Blogger and WordPress.com are both popular blogging platforms. Both allow you to set up a complete blog for free in a matter of minutes.
In this article, we’ll compare WordPress.com with Blogger to find out which of the two is a better solution for your blogging needs.
Comparing Blogger With WordPress.com
Before we get started with the comparison, keep in mind that Blogger is fundamentally different from WordPress.com.
Blogger is a free blogging platform. It’s created exclusively for the purpose of blogging, and as such, you’re not advised to use it for other kinds of websites, such as an e-commerce store for example.
WordPress.com, on the other hand, isn’t used exclusively for blogging. You can create virtually any kind of website you want on the WordPress platform—landing pages, brochure sites, e-commerce stores, you name it.
With the core difference out of the way, let’s compare the two platforms across different areas.
Pricing
Blogger is completely free to use. Anyone can go over to blogger.com, sign up for a free account, and set up their blog in no time.
The only payment you might have to make is for the purchase of more storage space for Google Drive, which is where Blogger stores the images used in your blog. Besides that, the service is completely free.
WordPress is a bit different from Blogger in terms of pricing. Yes, you can use WordPress for free, but your blog will be limited to just the default features of WordPress (much like with Blogger), which may not be a good thing for you.
For example, if you’re creating a basic blog to share your opinions and thoughts, then a free plan might suffice. But more often than not, you’ll need one or more features that aren’t included in the free plan. In that case, you have the option of upgrading to a paid plan.
WordPress.com has several paid plans. Each of the paid plans is tailored for a specific use case: there are plans for freelancers, online businesses, and online stores.
Should you go with Blogger or a free version of WordPress.org? I’d recommend going with Blogger, but if you want a standard blog, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid WordPress plan or use another platform.
Winner: Blogger is absolutely free.
Domain Registration
By default, when you create a blog at Blogger.com, your blog will be hosted by Google at the blogspot.com subdomain. As a result, your blog will have a URL that looks like so: kingsleythoughts.blogspot.com.
You can also connect a custom domain name to your blog. Assuming you have purchased the domain from a domain registrar like GoDaddy, you can connect to your domain from within your Blogger admin.
Similarly, WordPress uses the .wordpress.com subdomain by default, and it manifests in the URL of your blog. Free WordPress sites can’t use custom domain names. You’ll have to upgrade to at least their “personal plan” in order to be allowed to set up a custom domain name.
Tie: Either way, you’ll have to buy your own domain name.
Storage
With Blogger, there are several restrictions to keep in mind (though they might change in future).
First of all, as a Blogger user, you are allowed to create up to 100 separate blogs in one account. Each blog can have up to 100 writers, and there’s no limit to how many posts you or the writers can publish on each of them.
In addition, you can add up to 20 static content pages (e.g. Contact Us page, About Us page, etc.), and each page cannot exceed 1MB in size. Blogger uses Google Drive to store images—the allotted space (for images) is 15GB, but you can always upgrade it if you need more space.
WordPress.com’s free plan, on the other hand, allows for an unlimited number of blogs with an unlimited number of writers, but there are limitations in other aspects such as image and file space being limited to 3GB.
You can always remove these limits by purchasing a higher-up plan.
Winner: Blogger has more free storage, though both platforms come with a lot of storage included.
Themes
When it comes to themes and overall design, WordPress.com is undoubtedly superior to Blogger for several reasons.
First, WordPress has a very active community of developers who devote their time to creating solid and responsive themes. Many of them are premium themes, but there are a lot of decent themes as well.
There’s one caveat to keep in mind, though. With a free WordPress plan, you won’t be able to upload your own themes. You’ll need to sign up for their paid plan to do that.
By contrast, Blogger doesn’t have nearly as many modern themes as WordPress. Though there are many templates in Blogger, only a few of them are modern and usable. The rest are old, clunky, and outdated.
Winner: WordPress has thousands of amazing free and premium themes.
Site Design
WordPress uses a modern block editor called Gutenberg, which makes designing your site very intuitive. Using the editor, you can further customize colors, background images, and other visual elements in your theme layout.
Once again, there’s a limitation to this—to access advanced customization features, you’re required to pay an annual fee.
Blogger is free, so you don’t have to pay to customize your site. Blogger also gives you more control over the appearance of your blog, although you’ll be required to be familiar with HTML and CSS to do that.
Winner: WordPress makes it easy to design and customize your site.
Adding Content
In terms of publishing content (adding text, images, and so on), they are both quite easy to use. Blogger is still using a basic text editor, while WordPress is using the Gutenberg (modern) editor.
Winner: WordPress has a more intuitive and powerful editor for creating content.
Content Organization
If your intended blog is going to have a large variety of content that needs to be carefully organized and categorized, you’re better off with WordPress.com than Blogger. This is because WordPress.com supports a larger variety of categorization methods than Blogger.
With WordPress, you have access to categories, subcategories, tags, and other helpful tool organizational tools. With Blogger, on the other hand, you’re limited to just tags—which it calls “labels”.
Winner: WordPress has a much more sophisticated system and interface for organizing content.
Analytics
When you’re running a blog, it’s important to get insights into your traffic. This will help you figure out the best kind of content to put out, the best time to put it out, and so on.
Within Blogger, you’ll have access to a powerful, full-fledged analytics tool known as Google Analytics. You can use this tool to analyze your traffic and get information about the source of your blog visitors, what they’re clicking on, how long they’re staying, and so on.
WordPress.com’s analytics tool, which is called Stats, doesn’t provide all the details that Google Analytics does. Regardless, you’ll still get all the typical information that you’ll need in most cases. Note that you can’t use Google Analytics on WordPress.com.
Winner: Blogger provides direct access to Google Analytics. To use Analytics with WordPress, you’ll need a self-hosted WordPress server.
Monetization
It’s easier to monetize a site on Blogger than on WordPress. Blogger sites can earn revenue through AdSense, Google’s ad delivery network. Installing AdSense on your Blogger site is also easy and takes just a few clicks.
Free WordPress sites are difficult to monetize. However, you can easily monetize a WordPress.com blog on a paid plan through affiliate links or WordAds (WordPress.com’s ad delivery network).
Winner: Blogger makes it easier to monetize a free site. For a paid or self-hosted WordPress site, however, there are many options.
Conclusion
If cost is your only concern, you might choose Blogger. The free WordPress.com plan doesn’t allow custom domain names, and that might be a deal-breaker for some.
However, if you don’t need a custom domain name, or you are willing to spend a bit of money for a paid plan, I recommend going with WordPress.com. WordPress has the Gutenberg editor and a vast collection of modern themes to pick from. Blogger is easy enough to use but just not as feature-rich as WordPress.com.