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 down to your vault, and they don’t reconcile changes made on both sides. Specter is two-way: it keeps a folder of local markdown and your Ghost blog continuously in sync, in both directions, with conflict detection and a preview before anything changes.
Side by side
| Obsidian Ghost Publish plugin | Specter | |
|---|---|---|
| Direction | One-way (Obsidian → Ghost) | Two-way (local ↔ Ghost) |
| Pulls your existing Ghost posts to disk | No | Yes |
| Conflict handling | None (last write wins) | Prompts when both sides changed |
| Dry-run preview | No | Yes |
| Lives in | Obsidian only | Any folder (Obsidian vault, plain .md, anything) |
| Edit with external tools / AI | Only what Obsidian can do | Any tool — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, scripts — on the whole folder |
| Price | Free | $49 one-time (free tier: 5 syncs/month) |
| Platform | Anywhere Obsidian runs | macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon) |
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 back as local files, not just a one-way push.
- You edit posts in more than one place (Obsidian and the Ghost editor) and need changes on both sides to reconcile safely instead of silently overwriting.
- You want to point AI tools at your entire blog — rewrite intros, generate meta descriptions, translate, enforce a style guide across every post — then preview the diff and sync it all back.
- You don’t want to be locked to Obsidian; any folder of markdown works.
Bottom line
The plugin is a one-way publish button. Specter is a two-way sync engine that turns your whole Ghost blog into local markdown any tool can edit — and then safely puts it 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 from local files,” that’s what Specter is for.