Are you plan­ning to start a new blog? Not sure whether you should use Word­Press or Blog­ger as your blog plat­form? Well, we can help.

Word­Press and Blog­ger are the two most pop­u­lar blog­ging plat­forms on the inter­net. They both let you cre­ate a blog eas­i­ly. How­ev­er, they work quite dif­fer­ent­ly, and each has spe­cif­ic pros and cons.

In this arti­cle, we will com­pare Blog­ger vs Word­Press side by side and show you the dif­fer­ences that mat­ter. Our goal is to help you decide which is the bet­ter plat­form for your needs.

What to Look for in Your Blog Platform?

Before we begin our Word­Press vs. Blog­ger com­par­i­son, let’s cov­er some impor­tant things to look for when choos­ing a blog plat­form.

• Ease of Use: You need a sim­ple and easy to use plat­form to quick­ly set up your blog, add con­tent, and grow your audience.
• Flex­i­bil­i­ty: You need a plat­form that lets you add more fea­tures or use more resources as your blog grows.
• Mon­e­ti­za­tion options: Do you want to make mon­ey online with your blog? If yes, then you need to choose a plat­form which has plen­ty of mon­e­ti­za­tion options.
• Sup­port: You may need sup­port while cre­at­ing your blog, design­ing, or man­ag­ing it. If you get stuck or have ques­tions, you’ll want to get help as quick­ly and eas­i­ly as possible.

Aside from the above, you also need to con­sid­er plat­form costs, avail­able design options, SEO opti­miza­tion fea­tures for traf­fic, and more.

With that said, let’s com­pare how Word­Press and Blog­ger stack up against these requirements. 

Table of Con­tents – Word­Press vs Blogger

Since this is a detailed com­par­i­son, please use the quick links below to jump straight to dif­fer­ent parts of the article.

• Overview: Word­Press vs Blogger
• Ease of Use
• Own­er­ship
• Con­trol
• Design Options
• Secu­ri­ty
• Sup­port
• Future
• Porta­bil­i­ty
• Pric­ing
• Con­clu­sion: Blog­ger vs Word­Press – Which One Is Better?

Note: This com­par­i­son is between self-host­ed WordPress.org and Blog­ger (not WordPress.com vs Blog­ger). See our guide on the dif­fer­ences between self-host­ed WordPress.org vs WordPress.com.

Overview – WordPress vs Blogger

As we men­tioned above, Word­Press and Blog­ger are the two most wide­ly used blog man­age­ment plat­forms in the world. 

Accord­ing to blog tech­nol­o­gy usage stats from BuiltWith, Word­Press is the #1 most pop­u­lar blog soft­ware. It’s used by about 38% of all sites in the top 1 mil­lion sites and by an aston­ish­ing 95% of all the blogs among those sites.

The same report shows Blog­ger as the sec­ond most pop­u­lar plat­form used by about 1% of the blogs in the top 1 mil­lion sites. 

We also com­pared the search terms ‘Word­Press’ and ‘Blog­ger’ in Google Trends to see the inter­est over time for each:

As shown in the screen­shot above, Word­Press steadi­ly rose to pop­u­lar­i­ty beat­ing Blog­ger by 2005. It’s still much more pop­u­lar today.

What is WordPress?

Word­Press is free open source soft­ware that allows you to eas­i­ly cre­ate a web­site, blog, or an online store. Start­ed In 2003, Word­Press now pow­ers more than 38% of all web­sites on the internet. 

You can down­load the Word­Press soft­ware for free and use it on as many sites as you want. 

To cre­ate a blog in Word­Press, you will need to buy a host­ing plan and a domain name, so you can install Word­Press. It sounds a bit com­plex at first; how­ev­er, it is pret­ty sim­ple with tons of user-friend­ly tuto­ri­als on WPBe­gin­ner and oth­er sites. 

Our team can even set­up your Word­Press blog for free. Learn more about our free blog set­up ser­vice.

What is Blogger?

Blog­ger is a free blog­ging ser­vice from Google. Start­ed in 1999 by Pyra Labs, it was acquired by Google in 2003.

