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What are the best blogging platforms?
16
Options Considered
108
Recommendations
Apr 17, 2018
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The best 1 of 16 Option
s
Why?
16 Options Considered
Price
Language
License
The Best
Jekyll
Get it here
Ruby
MIT
Wordpress
Get it here
PHP
GPLv2
Ghost
Get it here
JavaScript
MIT
Hugo
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Go
–
Medium
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–
–
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Jekyll
The Best
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
Open source software
•••
Top
Pro
Free hosting integration with GitHub pages
•••
Top
Pro
Users have full control of their blogs
•••
Top
Pro
Nice way to write posts in clear text (almost) using pretty simple markdown language
•••
Top
Pro
Very well documented
•••
The documentation available on the website of the project is very well organized and simple to follow.
Top
Pro
Pretty easy to create a new theme and most of the themes are free
•••
Top
Pro
Easy development
•••
Top
Con
Requires some technical knowledge
•••
As Jekyll is shipped as a Ruby package you will need Ruby installed and need to be able to install ruby gems. This may be daunting for first timers, or those not used to scripting languages.
Top
Con
Not user friendly
•••
The project is well documented. But if you just want do spill your content in the internet without taking to much time constructing a blogging platform, Jekyll isn't for you. Users have to know at least the basics of HTML, CSS and Markdown, not unusually dealing too with Javascript. And to ma...
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15
Other
Options
Considered
Wordpress
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
Beginner-friendly
•••
WordPress is easy to understand and use. Basic tasks are easy.
Top
Pro
Open source software
•••
Top
Pro
Optional free hosting
•••
WordPress offers free hosting under a wordpress.com subdomain. This option eliminates the need for setting up the CMS yourself and is reasonably secure, as WP uses multiple servers to back your site up. Additionally, for a fee, you can even set up your own custom domain name.
Top
Pro
SEO friendly
•••
The default WordPress SEO setup will work great for most people starting out, but you can further tweak different aspects of WordPress to achieve better search ranking results by installing plugins, following tutorials or experimenting yourself.
Top
Pro
Easy and inexpensive to customize
•••
Simple open source code base makes adding custom functionality easier than many other CMSs.
Top
Pro
Lots of plugins that extend functionality are available for Wordpress.org
•••
There are plenty of plugins available to extend the functionalities of WordPress.org, as well as shortcodes in Wordpress.com
Top
Pro
Widely used
•••
According to some statistics, WP powers a fifth of the Internet. It means that there are resources for everything. There's excellent community support and a plethora of plugins and customization options.
Top
Pro
It comes with a Gravatar account
•••
Gravatar is the ubiquitous avatar hosting service that has an API for others to quickly grab your avatar.
Top
Pro
Self-maintained
•••
Top
Con
Clunky, and trying to do too much
•••
If you stick to basic blogging, you might be ok. But, if you get too excited and picky and want to customize too much the appearance & features, then you'll fall into an abyss of clunkyness (code, 1000s of plugins, documentation, support, hack-o-ramas). This might be ok for some, or not. C...
Top
Con
Self-Hosted
•••
Wordpress.org requires you to have a domain name and web hosting provider to get started. Though it's important to note that Wordpress.com offers free managed sites with hundreds of themes, and numerous other managed wordpress providers (wpengine, godaddy) will set up sites for you.
Top
Con
Editing a theme possible with custom CSS
•••
Wordpress uses themes, not templates. Most themes have menu-customizable aspects (colors, fonts) or the option of adding custom CSS. Wordpress.com charges to allow you to use custom CSS.
Top
Con
A bit of bloat and complexity
•••
WP has grown past being just a blogging platform and as such it's not as lightweight as it used to be. It's also considerably more complex due to many more customization options compared to other solutions.
Top
Con
Spam
•••
Wordpress by default allows commenting on pages, any page. Even if you turn commenting off for a page bots can still access the commenting endpoint; even if you use a 3rd party commenting system such as Disqus. Wordpress comes with an anti-spam filter called Askimet which does a pretty good job but...
