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Add to SafariWhen comparing Medium 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 Medium is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Pelican is:
All code is available on GitHub.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
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.
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 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.
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.
Con Not as powerful as other more popular site generators
Con A little bit slower than some of its competitors
