Are you about to start your own website or blog? If that’s the case, there are a lot of things you need to do. 

It can be quite overwhelming. The biggest question people have when they want to create a website is: 

Which platform is the best for starting a blog? Is it WordPress or Blogger?

Both of them are really good platforms to create your own website. But which one is the best for you? 

To make things easier for you, I’ve created this detailed Blogger Vs WordPress comparison. In this comparison, we’ll go beyond the features of the two platforms and discuss them in each and every aspect. 

This will help you make your decision and choose a platform for your website. 

What Is Blogger or Blogspot? 

Blogger is a blogging platform owned by none other than Google. This platform was founded in 1999 and was acquired by Google in 2003. Websites on Blogger are hosted for free.

Blogger has now become a leading platform for anyone who wants to start a website. Many people think that Blogger and Blogspot are the same things. 

Well, they’re not. 

Blogger is a blogging platform whereas Blogspot is a free domain service. Have you ever visited a website like this: 

www.mywebsite.blogspot.com 

That’s what a Blogspot domain is. For further clarification, when you create a website on Blogger, you get a free Blogspot domain like the one above. 

You can later buy your own domain and set up your website. Let’s not rush into that now. We’ll talk about it in brief in the later sections of this article. 

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source software used to create a website. It was launched in 2005 and is now widely used across the web. 

WordPress actually has two different platforms: WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

This often confuses people thereby stopping them from choosing this platform. Here’s a very simple explanation of both these platforms and how they are different from each other: 

Since this article is about WordPress and Blogger, I’m not going to do a full comparison of WordPress.org and WordPress.com. 

Now that you know what Blogger and WordPress are, let’s take a deep dive for a detailed comparison of these platforms. 

Blogger Vs WordPress Comparison

1. Cost 

When it comes to cost, Blogger wins the race here as it’s a completely free service. You can set up your blog for free without any problems. 

All you have to do is to purchase a domain that costs around $10 per year. But even that’s optional as you can stick to their free Blogspot domain. 

With WordPress, there is some investment required to start your website. First, you’ll have to purchase a domain name. 

You’ll also need to purchase web hosting to host your website and make it available on the internet. Web hosting costs vary based on the type of hosting. 

There are shared hosting that has a starting cost of $3 per month and then there are dedicated hosting services with costs up to $79 per month. 

For now, you won’t need a fancy hosting. A shared hosting that costs around $3 per month will work for you. 

But that’s not the end of your investment. Once you purchase a domain and web hosting, you’ll also have to invest your money in purchasing a good theme. 

There are many free themes available but they aren’t as good as premium ones. Themes could cost you from $30 to $90 depending on the type of theme you purchase. 

Lastly, with WordPress, you can install plugins on your website. Most of the essential plugins required for running a website on WordPress are free, but there are some paid plugins that you would want to install on your website. 

With that being said, setting up a website on WordPress could cost you around a hundred dollars. 

Also Read: How Much Does It Cost To Start A WordPress Blog?

And with Blogger, all you’ll need is to purchase a domain name. 

Verdict: When it comes to cost comparison, Blogger is the clear winner as it’s completely free and doesn’t require much investment. 

2. Setting Up Your Blog

Blogger and WordPress are the top blogging platforms because of their simplicity and user-friendliness. You can set up your blog easily using both platforms. Let’s see how you can do that. 

Setting up your blog on Blogger is very simple. Just head over to blogger.com and log in with your Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, you can simply sign up and continue. 

This is what your dashboard looks like when you log in to Blogger. 

To create a new blog, click on the new blog button and create a new blog. A pop up will open where you have to enter the title and address of your blog. You can also set a theme here, but you can change that later. 

Once you’re done giving a name and address to your blog, click on the create blog button to proceed. 

After you create your blog, you’ll be redirected to your website dashboard. Before you can access your dashboard, you are asked to choose a domain from Google Domains. You can purchase a domain from Google Domains or you can use any other domain registrars like Namecheap and GoDaddy. 

This is how the Blogger dashboard looks like: 

Your blog on Blogger is now ready and you can change the theme, create posts and pages, and do a lot more. It literally takes a few minutes to set up your blog on Blogger. 