Top
Con
Themes have limited flexibility.
•••
Themes have preset templates, and these templates draw data from a single "body" entry, or from widgets in sidebars or other portions designed into the templates.
Top
Con
Wordpress.org allows too many amateurish, insecure, outdated, unmaintained, incomplete or useless plugins
•••
Wordpress.org allows plugins. For security reasons, Wordpress.com does not. Other managed Wordpress sites allow only a smaller "curated" set of plugins. True, there may be some plugin for every functionality you require. However if you take a more detailed look at those plugins they are...
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3
Ghost
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
Developed by a non-profit organization whose only purpose is to support the software
•••
Less worries about the project going in a direction against it's users.
Top
Pro
Hosted version available
•••
Top
Pro
Self-hostable
•••
Top
Pro
Libre/open source
•••
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9
Hugo
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
Simple architecture
•••
Top
Pro
Fast compile html
•••
Because is based on golang is very fast when you compile your html
Top
Pro
Includes a server option for easy development
•••
When developing themes for a given blog platform, having an automatic refresh server available is very helpful.
Top
Pro
Good documentation
•••
Top
Pro
No dependencies
•••
All other SSGs expect you to have a full toolchain setup for their language. Hugo is written in Go and distributed as an executable for unix, linux, windows and mac. Just download and run.
Top
Pro
Portable from Jekyll
•••
If you have a blog with jeckyll is very easy to migrate to hugo
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Medium
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
Simple and easy way of writing new posts
•••
Medium takes away all the clutter without taking away any necessary features for a better writing experience. And it doesn't require knowing Markdown to write, all tools are WYSIWYG.
Top
Pro
Beautiful design following the latest design principles
•••
Top
Pro
Unintrusive yet powerful community interaction
•••
Allows for finding new, related content.
Top
Pro
Excellent readability
•••
The are no distractions and with a clean layout and great typography reading Medium articles is a pleasure.
Top
Pro
Great post editor
•••
A WYSIWYG editor that does not get in the way at all. It is invisible most of the time and only appears when you select something.
Top
Pro
Built-in analytics
•••
Medium shows how many people have opened your post and how many have read through it. And how many people have recommended your post.
Top
Pro
Bookmarking
•••
Medium allows bookmarking articles and following collections as well as users.
Top
Pro
Collaborative if you want it to be
•••
You can send a draft out to other people and have them edit and leave notes on it.
Top
Pro
Zero setup required
•••
As soon as you sign-up for the service via your Twitter account, you are ready to start writing.
Top
Pro
Recommendation system
•••
Intended for appreciating a post, allows easier discoverability of an article by other readers.
Top
Pro
Clean, beautiful pages
•••
Medium has clean, minimalist pages with pictures & great typography.
Top
Pro
Great sarch engine optimization
•••
Top
Pro
Paragraph based commenting
•••
As Medium encourages long-form writing they've re-imagined how comments should work accordingly. You can leave comments for every paragraph separately, so you don't have to reference a specific part in a comments section at the bottom. Technically, the feature is called "notes."
Top
Pro
No need to create an account
•••
Top
Con
Not self-hostable
•••
Top
Con
Proprietary
•••
Top
Con
Medium can use your content however they want to
•••
Your content can be used royalty-free by Medium according to their Terms of Service.
Top
Con
No custom domains
•••
Top
Con
Non-intuitive, non-threaded comment system
•••
Top
Con
Export is limited
•••
The only export option is HTML. If you want to migrate away from Medium for some reason, it might be very difficult to do so.
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4
Wordpress.com
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
Huge collection of free and paid themes out of the box
•••
Top
Pro
Pretty easy to create and maintain a blog
•••
Top
Pro
Powerful analytics out of the box
•••
Top
Pro
Plugins for every occassion
•••
There are a wealth of plugins that can cater for just about every requirement you may have, and many of these plugins are free.
