Which is the best platform for blogging: WordPress, Ghost or Medium?

written by Anna Jhonson on April 20, 2017

A blogging platform is a software or a service which allows users to publish their content onto the World Wide Web in the form of a blog. It is a specific form of content publishing system where the users can interact with a wide range of audience. During the past decade, there has been a rapid growth in blogging sector. Millions of people are nowadays using blogs to post textual content, images and videos.

To cater the growing needs of the users, several new blogging platforms have joined this sphere. It sometimes becomes really confusing to choose the best platform for a blog, especially for the newbies who don’t have much idea about the blogging process and service providers. In this post, you will be reading about three blogging tools: WordPress, Ghost and Medium. By the end of this post, you will have enough knowledge to choose the best blogging website.

So let’s begin.

1. WordPress

Well, WordPress CMS system needs no introduction. Anyone who is even remotely active on the web also knows about the WordPress. It is one of the most popular blog and site-building platform available on the internet. Currently, WordPress is powering approx 65% blogs and 35% portals which are live on the World Wide Web. Apart from using WordPress for building blogs, you can also create eCommerce stores, photography sites, business portals, online magazine sites and so on.

WordPress offers two different services:

• Self-hosted: It is totally free (WordPress.org)
• Paid Version: Plenty of premium add-ons are available (WordPress.com)

The primary difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com is that the first one can be downloaded & installed on your own server. You can customise it with themes, plugins etc. In the second one, you can change template but rest of the functionalities will be limited. Moreover, in WordPress.org your site will run from .com servers directly. WordPress is well-known for its simplicity and ease of use.

2. Ghost

This platform is quite straightforward and relies on simple, crisp and minimal user-interface. Unlike the WordPress, Ghost doesn’t power a host of websites, instead, it offers a pure blogging experience to the users. Ghost uses the Markdown tech rather than the WYSIWYG editing system. There’s also an option to change this system using an extension. Just like WordPress, Ghost also comes with two variants:

• Self-Hosted- Free to download and use
• Hosted: It runs on Ghost’s own servers.

However, Ghost offers a 14-day trial version for its hosted version. Furthermore, unlike WordPress, you won’t be limited in the hosted version of the Ghost. No matter, which version of Ghost you are using, you can install desired themes, content, images by means of FTP. Apart from that, Ghost also provides SEO settings and social sharing functionality in the core. You won’t be needing any external plugins for this purpose.

3. Medium

It is less of the personalised blogging platform and more of community-centric writing/online publishing tool. In simple words, posting content on Medium is comparable to having your article in the college magazine or notice-board, rather than having a journal or diary of your own. Even the Medium officially defines itself as “a community of readers & writers providing innovative perspectives on ideas large and small.

With Medium, you can express your personal ideas in a long textual form. The primary user base of Medium consists of serious writers which usually focus on highly niche-centric topics. For instance: if you are looking for well-written and properly researched content, then you can search it on Medium. Moreover, it is a purely hosted platform, which means you cannot download anything of your own as it runs on its own servers.

The best thing about Medium is that there are no storage limits in place, everything is free as of now- custom domains, sub-domains, SSL and much more. Medium is a platform which you can use on a zero budget.

Summing Up

In this post, you will read about three different blogging tools available on the web. It completely depends on your budget and requirements on the basis of which you will be choosing the blogging platform.