Monday 1 September 2014

Wordpress vs Blogger Non-Technical Comparison

Now this is not a tech-savvy comparison between WordPress and Blogger. It's a simple comparison from the perspective of a pretty normal person (although I work in the career of websites/systems development :)) who decided to make usage of Blogger - since it's free and already easily accessed through my Google account, and then thought of trying out WordPress (the free version) to decide which will meet their needs and which to continue using. Thus, hence a really simple table with the pros and cons of each that I see:
WordPress Blogger
Price Free with some extra feature or further customization option that you need to pay for (No such thing as free lunch!). Free and already comes with your Google account. (No such thing as free lunch! You'll always have some kind of limitations).
Hosting You can either use the wordpress.com, or you can get your own hosting and domain name, which will then create the extra work of getting them and paying for them, but then you'll call it your very own. If you're creating your own business, you'll definetly need to buy a hosting and domain name, so this will be the best choice for you. Blogger will add the blogspot. to your blog URL, but you'll need not worry about getting your own hosting nor domain name as long as you don't mind that extra phrase.
Creating the blog You can add unlimited blogs for wordpress.com, but for wp.org, you will need to have a new installation for each with its own DB. Your Blogger account can hold up to 100 different blogs.
Theming Plenty of free themes to choose from, or you can go premium. The free themes are limited in their customization. Depending on the theme you choose, you might need to pay (around $30) to just even change color, but once you paid them, you can have enough flexibility to play with your theme. A few limited choices, but you have all the control over it. If you know some HTML and CSS, you can play around and change what you need.
Editor Both are almost the same (not a big fan of either) with some basic formatting options and the rest you'll need to create in HTML, e.g., creating this table: I did it in Dreamweaver first to edit HTML easily till I'm satisfied, then copied it. Adding images and placing them in a certain spot can sometimes (many times) be a pain as well, and I always fix their mess by editing the HTML. I'm also having hard time adding breaks within the table cells here (WP) without risking the font going bigger, and I have no control over it from the HTML (so excuse the writing blocks till I figure out a way :S).
Widgets and features A huge library of widgets and doesn't need a developer or code knowledge to add or configure; nevertheless, the free widgets available with the wp.com are sometimes pain and annoying because you can't actually edit the HTML, like the Goodreads widget that I can't edit the font size to fit nicely in the right column, so I had to add a blank one and add the code from Goodreads. A few available, but you have the option to add new through Javascripts and HTML you can add through the blank widgets they offer.
Posting WP options when publishing a new post are numerous; you can save a draft for later, schedule your post to be published even when you're not online, limit post visibility online, and review older versions of the posts to compare and select one to publish. Publicize is also another feature here not found in blogger (at least not per single post), but I haven't tried it yet. It pushes your post to your social networks for wider visibility range. Blogger has pretty much the same options, except for the visibility limitations and revisions review and retrieval.
Stats Has it's own stats, but unfortunately, you cannot stop it from tracking your own view to your own blog.If you need to add the Google Analytics, you'll need to go premium. Has it's own stats as well, which you can opt out your own pageviews; however, many mentioned that they're not at all reliable ... still it's fine.You can also add the Google Analytics (of course!! both children of the same family ;)) directly in the template HTML or just the code under Settings (easy = more appealing).
Dashboard We all (almost all bloggers) have seen it and know it. It haven't changed much over the years. Design is pretty sleek, but has a long menu of options. Pretty easy to understand and easy after a very few minutes of logging into the account. Layout is neat and tidy, minimal design.
Storage 3 GB Up to 1 GB of total storage, shared with Picasa Web. If you've upgraded to Google+, your photos will be stored in Google+ Photos, where you have 15GB of storage space shared with Gmail and Drive.
Security Known to be spammed and hacked. It's a Google product! ;)
Portability And by that I mean how easy can you move the content to another platform, needs no brain how easy it is to upgrde to WP.org since they are on the same platform, but not that easy when moving to another opensource platform, e.g., Drupal. Haven't really tried it or heard about how wasy it would. Guess I ahve to try it myself :).
Ownership What you create is yours. Blogger and its content belongs to Google and if they decided to take it down, your content will be lost.
Social Sharing WP has all the big names there to add to your posts/blog to help you maximize your reacable audience. AS mentioned in Posting, each post has its own options to turn on and share your post on social networks when you've published your post. With Blogger, +1 is its sister, so for Google why would they go to someone else?! They don't have that publicizing option, but I gues people can go around this by using the sharing options available per post.
SEO  N/A  Google of course helps a lot :)
Extendability  WP wins with it's paid and free options. and all its available plugins that help you do anything you like.  What you start with is as far as you can go; after all it's free.
Permalinks Available with the option to edit as needed and with a customizable and user-friendly URLs that makes each page appear as a directory of its own. Available with the option to customize, but URL appears with the page extension at the end of it
Commenting  You have to log in to be able to comment, either with WP, twitter, FB, or G+. No anonymous comments which of course helps a lot in avoiding spam, but many people might not feel like logging in to leave a comment. Users have a lot of options they can use to log in and comment, but there's also the option of Anonymous, which might get you more spam (which you can moderate of course), but anyone will be able to directly comment anytime from anywhere without the concern of logging in (though everything now is connected and with the mobile devices, it's easier than ever since you're always logged in). However; Blogger have another nice and quick feature which is rating the post with funny, cool or interesting that would help as feedback, but not sure if helps in promoting the blog or increase ranking on Google.
Users  You can create other users with specific roles to manage your site.  It's YOUR blog that you created using YOUR account, so no one else has access to it but you.

This is just a basic comparison and I'm sure by keeping using both, more assets of each will come up and would help more in making a good decision of which to use based on the goal behind why I want to have a blog and what I would use it for. There are other features that are only available on Blogger, like creating campaigns and making money out of them and track your earnings, that I don't see yet in WP, but will keep looking and will sure get back here and update the list of features with the new stuff :).

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