When it comes to creating a blog or a website in general, WordPress and Blogger are still the two most popular options. But which one is the best for you?
WordPress has long been the absolute market leader: 40% of websites worldwide have been created with WordPress.
And we are not always talking about blogs, we are also talking about many sites such as the New York Post, CNN or Spotify to give just a few examples among many others.
The crux of the matter is that when it comes to choosing a platform, it doesn’t make sense to talk about “the best” in absolute terms, there is no such thing. They all have advantages and disadvantages.
The question to ask is which one is the best for you and that will depend on what exactly you want to do with your website.
Blogging just for fun is not the same as blogging professionally, creating a site to support a traditional business or creating an online site as a business in itself.
In that sense I will make a detailed comparison between WordPress and Blogger (aka Blogspot) for still being the two most demanded options today, although in recent years have had a remarkable rise new options oriented websites (not so much blogs) as Wix, Weebly and Squarespace.
I will detail the differences between them and the reasons to choose one or another option. In addition, I will also explain the differences between the two variants of WordPress: WordPress.com and WordPress.org, something that today still generates a lot of confusion among users.
With all this information you should be perfectly able to choose the best platform for your case.
And since I know that it’s hard for the impatient ones to read a post as long as this one, I’ll start with what should really be the conclusions, although I insist: this is not black and white, so you should read it in its entirety to know why I reached them, even if it’s at another time.
When to use Blogger, when to use WordPress.com and when to use WordPress.org
First of all, I reiterate, in my view, you can’t just say that one platform is “better” than another.
The good question is:
What is the best option for my specific needs with the blog I want to create now and in the future?
I would approach the decision based on a number of different scenarios that can occur in this:
You just intend to try it out.
If you just want to start blogging on a topic you like, but without any ambition and without any concrete horizon, I recommend you to discard WordPress.org and hire your own hosting (renting a server on the Internet for your site).
The reason is not so much the cost, since the cost of a hosting is very low, but to keep things simple.
That way I would also consider the decision between Blogger and WordPress.com: here the question would be what is your “relationship” with web technologies.
Below you will see that Blogger is more technically demanding. I mean, do you prefer not to have to touch anything that sounds like technical stuff like HTML or would you not mind fiddling with these things a bit?
If you’re a bit phobic about the technical side of things, the decision is clear: WordPress.com. This option is more limited, but these are things you should be able to live with if you don’t have any major pretensions.
If you’re a bit more techie and like to tinker with things like HTML or CSS, WordPress.com in its variant will be frustrating because you basically can’t do anything at this level. Now, to get into their paid versions that already allow you to do things, but cost as much as a hosting or more, I would go directly to WordPress.org with hosting.
So, here it makes more sense to go to Blogger if you want a free option. And, in addition, if at some point you want to monetize your activity, you will have fewer restrictions than WordPress.com.
You have a serious project, but you can’t spend any money.
Here the first thing I want to advise you to do is to be honest with yourself: can you really not afford what it costs to have a few coffees to pay the monthly hosting fee?
To give you an idea of what we are talking about, I am talking about very popular hostings such as: Webempresa, SiteGround or Raiola Networks, for example (this blog is hosted by Webempresa).
If you go to the links, you will see that we are talking about very little money per month in the basic plans.
Basic plans are usually more than enough for something like 98% or 99% of the cases.
Frankly, if you then spend every week on drinks or breakfast coffee at the company or superfluous things like that, you’re not being honest with yourself.
In this case, you are simply not giving enough priority to your project. Therefore, my advice would be not to even start, because a blog that you are serious about requires work and if, from the beginning, you don’t give it, it is a guarantee to never get anywhere. So it’s better not to waste your time.
Not having money is that every month you really have a hard time making ends meet. In the rest of the cases are excuses that only camouflage that your project, in reality, has no priority for you. And it is not criticizable, you have the right to give it the priority you want, of course, but it is better not to waste time.
Something happens with comments like “6€/month seems expensive to me because I have seen another hosting at 3€/month”. In that case, if that is your way of thinking, I tell you the same thing, listen to me: this is not for you, this attitude is not the right one to get anywhere with this.
Now, if you really find yourself in an extreme economic situation that prevents you from spending money on hosting, to choose between WordPress.com and Blogger, I would approach the issue as in the previous point based on your skills with web technologies.
And finally, do not hire a free hosting, stay better with WordPress.com or Blogger.
The only exception to this would be if you really want to hire it for technical testing, that is to say, to try it, to know how a hosting works, etc. In short, to shoot a little, although this entails the risk that you get a bad impression by the poor service that these options give and you make the mistake of extrapolating this impression to the paid hostings in general.
You have a serious project and you want to generate income with it.
