Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Ghost to KeystoneJS
We are the Ghost to KeystoneJS migration experts
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Challenges with Ghost
Key pain points
Ghost is great until you need it to do anything more than “post blog, send newsletter, and beg readers for $5/month.” The moment you step outside that happy path, the whole thing starts feeling painfully bare-bones. There’s no real visual builder, no serious content modeling, and the plugin ecosystem is basically “good luck, build it yourself.”
Hosted plans get expensive fast once memberships grow, and self-hosting turns into a weekend-killing DevOps hobby nobody asked for. If you need anything beyond a clean blog with a paywall, Ghost will politely tap out and tell you to write less ambitious content.
Blogging-centric feature set
Ghost is brilliant for blogs… and very “meh” for anything else. If you need complex content models, workflows, or enterprise-level flexibility, you’ll hit a wall quickly.
Sparse plugin marketplace
There’s no real ecosystem to lean on. Anything outside the basics usually means rolling up your sleeves and writing code yourself.
No visual page builder
If you were hoping to drag, drop, and magically design pages, Ghost politely says “no.” Everything beyond basic layouts needs theme edits.
Custom coding required
Even simple enhancements often require Handlebars or API work. Non-technical teams will run out of road fast.
Limited content modeling
You get posts and pages, that’s pretty much the deal. Anything beyond that is a workaround, not a first-class feature.
Lacks multi-site support
Running multiple sites under one instance isn’t Ghost’s thing. If you’re scaling across regions or brands, you’ll feel boxed in.
Benefits of KeystoneJS
Key advantages
KeystoneJS is one of those tools that really clicks if your team thinks in code. It's a schema-driven, open-source headless CMS built on Node.js, and the developer experience is genuinely good. You define your content models in TypeScript, Keystone generates a GraphQL API and an admin UI for you, and you're off. There's very little magic or abstraction hiding what's happening under the hood, which we appreciate when building complex projects for clients.
The Prisma ORM integration is a real highlight. Automatic migration generation, type-safe database access, and support for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite mean you're not fighting your data layer. If you've ever had to wrangle a CMS into supporting a non-trivial relational content model, you'll understand why this matters. Keystone lets you express those relationships cleanly and query them with a proper GraphQL API.
The document field editor is also worth mentioning. It's one of the more thoughtful rich text implementations we've seen in a headless CMS. You can embed custom React components directly into the editor, which means content teams can work with your actual design system components rather than generic blocks. For teams that care about structured content, Keystone gives you real tools to enforce it.
Where Keystone really shines is in projects where the development team wants full ownership of the stack. There's no vendor lock-in, no proprietary query language, and no surprise pricing tiers. If you want a CMS that feels like a well-designed library rather than a platform, Keystone delivers on that promise.
Schema-as-code with full TypeScript support
Define your entire content model in TypeScript with strong type inference throughout. The schema drives everything from the database to the admin UI to the GraphQL API.
Automatic GraphQL API generation
Every content type you define automatically gets a full CRUD GraphQL API with filtering, pagination, and relationship resolution. No manual endpoint wiring needed.
Prisma-powered database layer
Built on Prisma ORM with automatic migration generation and type-safe queries. Supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite out of the box.
Flexible document field editor
The rich text editor supports custom embedded components that map to your design system, giving content editors structured authoring without sacrificing flexibility.
Granular access control
Fine-grained, field-level access control defined in code. You can write custom logic for create, read, update, and delete operations per field or per list.
Fully open source with no vendor lock-in
MIT licensed with no paid tiers or proprietary features gated behind a subscription. You own the entire stack and can host it wherever you want.
Common questions
Ghost to KeystoneJS migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Ghost to KeystoneJS migration
How much does Ghost CMS really cost beyond the "free" open source version?
Ghost is free to self-host, but "free" is misleading. You'll need a VPS ($5-$20/month minimum), someone to handle server maintenance, security updates, SSL certificates, and backups. That's either your time or a developer's hourly rate. Realistically, self-hosted Ghost costs $50-$200/month in labour and infrastructure for a small team. Ghost's managed hosting (Ghost Pro) starts at $9/month for the Starter plan (500 members), jumps to $25/month for Creator (1,000 members), and scales to $199/month for the Business tier. Once your membership list grows past a few thousand, costs climb fast. We've seen publishers hit $300+/month on Ghost Pro before questioning whether the platform still made sense for them.
Does Ghost need a developer to maintain it?
If you're self-hosting, yes. Ghost runs on Node.js and requires regular updates, database maintenance (MySQL), and server monitoring. Major version upgrades (Ghost 4 to 5, for example) can break themes and integrations, and someone technical needs to handle those. On Ghost Pro, maintenance is handled for you, but customisation still requires a developer. Custom themes use Handlebars templating, and anything beyond basic styling means editing theme files and redeploying. If your team is purely non-technical and you want to go beyond Ghost's default themes, you'll need developer support on an ongoing basis.
When should you migrate away from Ghost?
Ghost hits its ceiling when you need more than blog posts and newsletters. If you're trying to build landing pages, manage structured content across multiple page types, run an ecommerce store, or handle multi-language content, Ghost wasn't designed for any of that. We've migrated publishers off Ghost when they outgrew the "blog plus newsletter" model and needed a real content platform. The migration itself is painless. Ghost's JSON API makes content extraction simple, and posts map cleanly to markdown. The typical timeline is 4-6 weeks to move content into a headless CMS and rebuild the frontend.
Can Ghost handle a site with more than just a blog?
Barely. Ghost gives you two content types, posts and pages, and that's it. There's no custom content modelling, no relational fields, no structured data beyond tags and authors. You can hack together something with custom routes and internal tags, but it's brittle and hard to maintain. If you need case studies, service pages, team directories, or any structured content beyond articles, you're fighting the platform. Ghost is excellent at what it does. It just doesn't do very much. For sites that need a blog alongside other content types, a headless CMS gives you the flexibility Ghost intentionally leaves out.
What makes migrating from KeystoneJS difficult?
KeystoneJS stores data through Prisma, so the database layer is well-structured and easy to export. The harder part is replacing everything Keystone doesn't give you. Most Keystone projects have custom-built preview systems, publishing workflows, and access control logic that are tightly coupled to the Node.js backend. Rebuilding those features in a new CMS takes planning. We typically budget 4 to 8 weeks for a Keystone migration depending on how much custom infrastructure the team has built around it.
Why do teams move away from KeystoneJS?
Deployment complexity is the number one reason. Teams love Keystone during local development, then hit a wall getting it reliably into production. The Docker images can balloon past a gigabyte, the docs don't cover production hosting well, and there's no managed hosting option. The small community compounds this problem. When you hit an edge case, there are fewer people who've solved it before. Content editors also struggle with the admin UI, which lacks visual editing, live preview, and built-in publishing workflows that competing platforms ship by default.
How do we extract our content from KeystoneJS?
Since Keystone uses Prisma ORM, your content lives in standard PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite tables with clean schemas. You can export directly from the database using SQL dumps or Prisma's query API. The content model is defined in your TypeScript codebase, so mapping fields to a new CMS is straightforward. We write automated scripts that handle the data transformation, including resolving relationships between lists and migrating file references. For a project with 20 to 50 Keystone lists, extraction and transformation usually takes 1 to 2 weeks.
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