Top 10 Best Blog Sites and Blogging Platforms

Updated on August 1st, 2018 by Quertime Team in Blogging

Blogging is beautiful as it allows you to share your ideas and opinions for all the World Wide Web to read. Fortunately starting a blog can be very easy these days as there are many free blogging sites available online. However you need to know which sites offer the best tools for setting up and managing your web publishing operation. Today we’ve gathered 10 of the best blogging platforms online to help you choose the one that suits your needs best.

Please also check out our another post: Top 40 of Best Free Blog Hosts or Blog Hosting Websites

WordPress

WordPress.org
WordPress is a free and popular open source blog publishing platform, powered by PHP & MySQL. It isn’t as simple to set up and configure as some of the other blogging platforms, but once you get it up and running you’re rewarded with thousands of plugins, themes and other features to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. WordPress is a scalable solution that allows you to do everything from maintaining a single blog with a single user to an entire stable of blogs with multiple users all overseen by a primary administrator.

WordPress.com
As a WordPress user, you have the option of setting up a WordPress blog on your own server or creating a WordPress-hosted blog at WordPress.com. WordPress.com is a very straightforward blogging tool with lots of features such as custom design templates, integrated statistics, automatic spam protection and more.

Blogger

Blogger (formerly known as Blogspot) is a popular and free blog-publishing service owned by Google. It offers free templates, widgets, mobile blogging, and money making opportunities by displaying AdSense ads on your blog. Blogger can be easily set up and it allows both private and multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use.

Joomla

Joomla is a free and open source content management system (CMS), which enables you to build web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla one of the most popular web site software available.

TypePad

TypePad is another blogging service for you to share your interests and get noticed. You can easily design and customize your own blog, and use its SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SMO (Social Media Optimization) tools to promote your blog and attract an audience and following. Unfortunately you must pay a minimum fee of $8.95 per month to use this service. Anyway Typepad offers a 14-day free blog trial for you to get started.

Movable Type

Movable Type is a weblog publishing system developed by the company Six Apart. Similar to WordPress, Movable Type offers a free self-hosted package (MovableType.org) as well as a service for non-developers who would like to host their blog for free (MovableType.com). This blogging service has several notable features, such as the ability to host multiple weblogs and standalone content pages, manage files, user roles, templates, tags, categories, and trackback links.

LiveJournal

LiveJournal (LJ) is another free and open source server software that was designed to run the LiveJournal virtual community where Internet users can keep a blog, journal or diary. LiveJournal’s blogging features include those found in similar blogging sites (multiple authors, commenting, calendars, and polls). However, LiveJournal differentiates itself from other blogging sites by its WELL-like features of a self-contained community and some social networking features similar to other social networking sites.

Drupal

Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP. It is used to create websites ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political, and government sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.uk. There are many templates available from contributors and the Drupal development team. Drupal’s installation process is quite similar to WordPress.

Posterous

Posterous is a simple blogging platform that support integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes. Updating to Posterous is similar to other blogging platforms. Posting can be done by logging in to the website’s rich text editor, but it is particularly designed for mobile blogging. Mobile methods include sending an email, with attachments of photos, MP3s, documents, and video (both links and files). Posterous also has its own URL shortening service which can be used to post to Twitter.

SquareSpace

SquareSpace is a commercial blogging platform comes with standard, advanced and business packages. Some of its notable features include iPhone or iPad app to check your site and manage posts, dozens of professionally designed templates, social integration, analytics tools help you view the traffic and more. It also provides importation tool for you to import your blog from WordPress, Blogger or TypePad and vice versa. Similar to TypePad, SquareSpace also provides free 14-day trial.