If you are not in an extreme situation like the one I described above and that really justifies not spending the minimum cost of hosting, there is simply no doubt: I would always recommend WordPress.org.
Otherwise, you’re going to find that the limitations of WordPress.com and even Blogger (which has much less) are a drag on your project. In addition, you forget from the beginning of future complications arising from the need to migrate to WordPress.org.
And I’m not thinking about the limitations for the use of online advertising, in fact, it is one of the least effective options when you are not an experienced professional with means.
I’m thinking of things like, for example, affiliate marketing where you need to do things like tracking conversion statistics to know which content works and which doesn’t for commission generation purposes, being able to design your site freely to suit what you need or integrating a shopping cart to make sales.
If you are just starting out and have no technical knowledge whatsoever, you should also seriously consider spending a little more on a hosting that goes beyond the normal hosting support and also offers specialized WordPress support.
You can find options like this at Webempresa or SiteGround, for example. This way you’ll have all the technical fronts covered and you’ll sleep much more peacefully.
What is Blogger ( Blogspot) and how does it work?
Blogger is a free cloud service originally created by Pyra Labs and acquired by Google in 2003, oriented to the creation of blogs.
I want to make special emphasis on the fact that it is a cloud service.
This means, creating a blog in Blogger is basically as simple as opening an account in other cloud services, such as a Gmail account, for example. No need to struggle with technical issues such as installing software on a server, etc.. Just open the account and start working.
In Blogger, after going through the steps to create it, the new one will have a URL of the type “minombre.blogspot.com”. However, it is possible to link your own domain name to your blog, something that I strongly recommend you always do, since a domain name costs very little money (usually around 10-15€/year) and it greatly improves the feel of your blog.
Above this paragraph you have a post that teaches you how to create a blog in Blogger and below in the bonus track you can see another video tutorial about the same thing.
What is WordPress and how it works
Unlike Blogger, WordPress is a content management system (or CMS for its acronym in English) designed for the creation of any type of website and began operating in 2003.
Today it is the absolute leader as a blogging platform, 27% of websites worldwide, if we limit ourselves to blogs, more than half.
Compared to almost all of its competitors, it has the peculiarity of being an open source product. This means that you have the source code of the application at your disposal to use it as you wish.
The first thing you need to know about WordPress: the difference between “.com” and “.org” versions
The fact that it is an open source platform has very important repercussions.
The first and most important is that there are two versions of WordPress, or rather, two very different philosophies:
WordPress.com: we could say that this is the counterpart of Blogger, a cloud service that starts with a free plan with many limitations that can be eliminated in the payment plans.
WordPress.org: here it is you who download (for free) the WordPress program (its source code) and it is you who must install it on a server connected to the Internet (i.e. a hosting). In return, here there are no limitations, you access 100% of the potential of WordPress which is simply enormous.
In both versions we are working with the WordPress application, but in two ways that could not be more different.
The WordPress.com philosophy
As I said, the philosophy of WordPress.com is “nailed” to that of Blogger: the company behind WordPress, Automattic, allows you to simply open a free account in the cloud that will have by default an Internet address in the style of “myname.wordpress.com”.
As in Blogger you can use your own domain, but here we find the first limitation: to use your own domain you have to go to the basic payment plan, the “Personal” plan of WordPress.com. We will go into the virtues and defects of WordPress.com in more detail later.
Of course, it is not necessary to contract the domain with a domain provider, WordPress is the domain provider in this case.
The WordPress.org
In the “self-hosted” option, the platform concept changes radically. In this case, you no longer have to open an Automattic account under which you can access your blog, but you have to download the WordPress application and install it on your own web server.
For this you need to hire a domain and install the application on a hosting service such as Webempresa (the one used by Ciudadano 2.0 and that we recommend to you too) and do a little maintenance work (approve WordPress updates, plugins, etc.).
Nowadays, if you hire a good hosting provider, this is not a big problem, as you can see in one of the videos below.
However, it is critical to choose the right hosting provider. If the foundation of your website fails, how will the rest work well?
Besides, a good hosting nowadays is already very affordable. The option we recommend currently costs about 79€/year, that’s about 6,58€/month.
On the other hand, it is true that with this option there is the added technical work of installing WordPress yourself, but in return you get access to possibilities that are simply light years away from the previous two options.
To give a little perspective with some first examples:
In the WordPress.org repository you have +2000 free design templates to choose from. In WordPress.com around 200.
You have about 50,000 plugins which are small extensions that add specialized functionality to your WordPress site. Things as powerful as WooCommerce, for example, which turns it into a complete online store. On WordPress.com you simply can’t use plugins.
Since the code is free (also the code of these products) you can mess with it as you like. With some basic knowledge of HTML and CSS you can already do very interesting things, or hire small custom jobs to WordPress professionals.
