head to head · open source
Ghost vs htmly
Ghost has 55,658 GitHub stars, 12,130 forks, 182 open issues and last shipped yesterday. htmly has 1,368 stars, 307 forks, 54 open issues and last shipped 9 months ago. Ghost leads on adoption by 3,969% (55,658 vs 1,368 stars). Ghost is written in TypeScript under MIT; htmly is written in PHP under GPL-2.0. Ghost has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, htmly 22%. Ghost was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (cms), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Ghost | htmly | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 56K | ★ 1.4K |
| License | MIT | GPL-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-01-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 307 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ghost if
- You weight community size — 56K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick htmly if
- You want the htmly feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and htmly fits your workflow better
About Ghost
Ghost.org • Forum • Docs • Contributing • Twitter [!NOTE] Love open source? We're hiring! Ghost is looking staff engineers to join the team and work with us full time The easiest way to get a production instance deployed is with our official Ghost(Pro) managed service. It takes about 2 minutes to launch a new site with worldwide CDN, backups, security and maintenance all done for you. For most people this ends up being the best value option because of how much time it saves — and 100% of revenue goes to the Ghost Foundation; funding the maintenance and further development of the project itself. So you’ll be…
read the full Ghost overview →
About htmly
HTMLy is an open source databaseless blogging platform prioritizes simplicity and speed written in PHP. It uses a unique algorithm to find or list any content based on date, type, category, tag, or author, and it's performance remain fast even if we have ten thousand of posts and hundreds of tags. Requirements HTMLy requires PHP 7.2 or greater, PHP Mbstring, PHP XML, PHP INTL, PHP GD, and PHP ZIP package for backup feature. Installations Install HTMLy using the source code: 1. Download the latest version from the Github repo 2. Upload and extract the zip file to your web server. You can upload it in the root…
read the full htmly overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ghost or htmly more popular?
Ghost has 55,658 GitHub stars and htmly has 1,368. Ghost has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ghost and htmly free?
Both are open source. Ghost is licensed under MIT and htmly under GPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ghost and htmly?
Ghost is written in TypeScript and htmly in PHP. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Ghost or htmly?
Choose Ghost if you want the larger community (55,658 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose htmly if its feature set, stack or GPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.