Ghost is described as 'The world's most popular modern publishing platform for creating a new media platform' and is a very popular Blog Publishing tool in the social & communications category. There are more than 100 alternatives to Ghost for a variety of platforms, including Web-based, Self-Hosted, Windows, Linux and Mac apps. The best Ghost alternative is WordPress, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Ghost are Drupal, Jekyll, Hugo and Blogger.
Create a website or blog with open-source software focused on accessibility, ease of use, performance, and security. Minimal setup, powerful growth features, and a large community supporting democratization of publishing.
Open source CMS with modular architecture, structured content support, and thousands of modules for extensibility. Offers custom themes, robust security, integration capabilities, starter distributions, active community support, and is free under the GPL license with no vendor lock-in.
Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory (representing the raw form of a website), runs it through and Liquid converters, and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server.
Hugo is a general-purpose website framework for generating static web pages. Hugo flexibly works with many formats and is ideal for blogs, docs, portfolios and much more.
Publish blogs with free hosting on a customizable platform offering a choice of templates, flexible layouts, custom or blogspot.com domains, built-in analytics and AdSense monetization, unlimited storage for posts and images, and secure Google service integration.
Publii allows to you build, modify and manage an unlimited number of sites from the same app with instant switching; no databases or other credentials to remember.
Medium is a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends. It’s designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world.
Privacy-first, no-nonsense, super-fast blogging. No trackers, no JavaScript, no stylesheets. Just your words.
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular web site software available.
Write.as lets you write and publish text instantly. Write a note for yourself to read later. Create a standalone article you can quickly broadcast on social media — or publish a full blog.
Grav is an easy to use, yet powerful, opensource CMS that requires no database. In a nutshell, installing Grav is a matter of unzipping the file. It is fast, has sophisticated caching, and a light footprint for optimal performance.
Substack is a newsletter service and blogging platform, making it an alternative to Medium, TinyLetter and WordPress blogs.
United States
South Africa
Wordpress is based on open source code, is more established in this field and has a much greater range of functionality, esp. though its community-driven plugin system. WP is more complicated also, but probably the "default" alternative, if there had to be one.