address. All you need to do is add the file as a free digital download product and set the delivery to “free email delivery”, and your lead magnet will be ready to roll. 

You can give away a video, file download, audio clip, exclusive content, or even a full free course. Plus, Podia automatically keeps track of who subscribed through each lead magnet so you can create custom welcome sequences and sales funnels depending on their interests. 

Ultimately, both Podia and Ghost make it easy to send email newsletters to your audience, but Ghost is best for simple newsletters while Podia is better for full-scale email marketing with newsletters, email campaigns, automations, welcome sequences, and audience tagging. 

Selling digital products

Ghost is not designed for selling digital products – it’s only set up for blogging, newsletters, and paid subscriptions to those newsletters. If you have products to sell, you’ll need to link to your courses or ebooks on other platforms.

Podia, on the other hand, has digital products and checkout built in. You don’t need to connect with another platform to sell your courses, downloads, coaching, or other products. Podia is a better fit for people who want to run their blog, website, and newsletter in the same place where they build and sell products. 

If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that makes growing your email newsletter and running your online business simple, we built Podia just for you.

Try Podia free for 30 days. We can't wait to see what you make.