Blogger vs. WordPress: Who is the Deadliest Warrior?
I’ve been meaning to write about this one for a while, but Darren Miller’s recent decision to switch from Blogger to WordPress sealed the deal.
I’m not going to take into consideration fads like LiveJournal or Xanga, because they aren’t really blogs. It is very hard to take them seriously when faced with the two big dogs, Blogger and WordPress.
What this won’t be is an “edition war”. I may be dead-set against all-things Apple and hate 4E D&D, but with blogging platforms – to each their own. What I intend to do is break things down point by point and leave it up to the reader to make their own conclusions.
What is Blogger?
Blogger is a blog storage service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. The service itself is located at www.blogger.com. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at subdomains of blogspot.com.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is an open source CMS, often used as a blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL. Free hosting services such as WordPress.com offer users an easy way to deploy a WordPress blog on-line.
For the purposes of this comparison, I will be almost exclusively referring to the wordpress.com hosted versions of wordpress.
Features Comparison
The awesome Pulsed blog broke down the most recent comparisons into a chart into a very straight-forward breakdown:
| Feature | Blogger.com | WordPress.com |
|---|---|---|
| Themes and customization | Blogger has introduced a collection of easy-to-customize templates. Earlier templates are not available in the new collection, but you can still edit them. | No template editing. Style sheet editing is only available as a paid upgrade. Many of the 90+ themes let you upload a header image. Some have additional customization options. |
| Visitor stats | You can include third party tracker scripts — or any type of script. | No scripts allowed. The admin dashboard shows 2 days of stats and daily, weekly and monthly graphs. |
| Import | Only from another BlogSpot blog. | Import from Blogger, Yahoo! 360, Type·Pad, MovabIe·Type, Posterous, Vox.com, LiveJournaI or another WordPress blog. |
| Image storage | 1 Gigabyte. There is no interface to browse through the images unless you sign up for Picasa Web Albums. | 3 Gigabytes. Paid upgrades are available to add more space. You can also upload .ppt, .doc, .odt and .pdf files (more file types with an upgrade). |
| Galleries | You can use Picasa Web Albums. | Add the tag to any post or page. |
| Static pages | Blogger allows up to 10 static pages to be created. | Create posts or ‘pages’. Static pages are listed in separate menus. |
| Categories | ‘Labels’. | ‘Categories’. |
| Optional excerpts | Expandable post summaries. | Some WP themes allow unique text. Others depend on a “more” tag. |
| Post by email | Submit your posts by email. You can receive new posts by email too (helpful for team blogs). | Submit your posts by email. Images can be attached. |
| Contact forms | Not available. You could add a third-party contact form, however. | Simply add the tag to any post or page. |
| Domain names | Free domain name mapping. | A paid upgrade is required to map a custom domain. |
| Private blogs | You can restrict access to invited Google account holders. | You can restrict access to 35 invited WordPress account holders (unlimited with a paid upgrade).
Alternatively, individual posts can be password protected or Private.
|
| Team blogs | Administrators and non-administrators only. | Administrator, Editors, Authors and Contributors. |
| Comments | Visual confirmation and moderation options, but no editing of comments. | Moderation, comment editing and Akismet spam protection. |
| Widgets | See the next table. | |
Widgets compared:
| Official BlogSpot Widgets | |
|---|---|
| Edit pages | You can add up to 10 stand-alone pages. |
| Add a Gadget | Software applications that do cool things. There’s an extensive menu in the sidebar. |
| Followers | Displays a list of users who follow your blog. |
| Blog List | Show off what you read with a blogroll of your favorite blogs. |
| Subscription Links | Let your readers easily subscribe to your blog with popular feed readers. |
| Slideshow | Add a slideshow of your photos to your blog. |
| Newsreel | Automatically add current headlines from Google News to your blog. |
| Video Bar | Display clips from YouTube and Google Video for your readers to watch without leaving the page. |
| List | Add a list of your favorite books, films or anything you like. |
| Link List | Add a collection of your favorite sites, blogs or web pages. |
| Picture [for the sidebar] |
Add a picture from your computer or from somewhere else on the web. |
| Text | Add some words to your blog – like a welcome message – with our rich text editor. |
| HTML/JavaScript | Add third-party functionality or other code to your blog. [ i.e., any third-party widget] |
| AdSense | Earn revenue by displaying relevant ads on your blog. |
| Feed | Add content from a site feed to your blog. |
| Labels [categories] | Show all the labels of posts in your blog. |
| Logo | Choose from a variety of Blogger logos to add to your page. |
| Profile | Display information about yourself. [WordPress blogs have an "About" page] |
| Page Header | Display your blog’s title and description. |
| Blog Archive | Display links to older posts. |
| Poll | Survey your visitors by adding a poll to your blog. |
Official WordPress.com Widgets |
|
| Akismet | Archives | Authors | Author Grid | Blog Stats | Blog Subscriptions | Box.net file sharing | Calendar | Categories | Category cloud | del.icio.us | Flickr | Gravatar | Image | Links | Meebo | Meta | Pages | Recent Comments | Recent Posts | RSS | RSS Links| Search | SocialVibe | Tag Cloud | Text | Top Clicks | Top Posts | Top Rated | Twitter | Vod:Pod Videos | |
Tale of the Tape
Blogger Wins In:
- Themes and customization
- Visitor stats
- Post by email
- Galleries
- Domain names
- Private blogs
- Comments
Blogger Loses In:
- Image storage
- Contact forms
- Import
Blogger Draws In:
- Visitor stats
- Static pages
- Categories
- Optional excerpts
- Team blogs
- Widgets
More ways Blogger Wins
Integrated Login
With the ability to easily connect all of your Google accounts, this is a huge win for Blogger. With one single login, you get access to all of these services:
- AdWords
- Checkout
- GMail
- Calender
- Page Creator
- Search
- YouTube
- Analytics
- Documents
- Groups
- Reader
- Picasa Web Albums
- Wave
- Blogger
- Feedburner
- iGoogle
- Mobile
- Talk
- Websites
WordPress is an open sources solution, meaning that all extra services must be manually integrated into your blog after you have signed up for your account.