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grav
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
Fast
•••
Add a Con
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3
Hexo
•••
Add Video or Image
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Recommend
2
Metalsmith
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
You are in complete control of your site
•••
You can control anything and everything about your site.
Top
Pro
Easy to get started
•••
Metalsmith is built around basic concepts. All you have to do is read some files, give each to a sequence of plugins and write the the result to an output directory. While not super easy to a technological newbie, it's easy to wrap your head around if you know what you're doing.
Top
Pro
Lots of plugins
•••
There are tons of useful plugins already available from the metalsmith website. If what you're looking for isn't already available, you can write your own custom plugin.
Top
Pro
Open source
•••
Top
Con
Requires some technical understanding
•••
If you are looking for something to just get you up and running quickly, Metalsmith, like Jekyll may not be the way to go. You will need to understand the concept of a build pipeline. In addition, to configure metalsmith, you will need to understand JSON, or be able to write Javascript.
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Boostlog
•••
Add Video or Image
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11
Write.as
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
Protects your privacy
•••
Works totally anonymously or you can sign up with a pen name.
Top
Pro
No sign up required
•••
You can publish without ever signing up or giving out your email address.
Top
Pro
Clean writing space
•••
It's made for writing, so there aren't crazy buttons and alerts all over the place to distract you.
Top
Con
Very simple
•••
The editor only lets you write plain text, select from a few fonts, and use Markdown for formatting. It's difficult to use Write.as for more complicated blogging or creating a full website.
Top
Con
The writing space is very limited
•••
The writing window is limited to only about one-fifth of the page, the rest is just blank. You can only see about three lines of text at a time. Seems like a mismanaging of space.
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2
GoNevis
•••
Top
Pro
Free
•••
Absolutely Free. No cost at all.
Top
Pro
Advanced dashboard
•••
GoNevis Dash is an open source project/product that you can participate directly to improve, either by submitting code, reporting bugs, reviewing patches, etc...
Top
Pro
Built-in commenting
•••
You don't need to use external commenting widgets on your site, all the comments and discussions happening on the your website are stored under your account and can be easily managed and moderated.
Top
Pro
Themes
•••
Different templates and themes.
Top
Pro
Free for lifetime
•••
No charges at all, completely free.
Top
Pro
Open source dashboard
•••
GoNevis Dash (Site Admin Dashboard) is completely free and open source.
Top
Pro
Full SSL Support
•••
Using secure connection on all the websites traffic.
Top
Pro
Granular permissions engine
•••
You can bring your whole team to each website and give them permissions such as Author, Admin, Owner, etc and manage your entire website with you team.
Top
Pro
Free subdomain
•••
Get a free subdomain registered under gonevis.com
Top
Pro
Content tagging
•••
To keep content management simple, our choice was using #tags instead of categories.
Top
Pro
Built-in search
•••
Top
Pro
File manager
•••
Dolphin, with GoNevis file manager Dolphin, keep all your photos, musics, videos, documents and other files under control.
Top
Pro
Follow/Subscription support
•••
People can subscribe and receive notification on new posts.
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Squarespace
•••
Add Video or Image
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Lifetile.me
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
You can simply move your images and other material into lifetile from social media or your device
•••
Top
Pro
You’re in charge of who can see what you post and your lifetile content is always protected and secure
•••
Top
Pro
lifetile works across phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers – both Mac and PC
•••
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RapidWeaver
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
Visual
•••
Has a GUI and a preview mode, which is fantastic for people who are visual creators.
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$99
Recommend
Blogger
•••
Add Video or Image
Top
Pro
No ads
•••
You can turn on ads if you want, but you can also keep your Blogger blog ad-free. That is different from WordPress.com (free hosted WordPress) where there are ads, and you cannot do anything about it.
Top
Pro
Every Google account has one
•••
If you have a Google account from any other of their services, such as Gmail, Youtube or Google+, you automatically have a Blogger account as well.
Top
Pro
Android and iOS mobile apps
•••
Allows viewing and editing content from your mobile device.
