Comparison
Specter vs the Obsidian Ghost Publish plugin
If you write in Obsidian and publish to Ghost, you’ve probably found the Obsidian Ghost Publish plugin (and its “Send to Ghost” forks). It’s a genuinely handy, free plugin — but it does one specific thing, and it’s worth understanding where it stops.
The short version
The Obsidian plugins are one-way: they push a note from Obsidian to Ghost. They don’t bring your existing Ghost posts back, and they don’t reconcile changes made on both sides. Specter is the other shape entirely: connect your Ghost blog in the browser, and your whole archive opens as clean, editable content you can run AI recipes across, review as a diff, and publish back — two-way, with conflict detection and a dry-run preview before anything changes.
Side by side
| Obsidian Ghost Publish plugin | Specter | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | One-way (Obsidian → Ghost) | Two-way (workspace ↔ Ghost) |
| Pulls your existing Ghost posts in | No | Yes — the whole archive |
| Conflict handling | None (last write wins) | Prompts when both sides changed |
| Dry-run preview | No | Yes |
| Where you work | Obsidian only | In the browser — nothing to install |
| AI across the whole blog | Only what Obsidian can do | Recipes across every post at once, reviewed as a diff |
| Price | Free | Browsing & review free; AI runs spend credits, 500 free to start |
| Platform | Anywhere Obsidian runs | Any browser |
When the plugin is the right call
If you only ever draft new posts inside Obsidian, never edit them again outside Ghost, and want something free that lives in your editor — the plugin is a perfectly good fit. It’s free and it’s simple.
When Specter is the right call
Specter is built for the other 80% of the workflow:
- You want your already-published posts in front of you as editable content, not just a one-way push.
- You edit posts in more than one place (a draft surface and the Ghost editor) and need changes on both sides to reconcile safely instead of silently overwriting.
- You want to point AI at your entire blog — rewrite intros, generate meta descriptions, translate, enforce a style guide across every post — as a recipe, then preview the diff and publish it all back.
- You’d rather not install or sync anything: connect in the browser and start.
Bottom line
The plugin is a one-way publish button. Specter is a two-way workspace that opens your whole Ghost blog to AI and then safely puts the reviewed changes back. If your needs are “push a draft from Obsidian,” the free plugin is great. If they’re “manage and AI-edit my whole Ghost blog with a diff in the loop,” that’s what Specter is for. Subscribe now — your workspace opens with 500 free credits.
Prefer to keep your vault on disk?
If you’d rather sync Ghost down to plain .md files inside your actual Obsidian vault and run the engine locally — nothing through our servers — the desktop and open-source edition does exactly that, with the same two-way sync, dry-run preview, and conflict handling.