Blogger or WordPress: Which is a better blogging platform in 2016?

Blogger vs WordPress

Evident by the history of mankind, everything ends up into two forms. Friends and Foes. Day and Night. Heaven and Hell. Men and Women. Proton and Electron. Life and Death.
One supports the other, or opposes the other based on it's nature and form. It's said "Necessity is the mother of Invention". However, in a world we live, necessity also gives rise to competition. Competition separates the best from the rest. But, what is obvious from my observation is that, there have always been a clash between the top two, whatever the field of study might be, as noted above.

Wait, are we studying science here?

Of course not! What I wanted to prove from the above examples is that, coexistence is also a necessity to support the mankind. Same happens in the world of technology. While Blogger and WordPress are seen as giant competitors in blogging platforms, they both execute their functions a little differently.

What is Blogger and what is WordPress?

Note: Those of you who are already familiar with this may skip this section and go ahead.

Let's have a look at Blogger first. Blogger is an online blogging software which was initially developed by Pyra Labs but Google acquired it later in 2003. Ever since the acquisition, Google is hosting the blogging platform and powering millions of bloggers from around the world. The very blog you are reading right now, is being hosted by Blogger only. You can create a free blog on Blogger.com and start writing Posts at ease. A Post can be anything, from your daily diary entry to your vacation photos to Articles based on various topics. It's pretty easy to use because of the simplified User Interface (UI).

Now, let's have a look at our next platform, WordPress. Just like Blogger, WordPress is also an online blogging software that helps you make your own blogs and write posts on it. It was founded by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little in the same year Google acquired Blogger, 2003. WordPress provides CMS (Content Managament System) built upon PHP and MySQL, two highly popular languages.

How are Blogger and WordPress different?

While both are blogging platforms and posses quite a lot of similarities, they also have some differences to look after. And these differences make a whole lot of difference in experience to the user who fails to choose the platform best suits them.

Domains or Blog Names: Sub-domain accounts are free of charge on both the platforms. YourName.blogspot.com and YourName.wordpress.com are sub-domains whereas YourName.com is called a Custom Domain or Full Domain.

Hosting Fees: Hosting means uploading files to your website address and making the website available for use. If you use a sub-domain, you can freely host the website with Blogger's own servers. Actually, they take care of hosting by themselves. You only need to get your blog running by posting contents. Even on WordPress, you get free hosting for your sub-domain. Things start to change when you need a custom domain. Imagine you bought up a custom domain from GoDaddy.com for your website, let's say YourName.com. Now in this case, you'll need to pay for hosting on WordPress. However, the hosting is still free of charge on Blogger.

Making Money: With time passing, if you reach a stage when your blog becomes too popular and you make up your mind to sell space on your blog by placing Ads through Ad companies, you cannot do that on a free WordPress account or a sub-domain. Instead, they are able to put their Ads on your blog if they may (Although that rarely happens). However, you can sell Ad space on your Blogger blog hassle-free, whether you own a sub-domain or a custom domain.

Themes and Layouts: The default Blogger themes  seem to be a little old have less featured than the default WordPress themes. WordPress also has much more plugins available for their users than Blogger users. However, Blogger themes and layouts can be easily customized through the HTML code directly. This is not possible on default WordPress themes.

Statistical Differences:

There ain't much of a difference when it comes to the statics of both the platforms. They both are powerful in that aspect.

Notes: 
Infinite* means although these assets are infinite in number but they depend on the condition that the amount of queries available per MySQL relation on the server determines the infinity.
Infinite+ means they depend on the available server size hosted by Blogger.

Pros and Cons of WordPress and Blogger

Blogger - Pros

1. Unlimited Free Hosting: Whether you own a custom domain or not, you get unlimited free hosting space on this platform.

2. Complete Customization: Blogger templates support 100% customization, which means, you can customize your blog or website in whatever manner you want to. Either you can customize the templates provided by default by Blogger, upload a new template written by yourself, or download a template from somewhere on the web and upload it. To top it off, Blogger also provides a rich template Editor based on Graphic User Interface for people who can't code template.
Some people think that Blogger platform is not good when SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is concerned. I guarantee that this is false. How can a platform be poor on SEO that is powered by Google, the king behind SEO itself? In fact, blogger blogs are more easily found in Google search results as compared to WordPress blogs.