Google Juice
Blogger has the backing of the largest and most powerful internet company in the known galaxy. Historically, features such as widgets, add-ons, and templates have been enhanced first by Blogger. WordPress is usually a step or two behind the curve.
Speedy Indexing
Whether it is because of the link with Google or because of the sheer volume of Blogger blogs, your posts will be indexed in the Search Engines much quicker with Blogger. Usually within a few hours of posting your newest page will appear, allowing you to receive the most traffic as quickly as possible. It has been debated before, but it does seem that Google gives preference to Blogger blogs in their SEO. Having blogged on both platforms I can attest to this. I did at one point dual-post from a WordPress blog and a Blogger blog, and within 3 hours, the Blogger was listed – while the WordPress blog didn’t show up until 2 days later.
Massive Network
Because Blogger is usually the first stop for new bloggers, it is the largest blogging network in the world.
User Interface
Blogger’s interface has more of the features that bloggers want and need to use on a regular basis. It is also far more user-friendly.
Security
Google has the most secure platform in the world. WordPress is very often plagued by vulnerabilities. Blogger has no vulnerabilities. Period.
Blogger is the Deadliest Warrior
WordPress doesn’t suck. Not by a long shot. I can understand why people use it – but I don’t understand why they would switch to it. There are limits to what you’re allowed to blog about (WordPress has McCarthy-esque censorship policies) and even more limits as to what functionality you can add.
If your reasons for blogging have anything to do with running a business, I’d suggest purchasing your own hosting and using Blogger. It’s a whopping $10 a year. If your blog is purely recreational in nature – you know – about geeky games stuff, I’d also suggest going with Blogger. No fuss, no muss.
Blogger seems to be a far better option for those running personal blogs – not only for beginners, but for the seasoned vets as well.
I don't use Blogger nor WP. I'm not a big fan of either, but like you said to each his own. The only thing that I'd like to say is that most people I know that use WP for their blog, also tend to host it on a pay service that's not at wordpress.com. That's not to say that people don't use wordpress.com and I understand why you selected it for comparison. Still, It does skew the comparison just a bit as some the WP negatives are only negatives if wordpress.com is used and not using the WP software on your own host.
For the record, I am one of the Minority that uses Drupal for most of my Blogs.
I've been wringing my hands about whether to transfer my blog from Blogger to WordPress. Some bloggers who use WordPress act like those of who still use Blogger are idiots.
I put up a test site on WP and I do like the page functionality and the categories–in theory, because all my blogger tags converted to categories. It would take a lot of work to winnow them down and then re-tag the posts in WP.
Maybe I am an idiot because I can't figure out how to make the static page feature work. In any case, I'm happy to see an article that compares the two platforms side-by-side and breaks it down for me. Thank you.
Of course, after writing the comment, I finally figured out how to add stand alone pages to Blogger. Learning is possible, even for me.
I think Blogger is now much better as it where back when I first tried it out a couple of years back. Some of the new options (especially the template editor) tempts me to try it out.
But if you don't mind self-hosting your blog, a WordPress installations (not hosted on WordPress.com but on your own server) is vastly superior. A lot of the things I've done on my blog wouldn't have been possible with either a WordPress.com blog nor Blogger. But you definitely need some skill in HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL to take full advantage of that IMO.
I am still using WordPress.com for some blogs, because I like the WP dashboard that I am used from my self-hosted projects and the familiarity is sometimes more important than features.
But I definitely agree that WordPress.com is more restricted in many ways compared to Blogger, which makes Blogger currently the better choice for most people.
@Bonemaster – I did catch some hell already about not specifying that I was referring (for the most part) to the wordpress.com versions – I will correct that.
@kathcom – glad I could be of some help.
@Stargazer – you are definately right about needing skills in php and MySQL. I have to say that as far as the former, I don't see it as much real use outside of forum construction, personally – but the latter – definately, yes. The only reason I bothered learning it was when I ran a self-hosted wordpress blog.
I've been using WP.com for three years how & have nothing but good things to say about it. One point in favor which the article skipped over is Akismet spam protection. I see folks on Blogger always complaining about spam comments – WP.com has almost no spam issues.
@CTF – I thought Akismet was probably the best feature when I was on WP, I really did.
I have to say that I have no problems at all with spam on Blogger – when they switched to the "new" system, it really took care of a lot of the old issues.