To this we must add many other commercial products, another consequence of the fact that WordPress.org is open source: it has favored a huge ecosystem (probably the largest in the world of this type) of third-party manufacturers creating products for WordPress.
That is, think for a moment the possibilities that this gives and the brutal support behind WordPress. And it also implies that with WordPress.org you have a professional platform, without ceiling in its possibilities, because anything you can imagine is technically possible on this platform.
To finish this section I have to comment that, in fact, there is one more version that I have left out: WordPress VIP.
It is a kind of WordPress.com premium, oriented exclusively to large companies, which you can easily see in their prices: the most basic plan starts at $5,000/month, so we could say that it is a little out of the scope of this post.
Commonalities between Blogger and WordPress
Let’s now look at the details of Blogger and WordPress and their differences. To do that I’m going to start first with the things they have in common.
They have in common that:
They allow you to create both blogs and “normal” websites (for a company page, for example).
Both have a totally free option, being the free version of WordPress.com considerably more limited than Blogger.
They include themes (design templates) and the basic elements you need on any website: things like comments, contact forms, social buttons, an RSS feed of articles, the possibility of embedding images, audio and video in the content, visitor statistics and integration with Google Search Console, an essential tool for the author of any website.
They use as default domain a subdomain of the site, that is, domains such as “misitio.blogspot.com” in the case of Blogger and “misitio.wordpress.com”. In both cases you can also use your own domains, but you will have to pay for that domain.
Blogger and WordPress.com limit the disk space. That is, the number of files, images, etc. that you can upload is limited. In the case of WordPress.org it depends on the hosting you have contracted.
Differences between WordPress and Blogger. Comparison
Let us now look at the differences in terms of advantages and disadvantages of each of the platforms.
- Level of captivity and investment risk
This may sound a bit strange to you, but for me it is undoubtedly the most important difference of all because it is a very important issue. That’s why I’m going to dwell a little longer on this point.
The reflection is that both with Blogger and WordPress.com as with any other similar cloud option (Wix, Weebly, etc.) your website is at the mercy of the provider and what they want to do with you. That’s the downside of any cloud service.
Imagine that you have worked for 5 years hard on your blog on Blogger, with a lot of effort not only in content, but also in things like customizing your templates. You’ve built up a good audience and even generated some income that gives you a lot of relief at the end of the month.
Suddenly, Google, given the decreasing popularity of Blogger (see the graph above), decides to close this service, as it has done without blinking an eye with other very popular services at the time (and despite massive protests from users) like Google Reader, for example.
How do you feel?
At the very least, scared, right?
Although it is possible to migrate from Blogger to WordPress, doing so is not trivial and much less with an aged blog in which this task becomes quite complicated. Doing all this with the noose around your neck in a situation like the one described is not pleasant.
But, in addition, there are things that are always lost, such as the work on your design template and all the knowledge of handling Blogger that you have acquired. Starting in WordPress will be starting from scratch and the more complex your Blogger blog is, the more the transition will cost you.
Now, you might say that, being WordPress.com also a cloud service, it’s the same thing.
But there are three very important differences:
For WordPress, WordPress is their business. For Google, it’s just one of many branches. Therefore, it is much less likely to cease its business.
Migrating from WordPress.com to WordPress.org is easier than migrating from Blogger.
And with if you have to migrate from WordPress.com to WordPress.org you don’t lose the investment in knowledge because both are used the same, WordPress.org.
And it goes without saying that with WordPress.org this risk simply does not exist because everything is in your hands: the program code and the site (your hosting). WordPress could shut down immediately and you will continue to function exactly the same.
But, what’s more, I was talking about the ecosystem around WordPress before. It’s so big that WordPress simply can’t die. There’s too much economic interest in keeping it going. Somebody would take over other than the current company.
Therefore, I would dare to say that with WordPress.org the continuity of your project is 100% guaranteed for decades.
- Learning curve and ease of use
Here there has been much debate and we are clearly entering a realm of subjective tastes.
My opinion: apart from the aesthetic differences, the learning curve and ease of use in general is more or less similar in broad strokes in Blogger and WordPress, as well as the organization of the administration panel, which is relatively similar, leaving aside the purely aesthetic.
However, in detail there are differences. WordPress takes the lead in terms of possibilities, for example, in the organization of categories or the creation of menus.
A particularly clear example for me is the visual editor: the WordPress one works much better than the Blogger one, which, at least in my (limited) experience, has given me a lot of problems with details such as suddenly changing font sizes, etc. And, in general, I’ve noticed that Blogger tends to put more “junk” in the generated HTML than WordPress when editing content.
To this must be added that in the case of WordPress.org, using plugins, the default visual editor of WordPress can be made much more sophisticated, so that here Blogger is already totally behind.
