When comparing Blogger vs Pelican, the Slant community recommends Pelican for most people. In the question“What are the best solutions for a personal blog?” Pelican is ranked 3rd while Blogger is ranked 19th. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
All code is available on GitHub.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Free
hosted by google
Pro Javascript friendly
You can include Javascript snippets and widgets (like Pinterest widgets for example) in posts and in sidebar items. This makes it very different from WordPress.com (free hosted WordPress) which does not allow javascript plugins.
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.
Pro Supports multiple authors
Multiple people can contribute to a single blog.
Pro Custom domain support
You can use either your own URL or a *.blogspot.com URL.
Pro API
The Blogger API allows you to publish and manage your content via a custom client app
Pro Allows custom advertisements
Such as project wonderful, or just google adsense,. so you can make money from your blog.
Pro Android and iOS mobile apps
Allows viewing and editing content from your mobile device.
Pro Analytics integration
There's very basic analytics, but you can upgrade if needed.
Pro Open source
All code is available on GitHub.
Pro Active community
Pro Uses a versatile, powerful and easy to use templating engine
Uses Jinja.
Pro Code syntax highlighting
Uses Pygments for code highlighting.
Pro Support for unique templates per page
Adds flexibility to create variety of websites.
Pro Content can be written in multiple formats
Supports reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats.
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Pro Customisable Themes and support for Plugins
Makes it flexible to cater to creation of variety of websites in addition to blogs.
Pro Multilingual
Easily handles multiple languages, like EN, FR, etc.
Pro Quite fast even for sites with thousands of posts
Can spin up an build sites with thousands of articles in a matter of seconds even on very old computers.
Cons
Con Bad post editor
It is a WYSIWYG html editor, and it would be a bit better if it used <p> tags. Instead it uses divs and brs everywhere, which leads to inconsistent or just crappy typography and spacing.
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.
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.
Con Not fully HTML4 or 5 compliant
And impossible to get it perfectly accepted by the W3C verifier no matter how much you tinker.
Con Theme inheritance doesn't seem to be a priority
There have been endless discussions for years but theme inheritance still doesn't seem to be a thing. You can "inherit" from the simple theme so you don't have to have all the required files in your theme, but that's as far as it goes.