What is the Best Blog Platform: Blogspot or Wordpress?

Creating a new blog can be an overwhelming feat, especially if you are just new in blogging and do not have any idea about the vital elements in blogging. One of the questions that confront new bloggers is what blog platform he/she should use when setting up a blog.

There are quite a number of blog platforms out there but the most popular are Blogger and Wordpress. New bloggers usually narrow down their choices of blog platforms between Blogger and Wordpress. So, for your new blog, what blog platform should you choose? Is it Wordpress? Or is it Blogger?

Blogger or Blogspot


Blogger is owned by the Internet giant Google. Large number of free hosted blogs uses Blogger as the blog platform. Blogger is easy to learn and use. It uses the “what you see is what you get” principle in designing. Publishing your blog post is easy and you could either compose your blog post by manually typing HTML tags or automate tagging their composer.
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Dashboard of my Blogger account.

What I like about blogger is that there are many free templates that could be found in the Internet. My templates for this blog and my travel and personal blog were just downloaded for free. Another good thing is that there many available widgets that you could download for free to make your blog look better.

The best bit is that you could place advertisements on your blog without even applying for paid hosting in the Blogger blog platform. All of my blogs using Blogger blog platform has Google Adsense and other ads from other advertising services.


Wordpress


I like Wordpress for its professional look and feel. This is the reason why I use it for my socio-political blog. Wordpress is the blog platform of choice for bloggers who want to have a .com site. For bloggers who just want to have free hosted blog, Wordpress is also recommendable as a blog platform. However, free hosted blogs is given some limitations by Wordpress. One limitation is that free hosted blogs is not allowed to have any ads. Any blogger who do not follow this rule have their free hosted blogs closed down by Wordpress.

Because of this restriction, I recommend Wordpress for those bloggers who just want to have a blog without the intention of monetizing it. For a free hosted blog to have ads, the only advice is to have pay for the hosting of your blog.

Sans the restriction, Wordpress is a good blog platform. One of the things that made it great is its dashboard that shows the statistics of your blog for free. The Wordpress dashboard can show the number of visitors of your blog, most popular blog post, most clicked links, and a graph showing the number of your blog visitors over time.


Another thing that I like about Wordpress is that you could create categories for blog post, aside from having tags for the blog post. Blogger do not have such functionality and its users are just limited to tags (or labels).

These some advantages and disadvantages of using Wordpress and Blogger. For better reference, here is the summary of advantages and disadvantages of the two blog platforms:
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Table showing the pros and cons of Wordpress and Blogger.

How about you? What can you say about Wordpress or Blogger? What is your blog platform of choice?

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2 Response to "What is the Best Blog Platform: Blogspot or Wordpress?"

  1. foongpc says:

    Very good write up on the pros and cons of Blogger and Wordpress. I like Worpdress for its very professional look, but I like Blogger because it's so easy to use. One day, I may switch to Wordpress when I get my own domain, but in the meantime, I'll just stick to Blogger : )

    Hey Foong! Thanks for visiting me here. ^_^

    Yeah, Those two blog platforms has varied advantages and disadvantages. It is the bloggers who can decide what to use.