Ghost vs Roots

Anyone can view code of Ghost since it's under a libre/open source license.

It only does a few things and it does them well. Unlike WordPress, with which you can build a universe, a blog or anything in between, Ghost is simple.

Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax designed so that it can be human-readable and easily converted to HTML. Markdown allows HTML code for complete flexibility.

Setting up a custom domain is effortless - fill the in the form and change DNS entries. Done.

You can download the source code and set it up yourself (just make sure your hosting provider supports node.js). Alternatively, you can use their Ghost(Pro) service to let them host it for you. Paid plans start at $10/mo.

Very easy setup with an official image from Docker. Just needs a custom config.json and you are pretty much good to go.

A built-in way to get and set up themes.

You can see markdown on one side of the pane and the result on the other, while writing.

Themes may be uploaded, as can logos and covers.

You can host your Ghost blog for free on Github Pages if you are OK with it being turned into a static site. You can use Buster to generate a static site from Ghost that can then be hosted on Github Pages.

There are lots of affordable hosting plans available for Ghost blogs.

Roots has heavy corporate sponsorship and is worked on very actively as a full time job. That means you can rely on it.

You can deploy to heroku, github pages, s3, etc. with a single command.

Roots supports dynamic content like jekyll for every compiler and language.

Roots is currently in the process examining how to leverage newer technologies to make Roots even better. You can see the new project on github: https://github.com/carrot/roots-mini

Here is the blog post explaining the next phase of Roots: https://medium.com/@jescalan/eaa10c75eb22#.uacjziaej

Here is the stack they're experimenting with:

- jade - for markup
- babel - for JS and JS transforms
- postcss - for CSS transforms
- webpack - as the core compiler

As this is a work in process, it just means the future of Roots continues to look great.

Not only does roots support a huge number of languages and compilers out of the box, it also allows you to insert custom compilers if you want. Fun fact, roots is the only static site generator that supports dogescript

Roots compiles files once for each extension, which allows for some advanced options if you get to that stage

Roots will precompile your templates into js, which makes it really smooth to work with client-side MV* frameworks.

Since roots is written in node, everything is compiled in parallel rather than in series, making it very quick.