Now, let’s see how to set up a blog on WordPress. 

The first task of setting up your blog on WordPress is purchasing a web hosting. There are many hosting providers (here are some of the best ones). 

But, I recommend HostGator as it’s quite affordable and simple. Once you purchase your web hosting and set up your blog, you’ll be able to access your WordPress dashboard. 

You can read this tutorial where I show you how to set up a WordPress site using Bluehost. 

Verdict: I would say WordPress is easier to set up as it literally takes a few clicks to set up your blog. 

3. Managing Your Blog 

It’s important to manage your blog properly. Fortunately, both Blogger and WordPress provide great features to make this job easier for you. 

Let’s take a look at how you can manage your blog using Blogger and WordPress. 

Here’s what the Blogger dashboard looks like: 

As you can see, the left sidebar has options to manage various parts of your blog. You can manage your posts by clicking on the posts button. You can view your site stats by clicking on the stats button. 

Similarly, you can go through each section and manage them easily. 

In a nutshell, managing your blog on Blogger is pretty simple and straightforward. All the settings and sections are right in front of you so you can access them and make any changes if required. 

Let’s see how you can manage your blog on WordPress. This is how the WordPress dashboard looks like: 

As you can see, it’s quite similar to Blogger’s dashboard. But it has a dashboard section where you can see everything about your websites like the number of posts and pages, recent activity, events, and news, and you can also create a new post draft right from the dashboard. 

There are other sections which allow you to create a post, page, check comments, upload media, change the appearance of the website, install and manage plugins, and change the settings. 

Verdict: Compared to Blogger’s dashboard, the WordPress dashboard is much better and simple. 

4. Publishing A Blog Post 

If you’re starting out a blog, it is essential that you publish blog posts with ease and without wasting any time figuring out a million different things. 

Let’s see how you can publish a blog post in Blogger and WordPress platform. 

With Blogger, all you need to do is to head over to the posts section and click on the ‘New Post’ button. 

Once you click on it, the post editor will load which looks like this: 

Here, you can give a title to your post and start writing your content in the editor. There are options above the editor to format your content. You can add images, videos, lists, add a link, and a lot more. 

The sidebar on the right has options to add labels, set a permalink, schedule your post, add a location, and other options. 

You can preview your post by clicking on the preview button. If you wish to publish the post later, you can save it as a draft. To publish the post, simply click on the publish button and you’re done. 

That’s how easy it is to publish a post on Blogger. 

In WordPress, click on the posts tab to go on to the posts section. Here, you can see all the posts you have on your website. To create a new post, click on the ‘Add New’ button. 

Just like Blogger, you can give a title to your post and start writing your content in the post editor. 

There are options to change the formatting of your content. The add media button lets you add images and videos to your post. 

On the right side, there are options to choose your post format type, add categories and tags, and set a featured image. 

Just on top of it, there are options to publish the page or save it as a draft if you wish to publish it later. 

Verdict: While it may seem very easy to create a post in Blogger, WordPress wins this one. I’ll tell you why in the next section. 

5. Themes & Customization 

I’m sure you want to customize your website and make it look like the way you want. Let’s see which platform is better when it comes to themes and customization. 

Here’s the theme section in Blogger: 

You can view the theme and customize it. This is the Blogger theme customizer: 

You can choose the theme, change the background, change the text fonts and colors, and add gadgets to your website. 

These options help a lot in customizing the appearance of your website in Blogger. If you want to do further customizations, you can edit the HTML of the theme. 

Apart from the themes available by default on Blogger, you can download other themes and upload it to your blog. 

There are many theme marketplaces for Blogger. Some of them are Gooyabitemplates, Btemplates, and Sora Templates. 

When it comes to theme customization, WordPress not only has a huge theme marketplace but the platform itself provides many features to let you design your website exactly the way you want. 

To change your theme or upload a new, go to the appearance and click on themes. 

Here, you can upload your own theme. One advantage WordPress has is that you can upload any number of themes you want on your website and you can activate any theme you want. 

To customize a theme, click on the customize button for the theme you want. 

This is what the WordPress theme customizer looks like: 

Here, you can find settings to change the appearance, typography, colors, menus, widgets, and the overall layout of your website. 