Blog­ger is a free blog host­ing ser­vice that lets you cre­ate a blog with­out pay­ing any­thing at all. You also get a free Blogspot subdomain.

Your blog’s address will look some­thing like this: www.yourname.blogspot.com.

How­ev­er, you can also use a cus­tom domain name with your blog. For that, you need to reg­is­ter a domain name through third-par­ty domain reg­is­trars, then con­nect it to your Blog­ger blog. 

Ease of Use – Blogger vs WordPress

Most peo­ple who want to cre­ate a blog aren’t web devel­op­ers. They might own a small busi­ness or a non-prof­it, want to share their ideas with the world, or be keen to try a new hobby. 

To get their words out there, they need an easy to use blog­ging platform.

Blog­ger – Ease of Use

Blog­ger is a sim­ple blog­ging tool where you can cre­ate a blog in just a few min­utes. You’ll need a Google account to get started. 

Go to the Blog­ger web­site and then sign up with your Google account. After that, click the ‘Cre­ate New Blog’ option. Next, you can choose your dis­play name, then cre­ate a blog title, blog address, and a theme. 

Once you’ve done that, your blog will be set up. Next, you can con­fig­ure blog set­tings, edit your blog lay­out, and add posts. 

The set­up process is pret­ty sim­ple. How­ev­er, if you want to cus­tomize your theme, that’s a lot trick­i­er. To change your blog’s design in Blog­ger, you’ll need HTML skills.

Word­Press – Ease of Use

Set­ting up a blog in Word­Press is a sim­ple and quick process. You won’t need any cod­ing skills. You just need to know how to point-and-click on a com­put­er screen to set up Word­Press and install Word­Press plugins. 

You can fol­low our step by step beginner’s guide on how to start a Word­Press blog, and you’ll be up and run­ning in less than 30 minutes.

Once the set­up is done, you can choose a Word­Press blog theme that’s a good fit for your blog. A theme is like a tem­plate for your blog. It con­trols how your blog looks.

After that, you can install the best Word­Press plu­g­ins to give your Word­Press blog more features.

Adding con­tent to Word­Press is sim­ple with the sys­tem of posts and pages.

You can eas­i­ly cre­ate text con­tent, add images, videos, and oth­er media to your Word­Press posts and pages using the intu­itive block edi­tor.

Aside from the block edi­tor, Word­Press has the option of drag and drop page builders that let you cus­tomize absolute­ly everything.

While the set­up process of Blog­ger is quick­er, Word­Press makes it much eas­i­er to cus­tomize things to look exact­ly how you want.

Win­ner: Word­Press.

Ownership – Blogger vs WordPress

Own­er­ship of your blog is anoth­er cru­cial aspect to con­sid­er while choos­ing a blog site.

Hav­ing full own­er­ship of your blog gives you the free­dom to do any­thing, includ­ing how to han­dle it, how to mon­e­tize it, and when to shut it down. 

Who Owns Your Blog on Blogger?

Blog­ger is a blog­ging ser­vice pro­vid­ed by the tech giant Google. It is free, reli­able, and has enough fea­tures to eas­i­ly pub­lish your con­tent on the web. 

How­ev­er, it is not owned by you. 

Google runs this ser­vice and has the right to shut it down or shut down your access to it at any time. It’s just like Face­book, Twit­ter, and Insta­gram, which can ban peo­ple or sus­pend their accounts with­out warning.

Even if you don’t do any­thing wrong, you could still lose your blog if Google ever decides to stop sup­port­ing Blog­ger. Google has a his­to­ry of aban­don­ing projects with­out warn­ing, such as Feed­burn­er.

Who Owns Your Blog on WordPress?

With Word­Press, you use a Word­Press host­ing provider to host your site. You are free to decide how long you want to run your blog. It won’t be shut down with­out warning. 

Also, you’re not tied to any spe­cif­ic web host. You can move to a new web host at any point if you want to. With Blog­ger, you can’t take your blog any­where except for Blog­ger itself.

