Blogger or Wordpress: Which one is better?

If you have been researching blogging platforms to host your blogs you may have already noticed that Blogger or Wordpress are two of the favourite options for hosted blogs. A hosted blog lives on the Blogspot or Wordpress servers respectively, instead of on your own hosting. They take care of the technical aspects and even give you a domain name, but at the same time they restrict the plugins and templates you can use. However, for a beginner blogger a hosted blog is a perfect way of testing the waters. So all that's left is choosing: Blogger or Wordpress?

Blogger is part of the Google family, and as such there's some rumours about it giving it the advantage SEO wise. In my opinion, Wordpress and Blogger can both be equally SEO friendly, but Blogger templates tend to be simpler and so less chances of making them difficult to read for the search engines. In the long run, however, it will be your content and link building strategy what will define your success with the search engines.

Both platforms offer the possibility of including advertisement, but only Blogger allows you to use Amazon and Adsense units without paying a fee, while Wordpress displays their won advertisement. To use advertisement on a Wordpress hosted blog you will need to purchase premium services. If you just want to test if your niche blog idea can make money, Blogger may be the best option. The self hosted version of Wordpress, of course, allows you to do anything you want with the template.

Both Blogger and Wordpress allow you to use your own domain name previous payment of a small fee. Otherwise your blog address will be myblogname.blogspot.com or myblogname.wordpress.com, which sounds quite less professional. Using your own domain name also allows you to move your blog into another blogging platform or your own hosted solution without losing all the backlinks you built, so it's extremely advisable if you plan on blogging seriously.

In my opinion, Wordpress tagging and category system is much better than Blogger, but also more complex. Both platforms offer an easy and friendly text editor for your posts that can be used by the most technically unfriendly person.

Blogger has gone a long way from the first, really basic templates, and also offers the possibility of updating the HTML code directly, for free. This means that if you know your CSS and HTML you can make your Blogger blog look exactly like you wanted it. On the other hand, Wordpress has over 120 available themes, many of them what I would qualify as professional, with plenty of customization options. So for the same effort, I'd say Wordpress provides better value. To install premium Wordpress themes you would need to go the self-hosted route.

Blogger offers you google analytics almost out of the box, which is extremely useful if you want to know what's going on and what kind of traffic are you getting. Learning to understand web analytics even for a personal blog can help you tailor your content to your visitors, and even become a better writer. This is a major flaw in Wordpress hosted, and the reason why I always go for a hosted Wordpress solution myself.

In my opinion, I'd go first for Blogger and then for a hosted Wordpress solution, mostly because I think if there's going to be ads on my content I prefer them to be mine, and because I love Google Analytics. However, the templates offered by Wordpress look generally more professional (it's a matter of tastes, I know) and the content hierarchy is better which makes it also more user friendly for blogs with a lot of content. Both are professional platforms that are kept up to date in terms of security and technical advances, and in the end using one or the other may be all a matter of testing both and seeing which one you are more comfortable with.