Ghost vs HashBrown CMS

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.

Strings, numbers and booleans are the basic building blocks for any site, but the fun really starts when you're building with arrays, structs, date pickers, media references, tags and dropdowns. HashBrown comes with 16 built-in field types, and gives you the power to combine them any way you please.

HashBrown is built on Node.js, sharing data models with the client side code. MongoDB is used to store site data, as a document database most accurately reflects the content of a complex website. This means that the content is always format consistent, and there is no incompatible serialisation and deserialisation happening between client and server.

Even though HashBrown is already a very flexible system out of the box, you may want to increase the flexibility even further to suit your needs. You may also want to add your own connection type, to allow publishing of your content to some obscure front-end that you wrote 15 years ago. It's all possible through the power of plugins.

With built-in support for languages, you can easily create a multilingual and multicultural website. There is no need for you to create your content trees multiple times for every language, nor is there a need for you to pay any particular attention to it when you create your fields. A simple "multilingual" switch is all you need, and you're good to go.

There are no fees, binary blobs, restrictive policies or asterisks.

If you've ever found yourself running multiple copies of your CMS for development, staging and production environments, dumping and restoring databases to migrate content between them, and pulling your hair out over how tedious and error prone that is, look no further. HashBrown is built from the ground up as a multi-site, multi-environment system.

Despite being a very sophisticated machine, HashBrown could run on your toaster. As HashBrown only needs resources when you're changing your website's content, it's mostly idle. This makes it the cheapest CMS for hosting purposes, as well as enables you to run it on that Raspberry Pi you've been neglecting.

By storing your website's content separately from the site itself, you are not only making it hard for attackers to bring down your site, you are also rendering the effort completely pointless. There is simply no database on your website from which to steal information and hold ransom. You can secure HashBrown behind a VPN and still have a publicly accessible site, consisting of statically generated HTML.

HashBrown won't tell you how to do your job. It is and always will be exclusively a content management system, and not a rendering engine. This means you can plug it into any web solution you want, whether you're running GoLang, PHP, Node.js, .NET, Ruby or Python on your end doesn't matter to HashBrown at all. You are free to develop with your preferred tools at all times.