Both put a live number on your Ghost site. They differ on price, page weight, who holds the data, and what is left behind when you remove them. Below is the comparison written the way we'd want to read it — including the cases where paying for Ghost integrations is the better call.
Compared against the widget category on Ghost's integrations directory: third-party comment systems, analytics add-ons, embedded chat and social-proof tools. Prices are the typical public range at the time of writing, not a quote — check the listing you're looking at.
| FeedPulse | Ghost integrations | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever. No tier, no card, no per-site fee. | Most embedded SaaS in this category runs $5-$29/month per site on top of your Ghost subscription |
| What you install | Nothing. One <script> tag you paste once. | Sign up with the vendor, verify the domain, then paste their snippet into Code injection anyway |
| Page weight | ~5 KB, async, loaded after your content. | Vendor bundles are routinely 10-50x the size of the page they sit on, which is the one thing a Ghost site is chosen to avoid |
| Where the data lives | Aggregate counts on our side. No IP stored, no profile built. | Held by the vendor; your Ghost install just renders their script |
| Cookies & consent | No cookies, no fingerprinting, no consent banner needed. | Analytics-flavoured integrations set cookies, which means a banner on a blog that previously needed none |
| Updates | Nothing to update. The embed URL is versioned, so it can't break under you. | Pricing and feature changes land on your live site without a deploy on your side |
| Removing it | Delete the snippet. Nothing is left behind. | Remove the script, then go hunting for the leftover divs in old posts |
| Free-plan limits | None. Every widget and every SEO tool is in the free product. | Free tiers usually brand the widget or cap monthly views |
Membership, paid newsletters and email analytics are Ghost's own territory and nothing embeddable replaces them. And if you want full session replay or a hosted comment system with moderation queues and spam ML, a paid integration does more than a widget can.
Use an integration when it needs your member list or your email data. Use FeedPulse when you want a live number or a comment thread on the page without adding a subscription or a cookie banner to a fast blog.
Use an integration when it needs your member list or your email data. Use FeedPulse when you want a live number or a comment thread on the page without adding a subscription or a cookie banner to a fast blog. Membership, paid newsletters and email analytics are Ghost's own territory and nothing embeddable replaces them. And if you want full session replay or a hosted comment system with moderation queues and spam ML, a paid integration does more than a widget can.
Most embedded SaaS in this category runs $5-$29/month per site on top of your Ghost subscription FeedPulse has no paid tier at all — all 18 widgets and 12 SEO tools are in the free product.
Removing the FeedPulse snippet leaves nothing behind — it is one script tag. Remove the script, then go hunting for the leftover divs in old posts