When you use Word­Press for your site, you own all your data, and you con­trol what infor­ma­tion you share with any third party. 

Win­ner: Word­Press.

Control and Flexibility – Blogger vs WordPress

Anoth­er impor­tant thing you need to con­sid­er is how much flex­i­bil­i­ty you’ll have. 

Does your blog site let you ful­ly con­trol the design of your blog? Are you able to add new fea­tures to your blog? 

Let’s see how Blog­ger and Word­Press com­pare on this aspect. 

Con­trol and Flex­i­bil­i­ty with Blogger

Blog­ger is designed to be a sim­ple blog­ging tool. That means the things you can do on your Blogspot blog are limited.

Blog­ger has a set of built-in “gad­gets” that let you add fea­tures like adver­tis­ing, sub­scrip­tion links, a con­tact form, and more. But these gad­gets have lim­it­ed func­tion­al­i­ty, and there are no alter­na­tives avail­able for them. They’re all pro­vid­ed by Google.

Advanced options like pop­ups, eCom­merce fea­tures, and more sim­ply aren’t avail­able on the Blog­ger plat­form. This seri­ous­ly lim­its your poten­tial for mak­ing mon­ey using Blogger.

Con­trol and Flex­i­bil­i­ty Options with WordPress

Word­Press is open source soft­ware, so you can eas­i­ly extend it to add new fea­tures. You can add almost any fea­ture imag­in­able to your Word­Press blog with plu­g­ins and third-par­ty integrations. 

There are thou­sands of free and pre­mi­um Word­Press plu­g­ins that allow you to huge­ly mod­i­fy and extend the default features. 

For exam­ple, using plu­g­ins, you could:

• Add an online store to your website
• Cre­ate a port­fo­lio
• Make a pop­up to cap­ture vis­i­tors’ email addresses
• Add social shar­ing buttons

… and much more. 

If you vis­it the plu­g­ins page on WordPress.org, you’ll find over 56,000+ free plu­g­ins there. 

If you have cod­ing skills, you can even cre­ate your own cus­tom plu­g­ins and use them on your blog.

So how do Word­Press vs Blog­ger com­pare for flex­i­bil­i­ty and cus­tomiza­tion options? Word­Press is hands down the best long-term solu­tion for any seri­ous blog­ger who wants to grow their site or build an online busi­ness.

Win­ner: Word­Press.

Appearance and Design Options

The appear­ance or design of your blog plays a vital role in attract­ing vis­i­tors and keep­ing them around. Your blog design needs to give a great first impres­sion to engage users and reduce your site’s bounce rate. 

The design also needs to make your blog easy to use and nav­i­gate to improve the time spent on your blog. 

Blog Design Options in Blogger

Blog­ger only pro­vides a lim­it­ed set of tem­plates to use. These tem­plates are pret­ty basic and have been used on thou­sands of blogs. 

You can change the col­ors and lay­out of these tem­plates using Blogger’s built-in tools. How­ev­er, you can’t cre­ate your own tem­plates or make modifications. 

There are some non-offi­cial Blog­ger tem­plates avail­able, but it can be real­ly tough to find qual­i­ty ones, plus you’ll need to pay for them.

The small range of tem­plates, the lim­it­ed cus­tomiza­tion options, and the lack of lay­out choic­es make Blog­ger seri­ous­ly fall behind in terms of design choices. 

Blog Design Options in WordPress

In Word­Press, there are thou­sands of free and pre­mi­um themes, mak­ing it easy to select the per­fect theme for your blog.

There is a Word­Press theme for any type of web­site you can think of. No mat­ter what your site’s about, you’ll find plen­ty of high-qual­i­ty themes that are easy to mod­i­fy and customize.

You can find a col­lec­tion of 7,400+ free Word­Press themes on the offi­cial WordPress.org themes page. If you go to Appear­ance » Themes in your Word­Press dash­board, you can search ‘blog’ to view the themes specif­i­cal­ly designed for blogs. 

You should find more than 2,000 free blog themes:

And, you can get more themes from third-par­ty theme providers like Ele­gant Themes, Themi­fy, and Astra Themes.

