Initially, I thought the built-in developer community would be a significant advantage for blog discovery, but the drawbacks overshadow this one benefit.
I’ve discovered that Hashnode lacks several key features that are crucial to me, making it not a good fit as my blogging platform.
As a result, I find myself reverting to Ghost, my blog before I stopped blogging last year. I have to manually migrate my previously written posts though, since Hashnode’s exported JSON file is incompatible with Ghost. Fortunately, I was still just starting, so it wasn’t that many yet.
There isn’t also a straightforward way to move posts from one Hashnode blog to another, which essentially soft locks my content.
Unlike Hashnode, Ghost’s open-source nature allows for a seamless transition of my content to any host.
The platform also lacks customization options, offering only three preset layout formats, and a little bit of branding and CSS customizations, but no built-in distinct themes for you.
If you truly want to customize it, you need to use a headless CMS, which is free only for personal blogs.
Interestingly, a personal blog can be converted into a team blog but not vice versa, leading to additional subscription costs if a headless CMS is needed for a team blog.
Adding to the frustration, Hashnode does not offer any kind of refund for an annual subscription, even if the cancellation request is made within a few weeks of subscribing.
If you are a developer and all you need is a place to write a free blog and care more about discovery than any other features, then I would still recommend Hashnode.
As for me, I’m very delighted to continue my blogging journey here on Ghost.
2 responses to “Hashnode vs. Ghost”
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Thank you!