Top Free Blogging Platforms

 

WordPress.org

Want the honest truth? Among these blog sites, the one I would recommend without hesitation is WordPress.
WordPress is the #1 and most popular blogging platform in this best free blog sites list, but what makes it so great?
Here’s the Deal: 
WordPress offers you ultimate customization and easy to use options that are very beginner friendly.
If you want to be taken seriously and have the opportunity to generate income from your blog, WordPress is without a doubt the way to go. A small investment that can go a very long way (most of the largest blogs in the world that generate significant monthly income utilize WordPress).
To make things even better, it comes with a ton of really cool features and plugins that can easily help you make your blog look stunning and professional.
Downloadable blogging (and website management) software, as well as the most popular blogging platform out there.
Could I have started with anything else? WordPress is the most popular blogging platform of them all, currently powering more than 25 percent of the entire web. Read: one in four websites is built with WordPress. Just wow!

• Price. Couldn’t be better – it’s $0 for the software itself.
• Hosting included? No. The software you get from WordPress.org is a downloadable package, which you then have to upload/install on a web server you already manage.
• Do you get your own domain? No. A custom domain name is something you have to buy separately. Then you can hook it up to your hosting account.
• Any prior skills required? / Ease of use. Self-hosted WordPress certainly isn’t a no-learning-curve kind of thing. Installing it and then configuring it properly will take 20 minutes to an hour if you haven’t done this before. However, after that, using this blogging platform on a daily basis to publish your posts is very straightforward. Plus, you can find great guides online that make the whole thing even easier.
• Designs available? A load. There’s more than enough free themes in the official directory at WordPress.org. Plus, there are literally hundreds of theme stores / theme houses that offer myriads of custom designs.
• Plugins and extensions. WordPress offers extreme extensibility. Again, there are more than 42,000 free plugins in the official directory, and who knows how many more available throughout the web.

Who’s WordPress.org perfect for?

• Bloggers who want to make money on top of their blog.
• Bloggers who want to make the blog a part of their business.
• Professional bloggers.
• Hobby bloggers who want to have control over everything.

Due to WordPress’ extreme customization possibilities, it’s the perfect choice if you want to build a professional blog that’s going to play an important role in your business. With self-hosted WordPress, you retain full control over your website and the way it looks and performs.

Blogger.com

Blogger is owned by Google and represents a free blog-hosting website. It was massively popular at the turn of the millennium but it has lost some ground since then. Even so, it still has some great services, even if they are a bit basic.
You can login with a Gmail account and have your first up within an hour. There is also an Adsense monetization option, layout customization, and the option to edit the coding.
The downsides here are that you don’t have a domain to call your own unless you pay $10/year. The options, while diverse, are basic when compared to other platforms previously mentioned.
Google essentially owns your blog, so they can take it down whenever they want if you rub them the wrong way. Even with all this considered, Blogger is an excellent way to try out your hand at blogging.

An old-school hosted blogging platform.

Blogger is one of the oldest blogging platforms out there. Currently, it’s run by Google, so all you need to sign up is your standard Google account. Similarly to WordPress.com, Blogger takes care of all the technical heavy lifting, allowing you to just focus on creating content.

• Price. $0.
• Hosting included? Yes, Blogger takes care of hosting your blog for no additional payment.
• Do you get your own domain? By default, you get a subdomain like example.blogspot.com. You can hook up your custom domain too, but you have to acquire it separately.
• Any prior skills required? / Ease of use. Blogger is easy to use, albeit a little outdated compared to some more modern solutions like WordPress.com or Medium. Setting up your blog is still very easy and quick. No skills required to start blogging under Blogger.
• Designs available? Just a standard layout editor (content/sidebar). Apart from that, there’s not much you can do in terms of the design of your blog.
• Plugins and extensions. No external plugins available.

Who’s Blogger perfect for?

• Hobby bloggers and personal blogs.

Maybe 10 years ago Blogger could have been considered a huge hit, but right now it’s a shadow of its former self. I don’t advise using it for anything other than personal blogs.

Tumblr.com

Tumblr was that guy that shows up to a brawl late. WordPress and Blogger were going at it when this company walked in awkwardly. They had a unique setup though and a different method of blogging that earned them a lot of users very quickly.
The entire website was built on the concept of “micro-blogging” and allows for easy uploading of short stories, videos, and photos. You won’t need to worry about publishing permissions or managing complex coding here.
Of course all is not perfect on Tumblr. There is no plugin compatibility here and limited visual customization options. It’s all very basic, but the user-friendly interface means that you can get content up and out there much faster than other sites, especially if you’re not versed in the more complex aspects of blogging.
Yahoo recently purchased them, so their growth isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Here is some additional information about the company:

A hip micro blogging hosted platform with a social network aspect.

Tumblr is a great blogging platform optimized specifically for bloggers who want to publish short-form content, such as micro-blogs, quotes, images, videos, and animated GIFs. Tumblr is also a community of users, ready to promote and comment on each other’s work.

