Ghost vs Piano DMP

Ghost is an open-source blog and newsletter platform for professional publishers, with tools for publishing, memberships, analytics, and editorial workflows. It runs on the web and supports custom domains, theme customization, SEO tools, multilingual content, and CSV export. Publishers can send multiple email newsletters and offer free or paid memberships with monthly or yearly billing. The editor supports galleries, GIFs, video, audio, products, files, and bookmarks. Integrations include Stripe, Zapier, Slack, YouTube, Google Analytics, and GitHub. Paid plans start at $18/mo (annual), with a 14-day trial and no permanent free plan. Starter costs $18 a month, billed yearly, and includes 1,000 members, one staff user, and a 5 MB file upload limit. Ghost charges a 0% fee on publication revenue; payment processor fees still apply. Ghost(Pro) includes security protections, while all plans include device verification and email-based two-factor authentication.

Piano DMP, also called Piano Audience, ingests and enhances visitor data for segmentation, analytics, targeting, and machine learning. It can combine anonymous profiles identified by browser or app ID with known profiles identified by email or another unique identifier. Segment Builder creates audiences from either group for targeting, analytics, and export, including look-alike segments. The content crawler uses NLP and LLM processing to support segmentation by entities, sentiment, and subject without manual tagging. Audience collects web and app activity, first-party system and campaign data, and second- and third-party sources through tags, server connections, or APIs; its APIs can ingest online and offline customer data. Segments can be used in Piano Activation and Composer, and selected attributes can be shared with Composer or exported to Piano Analytics. Integration Designer can transform and schedule exports to endpoints, files, Amazon S3, SFTP, or Google Cloud Storage. Piano says it does not track users across the Web, though it supports first-party behavior across an organization's domains. Pricing is available on request.