Case Study
View Case StudyTray.ai
Migrating hundreds of thousands of pages, re-platforming and extending for the leading composable AI integration platform
From Prismic to Ghost
We are the Prismic to Ghost migration experts
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Challenges with Prismic
Key pain points
We have a long history with Prismic, and at one point, we were agency partners, so count us as biased. However, if you're anything like us, we've had an absolutely terrible experience with Prismic.
They've historically changed their API ad hoc, resulting in many broken websites, which is especially bad for an agency. They've dumped infrastructure on the community, resulting in expensive migration bills and client dissatisfaction and they've updated their system with no way to migrate other than to rebuild your entire website for literally years.
If you're having a hell of a time, we can help you move away and do it without breakages. We've had to migrate quite a few folks and we have a standardised process that lets us migrate images, videos, text and content structure to the platform of your choice.
Dependency on third-party hosting
You don’t control the infrastructure, Prismic does. So you’re tied to their uptime, limits, and CDN behaviour.
Limited native integrations
Most serious integrations require extra tooling or custom code because Prismic’s built-in ecosystem is pretty thin.
Steep learning curve
Slices, custom types, and the editor workflow take time to understand, especially for teams new to component-driven CMS structures.
Lack of built-in versioning
There’s no full document history or global rollback, meaning mistakes are harder to recover from without workarounds.
Escalating pricing model
Costs jump fast as you add seats, locales, or repositories, making it expensive to scale a growing content team.
Limited out-of-box features
Beyond basic content creation, most advanced needs require custom development, external tools, or plugins.
Benefits of Ghost
Key advantages
Ghost is genuinely great if all you want is a fast, clean, no-nonsense blogging machine. It keeps things beautifully simple: a slick Markdown editor, zero clutter, and performance scores so good they’ll make WordPress users cry into their PHP logs. If your plan is “just publish content,” Ghost actually gets out of your way and lets you do that.
The built-in memberships and payments system is also a win. You can slap a paywall on your content, charge people to read your mediocre hot takes, and do it all without duct-taping together 12 plugins. For solo creators, small publications, and anyone who wants a simple writing-first experience, Ghost delivers exactly what it promises and nothing you didn’t ask for.
Lightweight JSON API
Ghost’s API is fast, predictable, and doesn’t make you fight a schema just to fetch a title. It’s perfect for JAMStack setups where you want speed without ceremony. Pull content, ship pages, move on with your life.
Intuitive Markdown editor
If you enjoy writing without 19 toolbars screaming at you, Ghost’s Markdown editor is bliss. Clean, distraction-free, and actually enjoyable to use.
Built-in membership system
Memberships, paywalls, and subscriptions come built in, no plugin Frankenstein required. Hook up Stripe and you’re basically running your own mini-Substack in minutes.
SEO-friendly defaults
Ghost ships with fast performance, clean URLs, structured data, and proper metadata, without needing an SEO plugin the size of a small country. Most sites hit solid scores straight out of the box.
Native subscription support
You don’t need 3 SaaS tools duct-taped together to run a newsletter. Ghost handles email delivery, subscriber lists, and automated posts natively.
Easy theme customization
Themes are simple to tweak thanks to Ghost’s handlebars-based templates. If you know basic HTML/CSS, you can make it look exactly how you want without fighting a visual builder from 2011.
Common questions
Prismic to Ghost migration FAQs
Answers to the most common questions about Prismic to Ghost migration
How much does Prismic cost?
Prismic has a free plan for 1 user with limited API calls. The Starter plan is $7/month per user for small teams. The Small plan is $150/month for up to 25 users with more locales and API bandwidth. Medium is $500/month. Large and Enterprise plans go higher. The pricing jumps are significant once you need multiple locales or repositories. We've had clients hit the ceiling on the Small plan faster than expected because of how Prismic counts API calls and custom types.
What are the best Prismic alternatives?
Sanity is the alternative we recommend most. It gives you better content modelling, real-time collaboration, and a query language (GROQ) that's far more flexible than Prismic's API. Contentful is another option with a bigger ecosystem, though pricing is steeper. If you liked Prismic's Slices concept, Sanity's block-based content approach works similarly but with more depth. We've migrated multiple former Prismic agency partners to Sanity, and the developer experience improvement is always the first thing they mention.
Can I migrate from Prismic to another CMS?
Yes. We've migrated quite a few Prismic projects, mostly to Sanity. We export your custom types, documents, and media through Prismic's API, then restructure everything for the target platform. Prismic's Slice-based content maps well to Sanity's portable text and block system. Typical migrations take 3-5 weeks. We keep your existing Prismic site live throughout, so there's no downtime. The biggest challenge is usually handling Prismic's media library, since images need to be moved to a new CDN.
Is Prismic a good CMS for developers?
It's decent for simple projects. The Slice Machine tooling is clever and the TypeScript support has improved. But Prismic's API has limitations that frustrate developers on bigger projects. You can't do complex queries, filtering is basic, and the content modelling is shallow compared to Sanity or Contentful. The bigger issue is Prismic's track record of breaking API changes and infrastructure shifts that have caused production outages. Developers who need reliability and deep customization are better served elsewhere.
Why are teams leaving Prismic?
The main reasons we hear are API instability, limited content modelling depth, and pricing that doesn't match the feature set. Prismic has a history of making breaking changes to their API and infrastructure without adequate migration paths. One major version change left agencies (including us, when we were partners) with broken client sites and expensive rebuild bills. Teams also outgrow the content modelling quickly. Once you need complex relationships between content types, Prismic's flat structure becomes a bottleneck.
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.
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