• Price. $0.
• Hosting included? Yes, Tumblr hosts your blog for no additional cost.
• Do you get your own domain? By default, you get a subdomain like example.tumblr.com. Hooking up your own custom domain is possible too (you need to get the domain elsewhere)
• Any prior skills required? / Ease of use. Absolutely no skills at all required to start and run a Tumblr blog. The interface is the most user-friendly one of the 8 blogging platforms we’re reviewing here. Tumblr blogs are easy to set up and easy to run afterwards.
• Designs available? There’s a lot of designs you can choose from, although many of them paid.
• Plugins and extensions. None.

Who’s Tumblr perfect for?

• Hobby bloggers.
• One-topic blogs.
• Micro blogs.
• Blogs publishing different types of content (quotes, posts, images, videos, etc.)

Tumblr is the blogging platform for you if you’re not planning to turn your blog into a business project, or if you don’t care about advanced features and extensions. Great solution for small blogs with not a lot of content and irregular posting schedule.

Medium

• In a sentence: A publishing platform for your blog posts, stories and articles.
  Medium has grown in popularity a lot during the last couple of years (more than a million people have joined Medium). In short, it’s a community of writers and bloggers, all using the same looking site design to share their opinions and stories on various topics.
  
• Price. $0.
• Hosting included? Yes, Medium handles it completely.
• Do you get your own domain? Not included. Everybody gets to publish under their profile (e.g. medium.com/@name/). However, quite recently Medium enabled its users to hook up their own custom domains to individual stories on Medium. Again, this means that individual stories can now use custom domains, not individual user profiles.
• Any prior skills required? / Ease of use. Not at all. Medium is extremely easy to use. All you need to do is sign up, and you can start publishing your stories/posts right away. No learning curve at all.
• Designs available? None. Everybody gets the same design.
• Plugins and extensions. None. Although Medium has some great publishing and typography features built-in.

Who’s Medium perfect for?

• Writers looking to build their brand. Medium is great to get instant readership for your stories.
• Hobby bloggers.
• Company blogs hosted outside of the company’s website.

In the end, Medium is great if you want to publish individual stories that aren’t necessarily related. Medium helps spread your content by using custom algorithms as well as editorial curation. If you just want to “experiment with this blogging thing,” Medium is the way to do it.

Squarespace

Squarespace is one of the best all-in-one website building solutions out there. You can use it to launch blogs, business sites, e-commerce stores, and much more. Fun fact, Squarespace is the only platform on this list that invested in a Super Bowl ad (twice).

• Price. Subscription-based, $8-$24 / month.
• Hosting included? Yes.
• Do you get your own domain? Yes, you get a custom domain with your subscription.
• Any prior skills required? / Ease of use. No. Squarespace is ultra easy to use, even if it’s your first time building a website or blog. The interface is clear, intuitive, and powerful. Publishing new content is simple as well, and their custom LayoutEngine lets you arrange your blog content however you like through drag-and-drop.
• Designs available? A number of great-looking and modern designs to choose from. Squarespace makes it a goal of theirs to always go with the trends and stay on top of what’s popular design-wise.
• Plugins and extensions. A range of the most important features built-in from the get-go, plus there are external plugins available through another site.

Who’s it perfect for?

• Business owners who need a great-looking and optimized website, and a blog to go alongside.
• Artists, musicians, photographers, creatives in general who want to blog and also showcase their work in an effective way.
• Restaurants, cafes, etc., running a company blog.
• Users with no design skills who want to be able to build a blog from scratch on their own.

 

Wix

To say this simply, Wix is basically like Squarespace, but different. It offers similar features in terms of its website-building and blog-building ability, but the execution is of a slightly different style.

• Price. Subscription-based, $0-$18 / month.
• Hosting included? Yes.
• Do you get your own domain? By default, you get a subdomain like example.wix.com. You can also add a custom domain that you already own.
• Any prior skills required? / Ease of use. Wix is very easy to use when it comes to launching a new website. However, you do need to go through a couple of additional steps to add the blog module. Nothing too difficult but still. Overall, Wix gives you a step-by-step wizard to get through the whole process.
• Designs available? More than 500 designs available.
• Plugins and extensions. There’s a number of essential site management features built-in, and apart from that, you can also extend your site through the Wix App Market.

Who’s it perfect for?

• Quite similarly to Squarespace, business owners who need a great-looking and optimized website, and a blog to go alongside.
• Users with no design skills who want to be able to build a blog from scratch on their own.
• Artists, musicians, photographers, creatives in general who want to blog and also showcase their work in an effective manner.

Wix is an interesting alternative to Squarespace, especially for users who don’t have a budget to invest and would like to keep things free. That being said, the blog module isn’t that configurable. So if what you want most of all is a blog, you’re better off with another platform.