Ghost vs WordPress for a paid newsletter

Ghost's add-on bill is for email, so it follows the size of your list. WordPress's membership plugins charge a share of each payment, a yearly license or both, so their fees grow with revenue, and some need a sending plan on top. The other split is who runs the server: you on a VPS with Ghost, DreamHost on DreamPress. Memory is close: on one 4 GB test server of ours (not a DreamHost server) on October 20, 2026, Ghost 6.71 idled at 596 MiB and WordPress 7.1.3 with its plugins at 519 MiB.

What each one needs for a paid newsletter

Ghost covers a paid newsletter in one app. WordPress needs a plugin for the members, and sometimes a second one for sending.

If the newsletter is the whole job, Ghost's one app covers it. WordPress is the better fit when the newsletter shares a site with other work built from themes and plugins.

What each route adds to the bill

Hosting isn't in this table, since both plans are priced at the end of the page. We assume each paying reader pays $10 a month, 5% of the list pays, and every reader gets one issue a week, the same assumptions as our Substack guide. Prices are in US dollars a month, read October 19 and 20, 2026.

Ghost connects to your own Stripe account and takes nothing from payments, so its bill tracks the emails you send. Mailgun's free plan sends 100 emails a day, which won't carry a weekly issue to 2,000 readers. Its extra emails are priced from $1.10 per 1,000, so read the 40,000-reader figure as the lowest it could be.

The plugins' payment fees track revenue instead. Jetpack's Growth plan cuts its newsletter fee to 2%, and with no plan the fee is 10%, which would come to $100, $500 and $2,000 a month at these sizes. Jetpack sends the newsletter itself, so it needs no separate sending plan. PMPro's license pays for itself once you pass $2,079 a month in revenue, about 208 paying readers at $10, but PMPro doesn't send the newsletter. Its makers point you to MailPoet, whose pricing page sizes its plans by subscriber count. A 2,000-reader list lands on the 2,500 tier, because the one below stops at 1,500.

You'll pay less for Ghost's add-ons at every size we priced. Between the two WordPress routes, Jetpack is cheaper at 2,000 and 10,000 readers, and PMPro with MailPoet wins at 40,000, once the license has replaced the 2% fee. DreamPress's own price covers the managed server, daily backups and 1-click staging, and you won't find any of that in these numbers.

What each one used on our test server

Ghost ran from its official Docker files, which start Ghost, a MySQL database and the Caddy web server. WordPress ran from Docker's example files with Paid Memberships Pro and MailPoet active and nothing configured. The VM had 2 vCPU and 3,904 MB of memory, close to our Stack 4 plan's 2 vCPU and 4 GB.

MySQL took most of the memory on each side, and since both ran MySQL 8.0, it's the apps and Caddy that make up most of the 77 MiB gap. The WordPress figure is an idle reading, since we didn't run a send on it. Ghost got a harder test: in the same day's run for our guide to leaving Substack, it imported 40,000 members on this VM and passed a newsletter for all of them to a local Mailgun stand-in, and its peaks were about 370 MiB for Ghost and 520 MiB for MySQL.

Ghost asks for at least 1 GB, so Stack 4 fits one publication of that size. DreamHost labels Stack 4 For lightweight apps and solo projects and Stack 8 For apps running in production. We'd put a paid newsletter on Stack 8, because its 8 GB leaves room for a second publication, and several Ghost sites can share one server. On DreamPress you size the plan by monthly visits instead. DreamPress 1 covers one site and 40k visits a month.

Paid Memberships Pro wouldn't install by name. WP-CLI answered The 'paid-memberships-pro' plugin could not be found, because the plugin was closed on WordPress.org on October 17, 2024 at its author's request. You'll download it from its own site or GitHub, which is where we got 3.8.9.

Its free Stripe connection adds a 2% application fee to each payment, apart from Stripe accounts in a few countries its code exempts. The gateway's code carries a settings note that the free integration includes an additional 2% fee for payment processing. This fee is removed by activating a premium PMPro license. The copy we installed says the same in a notice: With the release of PMPro v3.5, we now charge all sites the same 2% application fee. The Standard license costs $499 a year.

Who keeps it running

A VPS gives you full root access. DreamHost's Help Center notes a VPS comes without automated backups, so setting them up is part of running it. Ghost ships more than one release a week. On a Ghost-CLI install, the method Ghost's Ubuntu guide uses, an update is one command, ghost update, and ghost update --rollback undoes one that goes wrong. On Ghost's Docker install it takes three:

git pull
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Our walkthrough shows how to install Ghost on your server, including Mailgun's DNS records.

On DreamPress the plugins are the part you keep current, and they move fast. MailPoet already had 5.43.0 waiting on the day we installed 5.42.0. If you're unsure a managed plan is worth it, we cover whether you need managed WordPress separately.

Sending the newsletter

Don't send an issue through a DreamHost mailbox. Professional Email comes with DreamPress, Managed VPS and Dedicated plans, and DreamHost's Help Center confirms a VPS doesn't include it. On DreamPress, DreamHost's Help Center says each address is capped at 100 recipients an hour, and the cap can't be raised. Ghost builds each issue on your server and hands it to Mailgun, the only bulk sender Ghost supports, and its docs say SMTP cannot be used for newsletters. Sign-in and signup emails can go through any SMTP service, Mailgun included. On WordPress, Jetpack sends the newsletter for you once it's connected to a WordPress.com account, and MailPoet uses its own Sending Service or an outside sender. MailPoet's pricing page calls sending through your web host a bad idea.

Which one fits your newsletter

How we measured

DreamHost ran both stacks on October 20, 2026, on a local test VM under Colima on an Apple-silicon Mac. It ran Ubuntu 24.04 on arm64 with 2 vCPU and 3,904 MB of memory. That's not a DreamHost server: DreamHost's VPS plans list AMD EPYC processors, which are x86 chips. Ghost 6.71.0 ran from Ghost's compose file with MySQL 8.0.44 and Caddy 2.10.2, in the same session as the Substack guide's run. WordPress 7.1.3 ran on PHP 8.3.35 and Apache with MySQL 8.0, and MailPoet 5.42.0 came from WordPress.org. We didn't connect a Stripe, Mailgun or MailPoet account. Memory is the median of 12 docker stats readings 5 seconds apart, taken 2 and 10 minutes after start.

The run covers idle memory, disk and the PMPro install and fee text. It doesn't time the setup or an update. It doesn't include a paid signup, a WordPress newsletter send, or Jetpack, which needs a WordPress.com account. Page speed and DreamPress itself are outside it too. We read the fee in the plugin's code and didn't open its Stripe settings screen. MailPoet's prices come from its pricing page's own subscriber selector, read October 20.

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