“My recommendation would be to start with Ghost as your membership and audience database, then add a specialist analytics tool only when you have a clear reporting gap.”
“Member segmentation | Good”
“Free vs paid members | Excellent”
“Newsletter segmentation | Good”
“Member labels and filtering | Good”
“Subscription management | Good”
“Newsletter performance | Good”
“One particularly useful feature is post-level growth attribution: you can see which articles generated paid subscriptions and their associated MRR impact.”
“Revenue reporting | Basic to moderate”
“Churn and retention analysis | Limited”
“Cohort analysis | Limited”
“Customer lifetime value | Limited”
“Cross-channel attribution | Limited”
“2. Kit — advanced email automation”
“- Multi-step onboarding sequences.”
“- Behaviour-triggered campaigns.”
“- Sophisticated subscriber tagging.”
“- Automated free-to-paid conversion campaigns.”
“Stripe remains the payment system of record.”
“1. Plausible Analytics — website analytics”
“- Traffic sources and campaign performance.”
“- Conversion goals and funnels.”
“- Reader journeys and content performance.”
“- Privacy-conscious analytics.”
“3. PostHog — behavioural and retention analytics”
“- Reader retention cohorts.”
“- Repeat-visit analysis.”
“- Behavioural funnels.”
“- More detailed engagement analysis.”
“4. Metabase — business intelligence”
“- One consolidated business dashboard.”
“- Monthly recurring revenue reporting.”
“- Subscription and cancellation trends.”
“- Custom reports combining Stripe, Ghost and marketing data.”