Blogger and WordPress.com are the two most well known blogging platforms for starting a free blog.
Both of them have their pros and cons and also many differences. If you are planning to start your first ever blog, then there are chances that you are not completely aware of the various blogging platforms you can choose from.

In this case, to choose the best blogging platform, you need to consider the pros and cons of each platform and according to your needs…Choose the best one.

Image Credit - Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
In the previous article (here), we were discussing about starting a completely free blog, where I mentioned about Blogger and WordPress.com as the most famous free blogging platforms. Both these platforms solve the basic necessity of building a blog – i.e. domain and hosting, by providing free sub-domains and free web space.
Note that we are not discussing about WordPress.org here. WordPress.org is almost completely different that WordPress.com though both of them work on the same core system. To start a blog on WordPress.org, you need to buy both a domain as well as hosting yourself.
Here, we are going to discuss about WordPress.com and Blogger only.
Both these blogging platforms have a huge list of differences which you MUST consider before choosing the best one for yourself.
Let us have a look at the general pros and cons of each of them first.

1. Blogger
Blogger is a widely used and completely free blogging platform by Google. It provides a free sub-domain of its site, eg. xyz.blogspot.com as well as truly unlimited web space on its own server.

Pros:
1. Easy to setup and maintain.
2. Truly unconditional unlimited web space.
3. Free sub-domain.
4. No Third Party (or even Google) Ads run on your blog for their profit against your will.
5. 1 GB free images hosting with Picassa which can be extended at a minimal cost. No limit of web space for blog posts though.
6. Can customize your template (blog theme), add new HTML codes and create your own theme without any restriction.
7. Can run HTML as well as Javascript codes on your blog, thus enables use of Google Adsense and other advertising services.
8. Almost 0% chances of your blog getting hacked.
9. Huge collection of free themes available online to give your blog a new fresh look.
10. In-built stats counter to check traffic to your blog. Also Google Analytics (another better traffic stats indicator) can be installed.

Cons:
1. Editing the template requires knowledge of HTML.
2. Psychological effect – Now a days, more and more spam bloggers prefer ‘blogger’ platform because of its ease of use and so the first look of a blogger blog hosted on free sub-domain raises the impression of spam.
This effect can easily be removed by buying a domain and shifting your blogger blog to that custom domain. Anyways, talking about starting a blog with zero expense…people prefer the name xyz.wordpress.com than xyz.blogspot.com
3. SEO, i.e. Search Engine Optimization is a term used for the methods used to improve a blog’s ranking in search engine result pages.
No need to worry about this new term yet!
I am just saying that SEO is a bit more difficult in Blogger than WordPress.com or I must say that it is difficult if you are lazy. Because WordPress.com provides some features for automatic SEO while some of these features are absent in Blogger.
But once you learn the basics of SEO, you can easily optimize your blogger site with little effort.

2. WordPress.com
WordPress.com is another almost free blogging platform by Automattic. WordPress.com also provides free sub-domain. eg xyz.wordpress.com and a limited amount of free web space.

Pros:
1. Easy to setup and maintain.
2. Free sub-domain.
3. 3GB free web space that includes space for your blog posts as well as images.
4. Easier, direct and automatic SEO compared to Blogger.
5. Highly secure system with very rare chances of getting hacked.

Cons:
1. Did you notice that I have underlined the word ‘almost’ in the first paragraph about WordPress.com? That is because most of its features are free up-to a limit and also, there are some extra features which are not compulsory, are available by paying some annual price.
2. 3GB of web space, which can be extended at a cost starting from $20/year.
3. You cannot modify the CSS used on your blog, thus disabling you from making changes to the design of your blog.
4. You cannot add any plugin or HTML/Javascript code to your blog. Thus no Adsense, no Analytics. Though advertisement can be enabled if your blog receives more than 25000 traffic/month by using a feature called Ad control where you have to share 50% of your income to it.
5. Third party ads seldom run on your blog by WordPress.com for their profit. Disabling these ads require a feature costing $29.97/year
6. Can’t use your own theme. You have to choose a theme from the list of about 200 themes provided by WordPress.com itself. Not a large problem though.

Conclusion For Blogger vs WordPress.com
If you are just looking for the best platform for building a small blog without any big future idea for it, then both Blogger and WordPress.com can offer you the basic platform to start your blog.
If you have some future ideas of building a larger blog with an eye on monetizing it, go for Blogger.
And if you are looking for a more professional blog with large scale ideas…then consider investing some money on your blog and avoid a free sub-domain. In this case, remove WordPress.com completely from your mind and think about only Blogger and WordPress.org.

Over to you!
Planning to start a blog on any of these two blogging platforms?
Which one did you decide? Blogger or WordPress.com?
Do comment and let us know.
And do remind me if I missed something in this article, OK?
Happy Blogging!


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