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What are the best blogging platforms?

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The best 1 of 16 OptionsWhy?

16 Options ConsideredPriceLanguageLicense
The Best
Jekyll
RubyMIT
Wordpress
PHPGPLv2
Ghost
JavaScriptMIT
Hugo
Go–
Medium
––
Expand spec tableSee Full List

Jekyll

The Best
•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
Coa
Top Pro

Open source software

•••
Coa
Top Pro

Free hosting integration with GitHub pages

•••
Coa
Top Pro

Users have full control of their blogs

•••
Laureano Macalango
Coa
Top Pro

Nice way to write posts in clear text (almost) using pretty simple markdown language

•••
Coa
Top Pro

Very well documented

•••
The documentation available on the website of the project is very well organized and simple to follow.
Coa
Top Pro

Pretty easy to create a new theme and most of the themes are free

•••
smutnyleszek
Top Pro

Easy development

•••
Chris Roe
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.
Laureano Macalango
WhiteLilac
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 Media iconAdd Video or Image
Ryan
Top Pro

Beginner-friendly

•••
WordPress is easy to understand and use. Basic tasks are easy.
Coa
Top Pro

Open source software

•••
Ryan
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.
Ryan
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.
Ryan
Top Pro

Easy and inexpensive to customize

•••
Simple open source code base makes adding custom functionality easier than many other CMSs.
John Coonrod
Ryan
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
Ryan
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.
Ryan
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.
Coa
Top Pro

Self-maintained

•••
Bruno Déry
Bryan
Ryan
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...
John Coonrod
Endi Sukaj
Flokir
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.
John Coonrod
Ryan
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.
Monika
Michael Howitz
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.
Ryan
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...
John Coonrod
Ryan
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.
John Coonrod
Ryan
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...
See 14 more Pros & ConsSee 14 more Pros & Cons

Ghost

•••
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Endi Sukaj
tuxayo
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.
Endi Sukaj
tuxayo
Top Pro

Hosted version available

•••
tuxayo
Top Pro

Self-hostable

•••
tuxayo
Top Pro

Libre/open source

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 3 more ProsSee 3 more Pros

Hugo

•••
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thermoplastics
Luis Ezcurdia
Top Pro

Simple architecture

•••
Luis Ezcurdia
Top Pro

Fast compile html

•••
Because is based on golang is very fast when you compile your html
dungeonHack
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.
schlaumeier
Top Pro

Good documentation

•••
schlaumeier
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.
Luis Ezcurdia
Top Pro

Portable from Jekyll

•••
If you have a blog with jeckyll is very easy to migrate to hugo
Know any negative aspects of this option?
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Medium

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
thermoplastics
Coa
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.
Coa
Top Pro

Beautiful design following the latest design principles

•••
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Unintrusive yet powerful community interaction

•••
Allows for finding new, related content.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Excellent readability

•••
The are no distractions and with a clean layout and great typography reading Medium articles is a pleasure.
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Bookmarking

•••
Medium allows bookmarking articles and following collections as well as users.
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Zero setup required

•••
As soon as you sign-up for the service via your Twitter account, you are ready to start writing.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Recommendation system

•••
Intended for appreciating a post, allows easier discoverability of an article by other readers.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Clean, beautiful pages

•••
Medium has clean, minimalist pages with pictures & great typography.
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Great sarch engine optimization

•••
thermoplastics
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."
Coa
Top Pro

No need to create an account

•••
tuxayo
Top Con

Not self-hostable

•••
tuxayo
Top Con

Proprietary

•••
thermoplastics
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.
thermoplastics
Top Con

No custom domains

•••
Maratik Asiatic :3
Top Con

Non-intuitive, non-threaded comment system

•••
Maratik Asiatic :3
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.
See 18 more Pros & ConsSee 18 more Pros & Cons

Wordpress.com

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
Coa
Top Pro

Huge collection of free and paid themes out of the box

•••
Coa
Top Pro

Pretty easy to create and maintain a blog

•••
Coa
Top Pro

Powerful analytics out of the box

•••
thermoplastics
Clinton Dickerson
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.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 3 more ProsSee 3 more Pros

grav

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
John Kelleher
Top Pro

Fast

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?

Hexo

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image

Metalsmith

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
Chris Roe
Top Pro

You are in complete control of your site

•••
You can control anything and everything about your site.
HardwareHero
Chris Roe
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.
HardwareHero
Chris Roe
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.
Chris Roe
Top Pro

Open source

•••
Chris Roe
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.
See 3 more ProsSee 3 more Pros

Boostlog

•••
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Write.as

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
HonorableShezmu
Top Pro

Protects your privacy

•••
Works totally anonymously or you can sign up with a pen name.
pbake
Top Pro

No sign up required

•••
You can publish without ever signing up or giving out your email address.
pbake
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.
pbake
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.
Alex
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.
See 3 more Pros & ConsSee 3 more Pros & Cons

GoNevis

•••
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

Free

•••
Absolutely Free. No cost at all.
Endi Sukaj
Alireza Savand
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...
Endi Sukaj
Alireza Savand
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.
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

Themes

•••
Different templates and themes.
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

Free for lifetime

•••
No charges at all, completely free.
Endi Sukaj
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

Open source dashboard

•••
GoNevis Dash (Site Admin Dashboard) is completely free and open source.
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

Full SSL Support

•••
Using secure connection on all the websites traffic.
Endi Sukaj
Alireza Savand
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.
Endi Sukaj
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

Free subdomain

•••
Get a free subdomain registered under gonevis.com
Endi Sukaj
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

Content tagging

•••
To keep content management simple, our choice was using #tags instead of categories.
Endi Sukaj
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

Built-in search

•••
Endi Sukaj
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

File manager

•••
Dolphin, with GoNevis file manager Dolphin, keep all your photos, musics, videos, documents and other files under control.
Endi Sukaj
Alireza Savand
Top Pro

Follow/Subscription support

•••
People can subscribe and receive notification on new posts.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 12 more ProsSee 12 more Pros

Squarespace

•••
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Lifetile.me

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
thermoplastics
Olivia Skumps
Top Pro

You can simply move your images and other material into lifetile from social media or your device

•••
thermoplastics
Olivia Skumps
Top Pro

You’re in charge of who can see what you post and your lifetile content is always protected and secure

•••
thermoplastics
Olivia Skumps
Top Pro

lifetile works across phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers – both Mac and PC

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 2 more ProsSee 2 more Pros

RapidWeaver

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
thermoplastics
Julien Desrosiers
Top Pro

Visual

•••
Has a GUI and a preview mode, which is fantastic for people who are visual creators.
Know any negative aspects of this option?

Blogger

•••
Add Media iconAdd Video or Image
Maratik Asiatic :3
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.
Ryan
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.
Ryan
Top Pro

Android and iOS mobile apps

•••
Allows viewing and editing content from your mobile device.
Ryan
Top Pro

Supports multiple authors

•••
Multiple people can contribute to a single blog.
Maratik Asiatic :3
Top Pro

Free

•••
hosted by google
Ryan
Top Pro

Custom domain support

•••
You can use either your own URL or a *.blogspot.com URL.
Ryan
Top Pro

Analytics integration

•••
There's very basic analytics, but you can upgrade if needed.
Ryan
Top Con

Dated layout

•••
Blogger hasn't had any major design changes in years and it shows.
Ryan
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.
Maratik Asiatic :3
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.
Maratik Asiatic :3
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.
Maratik Asiatic :3
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.
See 10 more Pros & ConsSee 10 more Pros & Cons

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