Searching for the best blogging platforms to share your knowledge and earn money online? Blogging is one of the effective ways to communicate with others. It lets you share ideas and publish thoughts in digital form.
There are many people who make a decent income just by blogging. Write what you like, monetize, market products, and show advertisements from top ad networks or direct clients. Today, we combined a list of 50 best blogging platforms that help you to create free blogs and online stores in a few clicks.
What is Blogging?
The blogging career gives you full control over the work. There is no one to give you instructions, watch your each and every moment and scold. You can work as you like from anywhere and anytime you want.
If you decide to start a blog, the next question arises. Which platform should you choose?
We all know about WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, and other numerous platforms. Most of us started with Google-owned Blogger, as it is easy to use and free.
Unfortunately, Google Blogger misses many features when compared to other blog sites. It lags far behind WordPress in terms of features, customization, themes, and many other things. Even though, we can’t say that WordPress is the sole choice to start a new blog. Tumblr, Medium, and Joomla are some other alternatives to WordPress to join the blogging field.
50 Best Blogging Platforms (Free Blog Sites)
These are the 50 most popular blogging platforms on the web,
1. WordPress.org
WordPress is a popular option with amazing features, unlimited themes, and plugins to manage every part of the website.
A WordPress powered site can be easily handled even by beginners. It is highly customizable and used by more than 24% of the websites around the world. At present, about 65 million websites using WordPress’s Content Management System(CMS).
2. Blogger
This is a blog-publishing service from Google. All blogs are hosted at blogspot.com. If you are having a domain address, it too can be used to replace the default URL.
Users can create any number of blogs, up to 100, in a single account. But Blogger themes are very limited in number. It doesn’t support plugins as well and you will be able to perform most of the customizations through coding only.
3. Tumblr
Tumblr is a microblogging website owned by Yahoo. Currently, over 188.7 million blogs are hosted on Tumblr. According to their official statement, more than 90 million articles are posting on the site every day. It is simple and light-weight.
4. WordPress.com
This is a free blog hosting service with the subdomain WordPress.com. It has limited features and contains ads. If you want to get domain mapping, customizations, and others, go for the premium subscription which starts from $99 per year.
5. Medium
Medium is owned by Twitter founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone. It is cute and easy to use. In many ways, Medium is similar to Twitter, Digg, Reddit, and Tumblr. Posts can be up voted similar to Digg and Reddit.
6. Bravenet
Bravenet is a free blogging tool as well as a website builder, which also provides hosting services to the customers. It has more than 15 million users now.
7. Live Journal
Live Journal is a blogging platform and social media site from Russia. It is free to use but premium users will get access to the S2 management and advanced features. Add interesting people in your friend list and get their stuff in your home stream thereafter.
8. Typepad
Typepad is one of the oldest publishing services. It is difficult to customize, and only premium options are available now.
9. Joomla
This is a free blogging platform with RSS feeds, polls, and so on. Joomla is the second most used Content Management System on the web after WordPress.
10. Quora
Quora is a famous social networking site mainly concentrating on question and answers. We can create blogs there and can be shared with others.
It is possible to add tags to the posts which will help to get more traffic. Quora blogs are easy to use, but customizations are not available. The total number of reaches will be shown along with the posts.
11. Silvrback
Silvrback is one of the latest services with advanced features and premium options. It is easy to use and domain mapping is also available. Silvrback comes with a neat interface and mainly used for business purposes.
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12. Postach.io
It is a simple platform with an attractive design and features like embedding videos, tweets, Instagram images into posts. Postach can be easily synced with Evernote account and its premium membership will start from as low as $5 per month.
13. Ghost
Ghost is an open-source service. The program has a rich interface that can carry plugins similar to WordPress and offers many modern publishing tools to meet your latest needs. It also works well on mobile devices.
14. Wix
Wix is another free blogging platform to create any kind of website. It comes with drag and drop tools and HTML5 capabilities.
Their library contains at least 500 high-quality and mobile-optimized themes which are enough to meet all your needs. It gives you full control over the design of the blog with a huge collection of fonts, effects, galleries and unlimited customization options.
15. Squarespace
This platform is mainly using for e-commerce purposes. Squarespace comes with a neat design and cloud hosting service. But unfortunately, it doesn’t have a free subscription service. Premium users should pay from $ 8 per month if choosing for the annual plan.
Some other popular blogging platforms are listed below:
16. Svbtle – A minimalist blogging platform since 2011
17. Movable Type – A weblog publishing software
18. Posthaven – A free Content Management System and blogging platform
19. Edu Blogs – Web publishing platform for students and teachers
20. Weebly – Free website builder to create professional-quality websites, blogs, and eCommerce stores
21. Website.IM – Another all-in-one website builder for businesses, bloggers, and merchants
22. Zoho – Stunning websites with advanced features
23. Yola – Build converting websites for businesses and sell products
24. Hub Pages – Write on any topic that you like
25. Jekyll – A open source static site generator from plain texts
26. Contentful – A headless content management system to write and publish content for any platform
27. Penzu – A customizable online journal for writers
28. Exposure – Best for photo and video blogs
29. Duda – Leading website builder to create faster websites and boost sales
30. Emyspot – Easy to use platform to build blogs, online portfolios, booking sites, and online stores
31. Jimdo – Create blogs and online shops easily with all tools you need
32. Drupal – Open source framework to design basic websites and applications
33. Bolt – A simple CMS for content creators and developers
34. Site123 – Design free websites and blogs using beautiful templates
35. Write.as – A clean and light-weight blogging platfrom
36. Shopify – Best for online stores and blogs linked to them
37. Strikingly – Another free website builder for mobile-friendly websites
38. uKit – A customizable website builder for businesses and sell online
39. Pixpa – Build amazing portfolio websites with online shops and blogs
40. Hexo – Intelligent blog framework to create blogs with beautiful themes
41. Voog – Developer-friendly platform to build websites, blogs, and eCommerce shops
42. Insane Journal – Write customizable diary notes and share them with friends
43. One – A customizable website builder with premium-quality templates and integrations
44. Odoo – All-in-one tool to create blogs, online shops, forums, and much more
45. Xanga – A blog based social network for teenagers
46. Webnode – User-friendly website builder for any website type
47. Website – Create responsive websites easily
48. Facebook – Leading social network with blogging abilities
49. Instagram – A photo and video sharing app to create visually appealing blog posts
50. LinkedIn – Career oriented social network to create branded pages and share blog posts
51. Quora – A question-answer community with blog spaces
Are you a blogger? Which is your favorite site to start blogging? Why? Kindly share your valuable feedback through comments.
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Nice run down of the options, I am a Blogger user myself but there are so many choices for people just starting. Back when I first got into blogging Blogger and WordPress really it. Great post.