What else you could use

01The short answer

Every row here is a fact each project states about itself, or one measured against a running install. Where a number would depend on how somebody set the thing up, the cell says so instead of inventing an average.

Read it twice. The first pass says what each one is; the second says what it costs. Tens of thousands of plugins is why WordPress can do anything, and why it needs patching on a schedule. No plugin system is why Quire Ink has nothing to patch, and why it will never grow the feature you were hoping to bolt on. Hosted means Substack, Medium and the hosted tiers of the rest. The rows are short on purpose; the sections below are where the qualifications live.

02WordPress

It runs a large share of the web, it has an answer for every requirement, and somebody near you already knows it. None of that is in dispute.

What you take on with it is a stack that has to be kept current: PHP, a database server, the core, the theme, and every plugin, each of which runs with the same privileges as the software itself. Cloudflare, announcing a competitor and therefore not a neutral party, put the share of WordPress security problems that originate in plugins at 96%. The number is theirs; the shape of it will surprise nobody who has run a WordPress site for a decade.

Choose WordPress if you need a shop, memberships, custom post types, several authors with different powers, or a specific plugin that exists nowhere else. That is a genuine list and it is not short.

Choose Quire Ink if what you actually wanted was a blog, and the maintenance is the part you resent. Bring the archive with you: the importer reads a WordPress export and turns every post into Markdown, sweeping out shortcodes that meant nothing outside their old plugin.

03EmDash

Cloudflare's own CMS, open sourced in April 2026 under MIT, built in TypeScript on Astro, and pitched as the spiritual successor to WordPress. It is the most interesting thing to happen to this category in years, and it is worth being precise about.

Its central idea is good: if plugins are where the security problems live, run each one in its own isolate and hand it only the capabilities its manifest declares. A plugin that says read:content and email:send can do those two things and nothing else. That is a real answer to a real problem, and it is more honest than another decade of asking people to patch faster.

The catch drew most of the criticism the launch received, including from WordPress's own founder: the isolate that makes a plugin safe is a Cloudflare Worker. Self-host EmDash on Node and you are running the same code without the guarantee that was the reason to pick it. The parts that are strongest are the parts that are theirs.

Quire Ink answers the same question by removing it. There is no plugin system, so there is no sandbox to build and no runtime that has to be present for one to be safe. What you give up is extensibility, which is a real loss and is stated plainly in the table above. What you get is a blog that runs anywhere Bun runs, with no vendor anywhere in the path, and that keeps running there if any company changes its mind.

Choose EmDash if you are already on Cloudflare, you want an ecosystem to grow around your site, you need several content types rather than posts and pages, or you like being early to something with a large company behind it.

Choose Quire Ink if you want the thing to be finished rather than promising, you would rather own your machine than rent an edge, and a blog is genuinely what you are building. On the agent question the two projects agree, and this one got there first: an MCP server, content served as Markdown to anything that asks for it, and skills that ship in the repository so an assistant that has just cloned it already knows how to install a blog and move an old one in.

04Ghost

The closest neighbour: open source, written for people who publish, with a newsletter and paid subscriptions built in rather than bolted on.

Ghost self-hosts on Node with a database server beside it, and there is a hosted tier the project would prefer to sell you, which is how the work is funded. If you want to charge readers, it has years of that behind it and Quire Ink has none of it.

Choose Ghost if paid subscriptions are the point, or you want somebody else to run the server and are happy to pay them monthly.

Choose Quire Ink if you want one process and two files instead of a runtime and a database, a reading page in the low hundreds of kilobytes, and every visual decision available as a setting rather than as a theme you have to edit and redeploy.

05A hosted platform

Substack, Medium, and the hosted tiers of everything above. Nothing to install, nothing to patch, and a real answer for most people.

The trade is the audience. Your readers are on their list as much as yours, their recommendation engine decides who else sees you, and the terms can change without asking. Exports exist and you should take one; a platform that closes takes the reading experience with it either way.

Choose a platform if you want to write today and never think about a server, or their discovery is bringing you readers you would not otherwise have.

Choose Quire Ink if you mean to keep this for years. Your writing is Markdown in two SQLite files on a disk you rent, one button downloads all of it, and there is no account anywhere in the path that can be suspended. Substack and Medium exports both import here.

06A static site generator

Hugo, Eleventy, Astro and the rest produce a fast site from files in git, which is exactly right for some people and quietly wrong for others.

The difference is not speed, because both approaches end at fast HTML. It is what happens when you want to fix a typo from a phone, or schedule something for Tuesday, or see which posts people are reading, or let someone comment. A generator answers all of that with more moving parts: a build, a deploy, and a third-party service per feature.

Choose a generator if you like your content in git, your site is mostly not a blog, or you enjoy assembling the pieces.

Choose Quire Ink if you want a real admin: write, upload a photo, schedule, publish, search, comments, a newsletter and private analytics, from a laptop or a phone, with no rebuild and nothing to deploy.

07Where this is the wrong answer

A comparison that ends with the author's own software winning every row is an advertisement. These are the cases where it loses, and none of them is on a roadmap.

• A newsroom. Roles, approvals, an editorial queue, several writers with different powers. Quire Ink has one owner, deliberately.
• A shop. There is no commerce, and nowhere to add it.
• Paid subscriptions. The newsletter sends to your own subscribers over your own SMTP. It does not take money.
• Many sites in one install. One process serves one blog. Ten blogs are ten processes, which is a real answer on one small server, but it is not multi-site.
• An ecosystem. No plugins, no marketplace, no themes to buy. If the feature is not in the software, it is not coming from somewhere else.
• Somebody to blame. There is no support contract and no company behind this. You get the source, the documentation and the issue tracker.
• Never touching a server. The first install is a technical job. An agent can do it for you, and the daily work afterwards is all in the admin, but somebody has to rent the machine and point the domain.

08How this page was written

Comparisons written by one of the parties are worth exactly as much as their method, so here is this one's.

Every claim about another project comes from that project's own documentation, repository or announcement, read on 2026-08-27, and the ones that are contested are named as contested rather than stated flatly. Nothing here is a benchmark of somebody else's software: no reading page but this project's was measured, and the table says so where it matters.

The Quire Ink numbers are measurements against a running install, taken at the origin rather than through a CDN, and they are the same ones published in the architecture note and the repository's own README. The reading page figure is this site's own content in Literata with the fonts it ships; a site in a different script would fetch different subsets and land somewhere else.

If something here is wrong, it is a bug on the same terms as a bug in the software, and it is fixed in the same place: the repository.