Ghost vs Poool

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.

Poool is a platform for media businesses to manage audience engagement, conversion, and retention. Its products cover visitor access, subscriptions, and on-site experiences. Access lets publishers use paywalls, registration walls, and cookie walls to guide visitors toward becoming leads, members, or subscribers. Subscribe supports creating offers and landing pages, setting up checkout journeys, collecting payments, and managing subscribers. Engage lets teams build on-site elements and set display conditions such as device, date, behavior, traffic source, or on-page interactions. Audience segmentation and A/B testing are also available for conversion journeys. Engage connects to GA4 and Piano analytics, while Zapier and webhooks can send form data to a customer’s own system. Poool says it does not retain data entered in Engage forms, so customers need their own collection or retrieval logic. Access requires Access.js and Audit.js, and publishers must pass consent information in its configuration and manage exclusions for existing subscribers. The paid service is available on Android, iOS, web, through an API, and as an extension. Pricing is on request.