Not only that, you can also use the sim­ple drag and drop Word­Press page builders to design stun­ning land­ing pages eas­i­ly in WordPress. 

You can even cre­ate your own cus­tom Word­Press themes with­out writ­ing any code. 

Win­ner: Word­Press.

Security – WordPress vs Blogger

Secu­ri­ty is anoth­er essen­tial aspect to con­sid­er when select­ing your blog plat­form. If your site is black­list­ed or hacked, you could lose months or years of hard work. 

Man­ag­ing Secu­ri­ty in Blogger

Using Blog­ger, you have the added advan­tage of Google’s robust, secure plat­form. You don’t need to wor­ry about man­ag­ing your server’s resources, secur­ing your blog, or cre­at­ing backups. 

How­ev­er, if Blog­ger goes down, your site will too … along with all the oth­er sites host­ed on Blog­ger. You can’t do any­thing to recov­er your blog when the Blog­ger site is down. 

Man­ag­ing Secu­ri­ty in WordPress

Word­Press is quite secure, but since it is a self-host­ed solu­tion, you’re respon­si­ble for secu­ri­ty and back­ups.

The good news is that there are plen­ty of Word­Press plu­g­ins that make it eas­i­er for you. 

For exam­ple, you can use Updraft­Plus or Vault­Press for cre­at­ing a back­up, and Sucuri for web-appli­ca­tion fire­wall to improve site security. 

For a com­plete guide on man­ag­ing secu­ri­ty in Word­Press, see our ulti­mate Word­Press secu­ri­ty guide.

Win­ner: Tie.

Support – WordPress vs Blogger

Sup­port is anoth­er crit­i­cal fac­tor to con­sid­er while choos­ing your blog plat­form. Check whether there is a reli­able sup­port sys­tem to help you out when you need it.

Sup­port Options in Blogger

There is lim­it­ed sup­port avail­able for Blog­ger. They have very basic doc­u­men­ta­tion and a users’ forum. In terms of sup­port, your choic­es are very limited. 

You can click on the Help option in your Blog­ger admin pan­el to see sup­port tuto­ri­als as shown in the image below.

Since it is a free ser­vice, Google can’t pro­vide one-to-one sup­port to indi­vid­u­als using Blogger. 

Sup­port Options in WordPress

Word­Press has a very active com­mu­ni­ty sup­port sys­tem. There are ques­tion-answer forums for each theme and plu­g­in on WordPress.org. For exam­ple, this is the offi­cial sup­port forum of the pop­u­lar com­ing soon plu­g­in Seed­Prod.

If you are using paid Word­Press prod­ucts, then you can get even more ded­i­cat­ed sup­port from their cre­ators. You can also get live sup­port from your web host­ing company. 

Aside from that, there are thou­sands of online tuto­ri­als cre­at­ed by Word­Press devel­op­ers and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers. Our team of Word­Press experts is also help­ing thou­sands of users via our Face­book group.

Even with free plu­g­ins, you might be able to get help and sup­port if you get stuck. Check out our guide on how to prop­er­ly ask for Word­Press sup­port to boost your chances of get­ting help.

Win­ner: Word­Press.

Future – Blogger vs WordPress

The future of your blog­ging plat­form deter­mines how far you can go with your blog. What’s going to hap­pen to your site in a year’s time, or in five years’ time?

Future of Your Blog on Blogger

Blog­ger hasn’t had any major updates for a very long time. Over the years, we have seen Google get rid of pop­u­lar ser­vices such as Google Read­er, Google Adsense for feeds, and Feed­Burn­er.

The future of Blog­ger depends on Google, and they have the right to shut it down when­ev­er they want. So, the future of your blog also depends on Google’s decisions.

Future of Your Blog on WordPress

Word­Press is open source soft­ware, which means its future is not depen­dent on one com­pa­ny or indi­vid­ual. To find out more about how it works, check out our arti­cle on the his­to­ry of Word­Press. It is man­aged by a com­mu­ni­ty of devel­op­ers and users. 

