Best free blogging platforms compared in 2020

Starting a fantastic blog for free! Yes, It is possible now.

 

There are several handful platforms are providing free space for blogging. It is very easy to start blogging and build-up without any headache. If you are thinking, for free do they reduce crucial features? Definitely not, Here we will look at all the aspects. Hence you can decide which platform suits you.

If you are a hobby writer, then definitely go for free versions and also make online presence very easily nowadays. The actual fact that you are not owning the full domain, but you have a subdomain. Like yourdomain.blogger.com or yourdomain.wordpress.com etc. 

Positive facts 

1. You can start your blogging without spending money
2. Introduce yourself to an online platform
3. You can learn what others did
4. Develop yourself to make up for the other experienced people.
5. Develop quality traffic 
6. Learn how to increase traffic.
7. Money making from free blogging

These platforms are providing free space for the user, under their main domain. So we are getting their name also with your blog name. That means if you are getting a good amount of audience for your blog, which is under a subdomain, the SEO ranking will get for your main domain. Moreover all the platforms have their own community to support, even within a couple of minutes you will get the answer for your query. 

If you want to start a blog for learning things and attracting audiences then a free version is good for you. Every platform is having good sides and bad sides. So keep looking at your requirements once and go through the page.

Lets starting here with the top 9 free blogging platforms and their pros and cons.

                                WordPress

WordPress is the largest using CMS in the world, started in 2003. Over 35% of percentage websites are using this CMS. You can visit wordpress.org for downloading free software and wordpress.com can create your blogs instantly. You can trust this and will give you enough confidence to build your world.

Features of WordPress.

• Simplicity    
• scalability                                   
• Flexibility       
• Publish with Ease Publishing Tools.                       
• User Management                                           
• Media Management                                           
• Extended theme and plugins                                   
• Built-in Comments support                                       
• Own Your Data               
• Freedom                                       
• Community
• Contribute
• support
• Easy Installation and Upgrades without knowing the coding

Login in WordPress much easier, the process of simple windows will guide you to straight to writing blogs. We can edit every aspect of pages with a text editor. But drag and drop feature may lack, but after familiarising the menus will be good credit in the future.

The support for WordPress is better than other platforms, because of a wide range of users.So don’t worry about the support. The statistical content will guide you on how people are contacting, the comments, visitors, page likes, etc.

If you can tolerate some adds coming in your windows, then definitely go signal for beginners for free with WordPress.

You can also read the article Why is WordPress so popular? here

                                Blogger.com

Blogger is a Google-owned purely blogging website. The primary feature of Blogger is, that it is free of cost, easy to use, high accessibility. The blogger having industry reputation and is still owned. As you know current top bloggers were having their Blogspot account once. They started here and grown exponentially. 

I told you this platform is owned by Google, so you can simply use your google account to login and you will direct to the blog page. Blogger is purely for blogging, so passionate writers love the way of Blogger.com

The main pros of bloggers are Millions of people currently using it, but not up to WordPress. You will get unlimited main features for free, with free SSL installed. This platform is very easy to use, even use multiple blogs with a single mail login. Blogger having speed, technical support, definitely it is SEO friendly.

There are limitation for blogger platform, that should be mentioned here.

1. Limited tool availability

2. Documentation and support needed to be upgrade.

3.User forums engagement is less comapared to other platforms.

It specifically concentrates on blogging only. Today’s websites hold static content and blog as a page that contains the latest updates. But the blog does not provide you static website.

                                   Wix 

This is made for both beginners and experienced, the matter is a very versatile console. This drag and drop page builder holds much market share. Wix has a major advantage in giving static content along with the blog page. It has a good collection of free and premium themes and templates for various purposes. You can launch the site by answering some of the questions after selecting the appropriate themes, you all set to write.

Wix offers a very intuitive console with unlimited pages. The editor named Wix editor, which is very helpful to new users. Also this is optimized for mobile platforms, known for a blog, you can build even E-commerce sites, custom domain purchase support, SEO friendly. The major pros can be appended with a high-speed website and a powerful support team.

The major flaws of Wix do not have unlimited plans. And also expect some adds from your starter plan. The app store doesn’t provide more reasonable applications. The site is not transferable in Wix, so some of them found this weird if they required to do so. Even though we purchase a premium plan, we only get a single website for the host. But others are 2nd level plan itself they provide unlimited.

                                 Weebly

Weebly comes with an idea as Wix doing. They have built-in drag and drop console, which is useful for beginners.

The editor comes handy and having the features of photo gallery, sidebar, adding multimedia contents, adding buttons, etc. Also bundled with social media icons, newsletter subscriptions, forms and more other features.

You can add the custom domain, which should be purchased, with Weebly.

Within the free plan you will get five custom pages, 500MB space, and subdomain. High content website builders please choose other platforms( Like image gallery, video gallery, etc). Weebly adds are coming in the footer area and not interfere in your main contents anyway.

Pros 

1. Weebly has a mobile app
2. Site speed is great
3. The editor is very simple and easy to use
4. Responsive theme
5. Free domain for 1 year.
6. Compatible with an eCommerce site.

Cons 

1. Limited tools for blogging
2. Transfer from other platform is tedious
3. Limited resources of storage

                                 Medium 

According to DMR stats, around 60 million visitors are coming in medium publishing platforms. 7.5 million posts are published in 2016. So they support getting reached your article to the right people. Weebly is a platform that can build a free blog, by doing some simple steps in login. 60 million is not a small number, and your topic will get enough traffic over the internet.

