head to head · open source
Ghost vs lektor
Ghost has 55,658 GitHub stars, 12,130 forks, 182 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lektor has 3,949 stars, 320 forks, 251 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. Ghost leads on adoption by 1,309% (55,658 vs 3,949 stars). Ghost is written in TypeScript under MIT; lektor is written in Python under BSD-3-Clause. Ghost has attracted 22% as many forks as stars, lektor 8%. 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 | lektor | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 56K | ★ 3.9K |
| License | MIT | BSD-3-Clause |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-30 |
| Forks | ⑂ 12K | ⑂ 320 |
| 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 lektor if
- You want the lektor feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the BSD-3-Clause license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and lektor 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 lektor
Lektor [![CI/CD Badge]][CI/CD] [CI/CD Badge]: [CI/CD]: Lektor is a static website generator. It builds out an entire project from static files into many individual HTML pages and has a built in admin UI and minimal desktop app. To see how it works look at the top level example/ folder, which contains a showcase of the wide variety of Lektor's features. For a more complete example look at the lektor/lektor website repository, which contains the source code for the official Lektor website. How do I use this? For installation instructions head to the official documentation: Installation Quickstart Want to develop…
read the full lektor overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ghost or lektor more popular?
Ghost has 55,658 GitHub stars and lektor has 3,949. Ghost has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ghost and lektor free?
Both are open source. Ghost is licensed under MIT and lektor under BSD-3-Clause. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ghost and lektor?
Ghost is written in TypeScript and lektor in Python. 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 lektor?
Choose Ghost if you want the larger community (55,658 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose lektor if its feature set, stack or BSD-3-Clause licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.