Blogger vs. WordPress

This post might cause a little stir, but it’s not meant to.  I love both! I have blogs on both networks and also use the WordPress software on a different domain as well.

There are benefits and drawbacks to both Blogger / Blogspot and WordPress.  I just wanted to share my thoughts on both here.  So I decided to do a Blogger Review and WordPress Review.

Benefits of WordPress.com hosted service:

1. It’s got a lot of cool tools built in – widgets, wordpress themes, and the ability to add a domain.

2. I love the spam filtering tool.

3. Lots of good control over the layout/links/categories/look/feel of the blog.

4. Well…this one is obvious  – IT’S FREE!!! WOOHOO! Most free web hosting companies suck, but these guys rock.

5. They have quick responses to email questions and I heard they just started 24/7 support which rocks because the internet never sleeps.

6.  I love the tag tools. Instead of just searching tags on your site – it allows you to find topics on other peoples blogs. So if I make a post on a random topic – what good would a tag do if it’s the only post on that subject on my site – I wanna see what others are saying about the same thing!

Benefits of Blogger and Blogspot:

1. It’s completely free. Same as wordpress software and service.

2. You can add a domain which points/accesses your blog for FREE! We love free stuff. Actually, you can add a domain or subdomain. I point my blog. subdomain to the blogger on a few.

3. Easy to upload your own header and make it look like other pages of your hosted website.

4. You can make money on your blog. Blogger allows you to integrate your blog with adsense. WordPress.org software allows this as well, but you just have to insert the code into the page. WordPress.com doesn’t allow this because that’s what they do to make money.

5. Clean look and feel – lots of add-on tools.

Drawbacks of WordPress:

1. If you don’t use wordpress.com – you probably have to pay for a web hosting account. WordPress.com is ok, but to add a domain it costs money. But you get full control over layout and themes when you host it yourself.

2. One account per email address. What if I want to blog about diff. topics? And what does wordpress.com care if I have many blogs? The more content – the more adds they show. (actually, I was corrected in comment below…woops!)

3. No way to really monetize the site – I can’t add popups or other ads so it’d all be done with links.

Suggestion: If you pay the ad removal fee – you should be allowed to add your own ad codes to the site.  Just like a free hosting company would do.

Drawbacks of Blogger:

1. That stupid bar on top of every page! What if I don’t want people to know I’m using blogger. I guess it’s free and they don’t do ads, but I help google by putting google ads on the site.

2. I would like to control which blogs are associate with my profile instead of them listing all of them. What if I want a public profile, but want my blog to be anonymous? Well…you need to have sep. google account for that.

3. Hex code customization sucks.  You pretty much have to use the standard sets.

Suggestion: take that bar off if I add google ads.

I love WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and Blogger – the differences are many and WordPress seems to be a much more powerful solution and has many advanced tools for social tagging and other things.  Anyone care to share their other thoughts? Let me have it!