Top
Pro
Supports multiple authors
•••
Multiple people can contribute to a single blog.
Top
Pro
Free
•••
hosted by google
Top
Pro
Custom domain support
•••
You can use either your own URL or a *.blogspot.com URL.
Top
Pro
Analytics integration
•••
There's very basic analytics, but you can upgrade if needed.
Top
Con
Dated layout
•••
Blogger hasn't had any major design changes in years and it shows.
Top
Con
Tied to other Google services
•••
Whether you like it or not Blogger is tied to AdSense, Google+, Feedburner, Analytics, etc. There is no way to opt out.
Top
Con
Not fully HTML4 or 5 compliant
•••
And impossible to get it perfectly accepted by the W3C verifier no matter how much you tinker.
Top
Con
Can be very slow
•••
Loading times can be huge - results may vary on your use of template, but even a fairly lightweight template can load quite slow.
Top
Con
Limited authorization system
•••
Sadly the authorization system is fairly limited. Co authors can post and publish, without you getting a chance to pre-check their posts as an admin. e.g. you can't give them "create" and not give them "publish" permissions. They can only edit their own posts however.
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108 Community Recommendations
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raixex
Contributor for 2 months
5
Total Rec's
0
Total Karma
Boostlog
Recommended
2 months ago by raixex
good design
Helpful
See full
denis15
Contributor for 2 months
5
Total Rec's
30
Total Karma
Boostlog
Recommended
2 months ago by denis15
simple design
Helpful
See full
uronu
Contributor for 2 months
5
Total Rec's
55
Total Karma
Boostlog
Recommended
2 months ago by uronu
Blogging media for developers.
Helpful
See full
Dashon
Contributor for 4 months
5
Total Rec's
70
Total Karma
Jekyll
Recommended
4 months ago by Dashon
Pro
Free hosting integration with GitHub pages
Pro
Open source software
Pro
Users have full control of their blogs
Pro
Nice way to write posts in clear text (almost) using pretty simple markdown language
Pro
Very well documented
Pro
Pretty easy to create a new theme and most of the themes are free
Con
Requires some technical knowledge
Con
Not user friendly
Pro
Easy development
Helpful
See full
Arjun
Contributor for 6 months
2
Total Rec's
365
Total Karma
Jekyll
Recommended
6 months ago by Arjun
Pro
Free hosting integration with GitHub pages
Pro
Open source software
Pro
Users have full control of their blogs
Pro
Nice way to write posts in clear text (almost) using pretty simple markdown language
Pro
Very well documented
Pro
Pretty easy to create a new theme and most of the themes are free
Con
Requires some technical knowledge
Con
Not user friendly
Helpful
See full
smutnyleszek
Contributor for 9 months
12
Total Rec's
925
Total Karma
Jekyll
Recommended
6 months ago by smutnyleszek
Pro
Free hosting integration with GitHub pages
Pro
Open source software
Pro
Users have full control of their blogs
Pro
Nice way to write posts in clear text (almost) using pretty simple markdown language
Pro
Very well documented
Con
Requires some technical knowledge
Con
Not user friendly
Helpful
See full
MightyFand
Contributor for 9 months
4
Total Rec's
0
Total Karma
Jekyll
Recommended
8 months ago by MightyFand
MightyFand hasn’t added their experience, pros or cons to their recommendation.
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Roman
Contributor for 9 months
100
Total Rec's
0
Total Karma
Jekyll
Recommended
9 months ago by Roman
Roman hasn’t added their experience, pros or cons to their recommendation.
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Mike
Contributor for a year
8
Total Rec's
1.2
K
Total Karma
Jekyll
Recommended
a year ago by Mike
Mike hasn’t added their experience, pros or cons to their recommendation.
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Laureano
Contributor for a year
14
Total Rec's
695
Total Karma
Jekyll
Recommended
a year ago by Laureano
Con
Requires some technical knowledge
Helpful
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