> It's also harder to self host and manage

Eh, I disagree. The only difference is that it uses Node instead of PHP. You still hook it up to MySQL/MariaDB/SQLite and you're good to go.

Plus I consider its Members feature (https://ghost.org/members/) to be a game-changer, though it's powered by Stripe, so you'll have to be in one of 39 countries supported by it to make it work without extensively hacking your theme.