3. Deeply Linked with Google Services: This platform, since owned by Google, is highly linked with other Google Services. For example, you can use either Blogger or Google Plus account to use it as your Blogger Profile. You can use either the default Blogger comments system or the new Google+ comments. You can also put Google AdSense Ads within your blog at ease with options provided within the Blogger Layout Management.

4. Great Help Resources: The web is full of tutorials aimed at helping the new bloggers. In fact, Blogger has the largest amount of tutorials available on the web. This might be due to the fact that Blogger is highly tweak-able, and hence open to tremendous opportunities of modifications.

5. Free Ad-Free: Blogger blogs are Ad-Free by default. Google won't show any of it's Ads on your blog unless they pay you for that. They'll only be able to show Ads if you sign up for a Google Adsense account and allow Google to show Ads on your blog for which you get having paid. This is not true for free WordPress blogs. They have the right to show Ads on free spaces available on your blog. Altough, those Ads can be removed once and for all for $30. It's worth notifying that Ads often slow down the blog performance, affecting SEO severely.

6. Hone Your Skills: With access to the template code, you can hone your web development skills my making changes and see how it reflects back on the blog. You can learn a lot of about HTML and CSS just from the template code itself.

Blogger - Cons

1. Dated Templates: While you are free to get as many new templates from the web you want for your blog, the default templates provided by Blogger seems to be out-of-date.

2. Less Plugins: WordPress blogs are rich with many powerful plugins available (although some of them are dated out much). Some plugins even help in making the blog more SEO-friendly with just a click. However, Blogger blogs have less plugins (Gadgets) in comparison.

3. Ownership: Whether you host on a free sub-domain or full domain, although it's not happening any time soon due to millions of blogs running across the web, but Google owns the right to shut down Blogger at any time.

WordPress - Pros

1. Long Term Commitment: WordPrss is an Open Source software. It means that it's future is independent of the actions taken by WordPress community alone. It's powered by hundreds and thousands of people across the globe and is not easy to shut down any time soon. It's future is more reassuring than Blogger.

2. Modern Default Templates: The default templates provided by WordPress look more modern and match today's lifestyle than those provided by Blogger. Many indie developers upload and sell their templates on WordPress templates gallery frequently.

3. Faster Updates: WordPress often update their website and database (MySQL) to meet modern web requirements. This seems to be a rather slow a case on Blogger since they rely on self-hosting made by Google itself.

4. Multiple Hosting Services: You get to choose from tons of hosting services available worldwide. They all have different plans depending upon your needs. Hosting services also depend upon their server quality and availability. But in case of Blogger, where the blogs are self hosted by Google, if Blogger servers go down then all the blogs may go down.

WordPress - Cons

Limited Customization: These blogs are hard enough to customize because the template code isn't directly available to the user.

Less Help Support: Help Resources are limited as compared to Blogger. The reason behind this has been discussed in the Pros of Blogger above.

So, who is the winner here?

I hope you haven't forgot what we first discussed about in the very first paragraph of this article. Now, depending upon the needs, you may either choose Blogger or WordPress. Some of my suggestions would be to choose:

Blogger: If you:

- Are a student
- Want to learn more about web development
- Want to test some blogs
- Intend to make some money online
- Want to host a site for free of charge
WordPress: If you:

- Are a professional
- Run a company
- Want to advertise your product
- Have long-term goals

What are your thoughts?

I'll admit that my only objective here was to guide you and help you choose the platform that best suits you. There's nothing worse than choosing a platform, working day in and day out on it, and later realize that you made a mistake choosing the correct platform to begin with, and then with all the regrets you dump it. With that being said, don't forget that there are still more blogging options available if you don't like ones we discussed here. Timblr, Medium, Weebly, LiveJournal are other available options worth trying. So, what are your views on the ones we discussed? Sound off in the comments below!

Thank you and happy blogging!