It is important to note that certain themes have a theme options panel with even more settings for theme customization.

There are a ton of theme marketplaces for WordPress. Some of the best ones are Themeforest, MyThemeShop, and StudioPress. 

Verdict: WordPress wins this one because of the limitless possibilities available on the platform that let you customize your website. 

6. Monetization 

If you’re starting a website, you probably know that you can make money from your blog. I’m not going to dive into the specifics of that but it’s important to know where these two platforms stand when it comes to monetization. 

There are ways you can make money from your website. Two most common is Google Adsense & affiliate marketing. 

Blogger lets you monetize your site with AdSense easily. You can also use affiliate marketing as a way to monetize your Blogger site. 

The only drawback here is that the platform doesn’t provide features to make the most out of it. 

On the other hand, WordPress has a lot of plugins that you can install to make money from your website. 

You can monetize your WordPress site with both Affiliate Marketing and Google Adsense. 

Verdict: WordPress has an advantage over Blogger here because there are many plugins that help you monetize your website and optimize it to make the most out of it. 

7. SEO Friendliness 

SEO cannot be ignored if you’re starting a blog. To get high traffic to your blog, your website should rank well on the search engines. 

There’s often a debate that Blogger is better than WordPress when it comes to optimizing your website for SEO. This stems from the fact that Blogger is owned by Google. 

But this is not the truth. 

To optimize your website and content for SEO, you’ll have to manually check your optimization. 

WordPress again has great plugins like Yoast SEO that let you optimize your content for the search engines. Plugins like this help optimize your content by displaying your SEO score and giving recommendations on how to optimize your page further. 

Apart from this, there are speed optimization plugins in WordPress that help you improve your website’s loading time. A fast website is essential for better rankings on the search engines. 

Verdict: WordPress is far better than Blogger when it comes to optimizing your website for the search engines. 

8. Ownership & Control 

It’s important to understand the ownership and control rights of your website. 

Since Blogger is a platform owned by Google, you’re bound to their terms and conditions. If you fail to follow their terms and conditions, your website could vanish any day and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. 

However, Blogger does provide an option to backup your website. 

WordPress is an open source software and hence there aren’t any terms and conditions. But, you will have to accept the terms and conditions of your hosting provider. If you violate these conditions, your site could be removed. 

But the advantage with WordPress is that you can move from one web host to another. Apart from that, there are many backup plugins for WordPress that you should use to do regular backups of your website. 

Verdict: Self-hosted WordPress.org offers better ownership and control.

9. Support & Community 

Since Blogger is very simple, the chances of you breaking the blog are very low. There is almost zero maintenance on your part. 

WordPress, on the other hand, has many features and also plugins. This would often cause you running into a problem. 

But since the community is so big, you can get your problems solved quickly. There is support available for the themes and plugins you use, so you know who to contact in case you’re stuck with something. 

Unlike Blogger, WordPress has support options to help you in case you run into a problem. 

Verdict: Since WordPress has a big community and active support, it definitely wins against Blogger. 

Conclusion: Which One Is The Right For You?

Both these platforms have their pros and cons but if you chose one, which one should you choose? 

To answer this question, you’ll first have to answer a question: 

What is the purpose of your website? 

If you want a website that requires minimal customization and low investment, then Blogger is a suitable platform for you. 

On the other hand, if you want to start a website and scale it to a level where you want to grow an audience or make money, then WordPress is the best platform for you. 

Before taking the decision, let’s see the comparison again.

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So if you’re really serious about your website and want to do something big, choose WordPress. 

It does require some initial investment but it pays off in the long-term as you’ll spend more time on growing your website and less time managing it. 

But before you make a final decision, here are some questions you should ask yourself: 

Are you ready to invest money to start a blog? Are you willing to learn how websites work and get into the technical stuff of running a website? Do you want to customize your website in any way you want without any limitations? 

If your answer to these questions is yes, then WordPress is definitely the platform you should choose. 

Lastly, if you have any questions about these two platforms, feel free to ask them in the comments section below. 

And, if you have experience using these platforms, comment below your experiences so it could help others.