Add to ChromeWhen 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 4th while Medium is ranked 5th. 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 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 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 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 Unintrusive yet powerful community interaction
Allows for finding new, related content.
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 Bookmarking
Medium allows bookmarking articles and following collections as well as users.
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 Recommendation system
Intended for appreciating a post, allows easier discoverability of an article by other readers.
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 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 Open source
All code is available on GitHub.
Pro Active community
Pro Content can be written in multiple formats
Supports reStructuredText, Markdown, or AsciiDoc formats.
Pro Uses a versatile, powerful and easy to use templating engine
Uses Jinja.
Pro Code syntax highlighting
Uses Pygments for code highlighting.
Pro Multilingual
Easily handles multiple languages, like EN, FR, etc.
Pro Customisable Themes and support for Plugins
Makes it flexible to cater to creation of variety of websites in addition to blogs.
Pro Import your existing blog from many sources
Pro Support for unique templates per page
Adds flexibility to create variety of websites.
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 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 Non-intuitive, non-threaded comment system
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 A little bit slower than some of its competitors
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