From Ghost to Tina CMS

We are the Ghost to Tina CMS migration experts

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 Tina CMS

Key advantages

Tina CMS has a genuinely compelling core idea: real-time visual editing backed by Git. Instead of your content living in some opaque database, every change becomes a Git commit. For developer teams that already live in Git, this feels natural. The local development workflow is solid too — you can iterate on schema and content simultaneously, merge everything in a single commit, and keep your content pipeline tightly coupled with your codebase. That's a meaningful advantage over CMS platforms that treat content as a completely separate concern.

The inline editing experience is where Tina really shines. Content editors can see their changes in context on the actual live site, which dramatically reduces the feedback loop between "I changed something" and "here's what it looks like." For marketing teams and content creators who are tired of editing fields in a dashboard and then previewing on a separate URL, this is a breath of fresh air. It bridges the gap between developer-friendly and editor-friendly in a way that most headless CMS platforms don't even attempt.

Since going fully open-source under Apache 2.0 and being acquired by SSW, the self-hosting story has improved significantly. You can run your own backend with your own database and auth, which gives you more control than relying on TinaCloud. If you're building a Next.js or React-based project and want a CMS that lives close to your code, Tina is worth serious consideration. If you want help evaluating whether Tina fits your stack, or you're looking at alternatives, we're happy to chat.

Real-time visual editing

Editors can make changes directly on the live site with instant visual feedback. This is genuinely one of the best inline editing experiences in the headless CMS space.

Git-backed content workflow

Every content change becomes a Git commit, so your content versioning, branching, and collaboration all flow through the same tools your developers already use.

Schema defined in code

Content models are defined in your codebase alongside your components, keeping your content structure and frontend tightly aligned and version-controlled.

Strong local development experience

You can develop locally with full CMS functionality, iterate on schema and content together, and push everything in a single commit. No cloud dependency during development.

Markdown and MDX support

Tina works natively with markdown and MDX files, making it a natural fit for documentation sites, blogs, and any project that already uses file-based content.

Fully open-source and self-hostable

The entire backend is open-source under Apache 2.0. You can self-host with your own database, auth, and Git provider, giving you full control over your content infrastructure.