Open-source Substack alternatives

Ghost is a publishing platform for independent writers and media businesses. It handles blogging, newsletters, memberships and subscriptions in one product, so a creator can publish articles, email them to subscribers and charge for access without stitching several tools together.

The project is written in JavaScript and TypeScript on Node.js. The official way to get a production site running is the Ghost(Pro) managed service, which launches a site with a worldwide CDN, backups, security and maintenance handled for you, and the maintainers state that all revenue from it funds the nonprofit Ghost Foundation. If you prefer to run your own instance, a CLI tool installs Ghost locally in about a minute or on a server with automatic SSL through Let's Encrypt.

Ghost is MIT licensed and comes with official documentation, a forum and an active contributor community. It suits journalists, bloggers and publishers who want a focused publishing and membership tool rather than a general-purpose CMS.

WriteFreely is a publishing platform for writers, kept deliberately minimal. It can be used to start a blog, share knowledge inside an organization, or build a community around writing, with a plain, auto-saving editor that keeps the focus on the text and a clean reading layout once posts are published.

Posts are written in Markdown, organized with hashtags, and can be saved as drafts. A single account can publish to multiple blogs, which lets writers keep separate pen names without publicly revealing the link between them, and normal posts can be pinned to become static pages. Blogs federate through ActivityPub with other WriteFreely, Plume and compatible servers, OAuth 2.0 helps bring members from existing platforms, and the interface is localized in over 20 languages including right-to-left scripts.

WriteFreely deploys as a static binary on any platform that Go supports, using built-in SQLite or an external MySQL or MariaDB database, and is licensed under AGPL-3.0. People who prefer not to run it can use Write.as, the hosted service from the team behind the project, which handles installation, backups and upgrades.

Markdown Ninja is a Markdown-first content management system for bloggers, minimalists and startups. It lets you publish websites, blogs, documentation sites and newsletters from Markdown content, and it positions itself as the simple alternative to hacking together a static site generator, a theme, a CI/CD pipeline and a cloud platform. The project names Medium, Mailchimp and Substack as the services it replaces.

According to the README, publishing a site takes one command and getting started takes about two minutes. Topics include headless CMS, JAMstack and email. Usage documentation is at docs.markdown.ninja, while a dev folder in the repository covers development. There is also a hosted service at markdown.ninja, and the README invites you to try it for free.

The code is written in Go and licensed under AGPL-3.0, with documentation and assets under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. The copyright holder is Arcane Services, which offers other licensing terms on request. Security issues should be reported through the contact page on the project site.