Weebly allows other competitors to build your webpage by drag and drop, and it is easy for a beginner as a blogger. The UI of the medium is stunning, very user friendly and they mainly focus on the text contents. Hence reading experience is good for medium.

The medium is proprietary webspace and they have all the rights to change their terms and conditions at any time. No guarantee for your content as compared with other free popular CMS.

Discuss some Pros and Cons

Pros

1. The user interface is stunning
2. The reading experience is great
3. An inexperienced user can develop their site within minutes
4. The vast range of targeted audience will get your contents
5. SEO friendly approach
6. Use of tags

Cons

1. Although the medium community is small and you have to promote your content by yourself
2. If you are getting enough traffic due to your quality work, Medium is getting benefits from it.
3. The analytics feature is basic
4. You don’t have like button for the posts
5. Content is held by the Medium. If change is terms may cost your contents.

                                 Tumbler

Tumbler is a microblogging website founded in 2007. This platform is offering free service as your social media. It is dedicated to setting up multimedia content in a single workspace. You can customize your site via the dashboard. Bloggers can also use the Tumbler as a private site if they want to. Around 470 million blogs are present in Tumbler space. The dashboard is the primary customizer window for tumbler users and users can comment, repost, like the post, etc through dash bard itself.

Another important feature is HTML editing. Users have the power to edit HTML codes to control the appearances. 

Tumbler purely supports personal content marketing, not for business uses. So if you are looking for a business platform you should see other platforms.

Pros

1. There is a lot you get for learning
2. You can make more appealing by editing HTML codes
3. If you are an artist then you can make a fan base very easily.
4. You will get a feature as social media
5. Can connect with google analytics

Cons

1. Not for business 
2. The mobile app is that much appealing
3. Anonymous messages may bother you
4. Looking for widgets and plugins for more to customize, then you are in the wrong place

 

                                 Ghost

Just like WordPress, the ghost is also open source and downloadable. The ghost is widely accepted as an online publication platform. It is powered with Javascript, so its performance is great. The ghost is supportable with the Oceanwp theme. Their community support also well up to the mark. You will get a simple and post creation centric admin console on the hatch. Server speed and performance have no complaints. The WordPress having the child theme concept, but ghost having not.  They have built-in SEO features.

They are not a good option for E-commerce or business applications. The ghost doesn’t provide free hosting and has a limited number of themes.

                                 Joomla

The main feature of Joomla is, it is open source. Due to this the one has coding knowledge, changes it and can distribute without a license fee. It is designed also for E-commerce site developments. Its intuitive console way very useful for newcomers and can design easily. Joomla can handle more complex tasks the WordPress.

WIthout coding experience no one can obtain custom design. The add ons and attachable modules are limited in Joomla. There may find some compatibility issues in the Joomla platform. The admin area more mobile-friendly  The webpage itself designed as responsive. The update will come on Joomla as your choices. You will get SEO support including the package. There are over 3 million posts on the Joomla forum with 800K active registered users in the official Joomla forum. That’s far good for your support.

You can search the contents from your admin area. Custom fields are important features of Joomla 3 also added a Repeatable field. There is Joomla having inbuilt multilingual support.

                                Drupal

Most famous sites like Weather.com and nbcuniversal.com are using drupal as a platform. Marketers and developers can manage with drupal. Hence my point is if you are looking for a professional website then go for drupal.

Drupal stretched along the US, London, France, mostly used to communicate with people. Media Giants like BBC, NBC, MTV UK trusted drupal as a reliable platform. Drupal 8 is having a more intuitive design console and moreover every built-in theme is responsive. 

Although it is an open-source CMS with a large supportive community all over the world. The platform can be edited and extended to others. Drupal has a great user interface which will allow you to vide range of customizations, and definitely publish the content very easily.  It is a suitable site builder for professional appearance required.

Drupal also follows the latest technologies in oop like PHP,HTML5 and YAML standards. Also incorporated with technologies like jQuary,Backbone.js, Guzzle, Twig, etc.

The installation of the Drupal is very simple and comes with multilingual support. The latest version of Drupal comes with series 8, they focused for integrate product launching. The standard set of features included RSS-Feeds, Menu management, layout customizations, administration, user administrations, etc.

It has over 7k plugins in the market to match the requirements. Some of the handy own tools made drupal a game-changer. Tools like feeds, SEO, Admin, etc. User maintaining is not a headache in drupal user, the best industry managing tools for user setup, credential management, etc will take care.

Every CMS has its own advantages and disadvantages. So drupal also posses some of the negative feedback from users.

The compatibility is an issue with Drupal with other sorts of software. More the capability the load also will be more, so there you might feel little slowness in loading. It is not that much user friendly. Drupal is working on this learning curve after launching D7. The documentation still under development. Some of the documents having incomplete data, actually it is not good for a beginner. The latest version is under development to stabilize it.

Dear friends, please choose CMS platforms wisely. The price plan of some of them had given you an idea, which one should you opt for. Every platform its own features and having uniqueness among others. So please think definitely you want free because, after your hard work, you have to convert into money-making to your own website not owned by others. It’s true that some of them provide google add sense enabling, but still having the doubt of SEO ranking to the main domain holder.

Good Luck!