Word­Press is the world’s most pop­u­lar con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS). Thou­sands of busi­ness­es around the globe depend on it. The future of Word­Press is bright and reassuring. 

Win­ner: Word­Press.

Portability – WordPress vs Blogger

The pur­pose of this arti­cle is to help you choose the best plat­form, so you don’t need to move your site. But mis­takes can hap­pen. So, it is essen­tial to check whether your blog plat­form has secure options to move to anoth­er plat­form or not.

Porta­bil­i­ty of Your Blog­ger Blog

Mov­ing your site from Blog­ger to a dif­fer­ent plat­form is a com­pli­cat­ed task. There is a sig­nif­i­cant risk that you will lose your SEO (search engine rank­ings), sub­scribers, and fol­low­ers dur­ing the move.

Even though Blog­ger allows you to export your con­tent, your data will stay on Google’s servers for a very long time.

Porta­bil­i­ty of Your Word­Press Blog

Using Word­Press, you can move your site any­where you want. You can move your Word­Press site to a new host, you can change domain name, or you can even move your site to oth­er con­tent man­age­ment systems. 

Win­ner: Word­Press.

Pricing – Blogger vs WordPress

You don’t want your blog to be a huge mon­ey drain. Equal­ly, you don’t want to become so obsessed with “free” that you strug­gle to grow your blog. 

It’s impor­tant to think about how much your blog­ging plat­form is going to cost you in terms of both mon­ey and opportunities. 

Cost of Mak­ing a Blog in Blogger

Blog­ger is an entire­ly free blog­ging ser­vice. It pro­vides free blog host­ing and a free Blogspot sub­do­main to get start­ed. All Blogger’s themes, gad­gets, and oth­er options are free as well, though there are some third-par­ty themes you can pay for.

If you want to use a cus­tom domain name with Blog­ger, you’ll have to buy it from a domain reg­is­tra­tion com­pa­ny like Domain.com. A domain name typ­i­cal­ly costs $14.99 per year, but you can get a dis­count with our Domain.com coupon code.

Ulti­mate­ly, while the Blog­ger plat­form is total­ly free, it lacks many fea­tures you will need to make your blog successful.

Cost of Mak­ing a Blog in WordPress

The Word­Press soft­ware is free, but you need to buy a host­ing plan and domain name to start a blog. 

With Blue­host, you can get a Word­Press host­ing plan for just $2.75 per month and a free domain along with it. 

Once you’ve set up your blog, the ongo­ing cost depends on the ser­vices you want to use. If you use paid themes and plu­g­ins, that will obvi­ous­ly cost more than using free ones. 

How­ev­er, paid themes and plu­g­ins can also bring you a great return on invest­ment if you’re mon­e­tiz­ing your blog.

For more details, see our com­plete guide on how much does it real­ly cost to build a Word­Press web­site.

Win­ner: Tie.

Conclusion: Blogger vs WordPress – Which One Is Better?

Word­Press and Blog­ger both are wide­ly used blog plat­forms. But since you need to choose one, it comes down to the pur­pose of your blog.

If your goal is to make a per­son­al blog and share your sto­ries, then you can choose a sim­ple plat­form like Blogger.

But if you aim to make a pro­fes­sion­al blog which can earn a liv­ing, then you need a robust and scal­able plat­form like WordPress.

With Word­Press, you can add a shop to your blog, cre­ate a mem­ber­ship web­site, and add tons of mar­ket­ing tools to your blog, and earn money. 

We hope this Word­Press vs Blog­ger com­par­i­son helped you under­stand the pros and cons of each and helped you make the right deci­sion for your blog. 

To learn more about Word­Press, we rec­om­mend you read our guide on Why is Word­Press Free? and our arti­cle on debunk­ing the most com­mon myths about Word­Press.

If you liked this arti­cle, then please sub­scribe to our YouTube Chan­nel for Word­Press video tuto­ri­als. You can also find us on Twit­ter and Face­book.

The post Word­Press vs. Blog­ger – Which one is Bet­ter? (Pros and Cons) appeared first on WPBe­gin­ner.