When comparing Hexo vs Medium, the Slant community recommends Medium for most people. In the question“What are the best solutions for a personal blog?” Medium is ranked 4th while Hexo is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Medium is:
Medium has clean, minimalist pages with pictures and great typography.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast and easy to use
Pro Deployment is easy and fast
Hexo built sites can be easily deployed to Github pages, Heroku, Openshift (custom cartridge needs to be setup) or any other custom solution (just copy over thepublic
folder). Any deployment is as simple as editing the _config.yml
file and running the hexo deploy
command
Pro Generating a blog is pretty fast
Generating a new blog with Hexo is generally really fast. Hexo truly lives up to it's name as a simple and fast static website generator.
Pro Constantly updated and actively maintained
Hexo's repository in GitHub is very active and it's actively being maintained. Updates are released every two or three months.
Pro Complete and helpful documentation
Hexo's documentation is very thorough and helpful, especially for people who are just starting with it.
Pro Clean, beautiful pages
Medium has clean, minimalist pages with pictures and great typography.
Pro Excellent readability
There are no distractions and with a clean layout and great typography, reading Medium articles is a pleasure.
Pro Zero setup required
As soon as you sign-up for the service, you are ready to start writing.
Pro Clean writing experience
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.
Pro Great inbound channels to acquire bigger audiences quickly
Has a great network based on tags and search for "Suggest an article" as a similar read to others and for specific categories. Allows you a much bigger audience quicker than most platforms.
Pro Unintrusive yet powerful community interaction
Allows for finding new, related content.
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.
Pro Bookmarking
Medium allows bookmarking articles and following collections as well as users.
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."
Pro Recommendation system
Intended for appreciating a post, allows easier discoverability of an article by other readers.
Pro Photo upload and display is aesthetically pleasing
If you post photos as part of your blog, the interface on Medium is one of the best for both inline uploading as well as display in the post itself.
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.
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.
Pro Google Analytics support
They can enable this for you upon request.
Pro Excellent Post editor
With so many built-in features and flexibility to use, I would recommend Medium first amongst all.
Cons
Con Relatively large community but the majority is non-english speakers
Hexo has a relatively large following and community, especially in China. While this is certainly a positive, many developers who do not know chinese would be unable to follow all the guides and tutorials out there written by their chineses counterparts.
Con Medium can use your content however they want
Your content can be used royalty-free by Medium according to their Terms of Service.
Con Not self-hostable
Con Cannot customise domain address
From April 2018, Medium has removed the ability to set a customised domain on new accounts.
Con Proprietary
Con Limited customization options
In order to create a dead simple way to use the service, possibility to customize your blog was sacrificed. Medium publications, however, do allow a limited amount of customization.
Con Non-intuitive, non-threaded comment system
Con Freemium philosophy
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.