Cheaper Weglot Alternative for Ghost Sites

Weglot works with Ghost. You paste their JavaScript snippet into Ghost's code injection settings, their proxy picks up your content, and visitors get translated pages with their own URLs. It's well-built and reliable.

It's also expensive for what most Ghost site owners actually need.

Weglot starts at $15/month for one language and caps you at 10,000 translated words. A Ghost blog with 50 published posts will blow past that word limit immediately. To actually translate a content-heavy Ghost site into three languages, you're looking at $29–199/month depending on your word count. That's a serious recurring cost on top of your Ghost hosting.

If you're a large publication targeting international organic search, Weglot's proxy-based approach with multilingual SEO might be worth it. But if you run a Ghost membership site, newsletter, personal blog, or documentation site and just want international readers to actually read your content? There's a lighter way.

The problem with proxy translation for Ghost blogs

Weglot works by routing your traffic through their proxy servers. When someone visits your Ghost site, the request goes to Weglot first, they swap in the translated content, then serve the page to the visitor. This creates separate URLs for each language (/fr/, /es/) which is great for SEO.

But it also means:

All your traffic depends on Weglot's servers. If their CDN has an issue, your site has an issue. For a blog where uptime matters — especially if you're running paid memberships through Ghost — that's a dependency worth thinking about.

Word-based pricing penalizes content-heavy sites. Ghost is a publishing platform. You write posts. Lots of them. Each post adds to your word count. A 1,500-word blog post in three languages is 4,500 translated words. Publish twice a week and you're burning through 36,000 translated words per month — already past Weglot's $15/month tier. Their $29/month plan covers 50,000 words. Their $79/month plan covers 200,000. The meter is always running.

You lose everything if you cancel. Weglot stores your translations on their servers. Cancel your subscription and all translated content disappears. Every manual edit you made, every correction, gone. Your Ghost site goes back to one language overnight.

What Ghost site owners actually need

Most Ghost users aren't running multinational content operations. They're running newsletters, membership sites, personal blogs, portfolios, and documentation. Their readers come from different countries and speak different languages — but the site owner isn't trying to rank in French Google.

For that use case, you need something that:

• Translates your published Ghost content into multiple languages
• Shows visitors a language switcher so they can pick their language
• Doesn't charge based on word count (Ghost sites grow fast)
• Doesn't break if a third-party proxy goes down
• Has a free tier for testing before committing money

OwOsy Translate vs Weglot for Ghost

OwOsy Translate takes a different approach. Instead of proxying your traffic, it translates your Ghost content once, caches the results on Cloudflare's global edge network, and serves those cached translations to visitors via a lightweight widget. No proxy. No separate URLs. Just fast cached reads.

Here's the comparison:

Setup. Both work through Ghost's code injection (Settings → Code injection → Site Header). Paste a script tag, save. Equally simple.

Architecture. Weglot proxies every page request through their servers. OwOsy translates once, caches globally, and every subsequent visitor gets an instant cached response. No round-trip to a proxy on every page load.

Translation approach. Weglot uses a mix of machine translation providers (Google, DeepL, Microsoft) with a visual editor for manual corrections. OwOsy uses context-aware translation with glossary support for brand terms. Both handle standard Ghost content (posts, pages, navigation) well. For highly specialized or regulated content, both recommend human review.

Content limits. This is the big one.

For a Ghost blog with 30–50 posts averaging 1,000 words each, you're at 30,000–50,000 words of source content. Translated into three languages, Weglot charges $29–79/month for that volume. OwOsy's Growth plan at $19/month covers 100,000 words in 10 languages.

SEO. Weglot wins here. Their proxy creates real translated URLs with hreflang tags that Google indexes. OwOsy does client-side translation — search engines only see your original language. If multilingual organic search is your primary goal, Weglot is the right tool regardless of cost.

Data ownership. Cancel Weglot and your translations vanish because they're stored on Weglot's servers. Cancel OwOsy and cached translations continue serving for up to 90 days while you decide what to do. You don't lose everything overnight.

What Weglot does better. Multilingual SEO. Visual translation editor. Longer track record (founded 2016). Larger team. More platform integrations.

What OwOsy does better. Price — dramatically cheaper at every tier. Permanent free plan. No proxy dependency. Faster cached responses. Fixed pricing that doesn't punish you for publishing more content.

Setting up OwOsy on Ghost

1. Sign up at app.owosy.com
2. Add your Ghost site URL and pick your target languages
3. Scan your site and translate
4. Copy the embed script from Settings
5. In Ghost admin: go to Settings → Code injection → Site Header
6. Paste the script tag and save

Works on Ghost(Pro) and self-hosted Ghost. Every theme. Every plan. Full walkthrough in our Ghost translation guide.

When Weglot is the right choice over OwOsy

Be honest with yourself about what you need:

• If you're a news publication targeting organic search traffic in multiple languages, use Weglot. The multilingual SEO is worth the cost.
• If you're getting significant organic traffic from non-English search queries and want to grow that, use Weglot.
• If you have budget for $29–199/month and need a visual editor for fine-tuning translations with a team, use Weglot.

For everyone else — newsletters, membership sites, personal blogs, documentation, portfolio sites — a translation widget at a fraction of the cost does the job.

Disclosure: This guide is published by the OwOsy team. We build OwOsy Translate, so we have a financial interest in you choosing our product. We've tried to present all options fairly — including where Weglot genuinely wins.

Try OwOsy free on your Ghost site →