15 Best Blogging Platforms To Get Content Out in the Wild

Even with the advent of YouTube and social media, blogging is still alive and well. Over 409 million people read personal and professional blogs hosted on WordPress.com alone each month.

That’s not even including self-hosted WordPress blogs and those hosted using other CMS solutions. So it’s not too late to start a blog.

But what is the best blogging platform?

That’s what we will cover in this post.

Best Self-Hosted Blogging Platforms

Below, we’ll cover the best self-hosted blogging platforms out there in detail, and why they are the best choices on the market. “Self-hosted” means that you need a separate server and domain to use the blogging software to create your blog or website.

1. WordPress.org

So you want to start a blog. If you’ve looked around even a little bit, chances are you’ve already heard about WordPress.

The .org website is the home of its open source self-hosted Content Management System (CMS). A CMS is a piece of software that helps you create a website and publish/manage/update its contents.

WordPress is the nr.1 CMS on the internet, and powers millions of blogs and websites. It’s the clear leader out of all the popular blogging platforms listed in this post.

If you’re creating a blog or website for business purposes, we 100% believe that WordPress is your best option. It’s completely free, open source, and makes it easy to create a professional-looking blog thanks to many themes.

Why WordPress Is the Industry Standard

But it’s not just beginners, solopreneurs, and bloggers who use WordPress. It has become a clear leader in the CMS industry.

CMS Usage Distribution — CMS usage distribution

Almost half of the internet’s top one million most-visited sites use WordPress. And these aren’t just amateur bloggers or aspiring writers.

People use WordPress because it has over 55k free plugins and 7k+ free themes in its official directory. There are also thousands of more premium themes and plugins available on other sites (check out our curated lists of the best WordPress themes and WordPress plugins).

So you can mix and match, find the theme that you want, and extend the functionality with WordPress plugins as necessary.

Not to mention it has one of the largest and most active developer community. There are hundreds of developers devoting their time to provide support to users, keeping their plugins/themes updated, or releasing new ones.

This active and huge community has a great advantage for everyone involved: issues and bugs are usually discovered and fixed quickly, which is good for security.

This community also means that it’s a lot easier to get help and guidance with potential issues if your WordPress business needs it. For example, it’s not hard to hire WordPress developers or designers.

WordPress is also SEO-friendly out of the box, which makes it easy to rank content in Google and other search engines.

Key Features

WYSIWYG Editor.
Monetization.
Multilingual (through plugins).
Multi-user Environment.
Password protection.
Global Navigation.
Full Customizability of Theme/Template Files.
Content Scheduling.
SEO-Friendly Content Structure.
Advanced SEO Options (with SEO plugins).
Extensive number of plugin solutions (both free and paid).
Extensive number of themes (both free and paid).

Interface and Ease of Use

If you are relatively confident with the internet and using new services or technology, you don’t even need instructions to figure out the interface.

Most web hosts offer one-click installation of WordPress, so it’s effortless install and setup. (With any of our WordPress hosting plans, we take care of the installation for you.)

The built-in tutorial will help you get familiar with the dashboard and create your very first blog post.

And even without the tutorial, the WordPress dashboard is not hard to navigate at all. Hover the plus sign to open a dropdown menu, where you can choose to create a new post, page, or even user.

To edit the design of your website, click the “Appearance” section, where you’ll have different options.

Pricing

Self-hosted WordPress is on an open source license and is 100% free, forever.

That alone, though, isn’t enough. You’ll also need a domain name and hosting.

If you care about loading speed, security, and reliability, Kinsta managed hosting plans start at $35 per month and comes with free migrations, a CDN, malware protection, automatic daily backups, and more.

You can also use the Kinsta API to create a new WordPress site/installation without accessing DevKinsta.

2. Drupal

Drupal is the second-largest open source CMS. Rather than a strict blogging tool, it’s better described as a professional, scalable online publishing platform.

Drupal has full-fledged versioning and content scheduling/planning built into the core. You have much more granular control over user permissions. You can even create unique permissions for specific users. There’s also support for multilingual sites in the core, which makes it a prime option for larger companies.

But it’s not as easy to use and it might be a bit more difficult when it comes to creating a blog that “looks good”.

Features

Basic Editor.
Monetization.
Multilingual.
Password Protection.
Global Navigation.
Full Customizability of Theme/Template Files.
Customizable Access Control and Tiered Permissions.
Advanced Content Scheduling.
Full-Fledged Versioning (with module).
SEO-Friendly Content Structure.
Advanced SEO Options (with module).