Obsidian Publish vs Ghost
Both let you put your writing online, but they’re aimed at different jobs. If you’re choosing between them — or thinking about moving from one to the other — here’s the honest breakdown, plus a way to get the best of both.
What each one actually is
Obsidian Publish is an add-on that turns your Obsidian vault into a website. Its superpower is fidelity to your notes: backlinks, the graph, and your existing markdown, published more or less as-is. It’s ideal for digital gardens, wikis, and interconnected knowledge bases.
Ghost is a full publishing platform. Beyond a clean blog, it gives you newsletters, paid memberships and subscriptions, SEO controls, themes, and an Admin API. It’s built for people running a publication or a newsletter business, not just sharing notes.
Side by side
| Obsidian Publish | Ghost | |
|---|---|---|
| Best for | Digital gardens, wikis, linked notes | Blogs, newsletters, paid publications |
| Backlinks / graph | Yes (native) | No |
| Newsletters & email | No | Yes |
| Paid memberships | No | Yes |
| SEO & themes | Limited | Full control |
| Write in Obsidian | Native | Not by default — but see below |
| Pricing model | Per-site subscription | Hosted (Ghost Pro) or self-hosted (free) |
The honest takeaway
If your site is your notes — interlinked, exploratory, garden-style — Obsidian Publish is hard to beat and keeps you entirely inside Obsidian. If you want to grow an audience with a newsletter, take payments, and control SEO, Ghost is the stronger platform. That’s exactly why a lot of writers who start on Obsidian Publish eventually move to Ghost as their ambitions grow.
You don’t have to give up Obsidian
The usual catch with moving to Ghost is leaving your Obsidian writing flow behind for a browser editor. You don’t have to. Specter syncs your Ghost blog two-ways with a folder of local markdown — so you can keep writing in your Obsidian vault (or any editor), edit posts with AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, and have changes flow back to Ghost automatically.
So the real choice isn’t always “Obsidian or Ghost.” With Specter, it can be: write in Obsidian, publish on Ghost — and keep both in sync.