Here’s a list of some of the best blogging sites that are currently available for you to choose the right platform if you want to be an active blogger.
WordPress
WordPress is the most popular free blogging platform which works for everyone from amateur bloggers to large-scale businesses. You can rapidly create a new blog entirely for free, with a reasonable amount of customization.
It offers a vast array of paid and free custom themes and plug-in which makes WordPress highly flexible, scalable, user-friendly, and search engine optimized.
WordPress.com is a free blog-hosting site with roughly half the features of .org. The general idea here is less maintenance for you, but less control of the blog.
To get the most out of WordPress and its features or turning your blog into a business, then you absolutely need to pay for web hosting. With a self-hosted WordPress blog, you can make money by setting up banner ads, inserting affiliate links, selling products, creating online courses, or any other way you want to monetize your blog. You have complete control of your website, including design, functionality, and user experience.
Blogger
You can’t customize Blogger even if you change the back-end code. It’s also tough to set up your blog with your own domain name. Themes and designs on Blogger are limited, and there are no plugins for additional features. There is little community support on Blogger in contrast to the larger developer community on WordPress.
This is the best platform to share your written thoughts when you do not want to pay for the flexibility of hosting your own blog.
Tumblr
Tumblr is one of the easiest free blogging platforms to use which is also known for informal micro-blogging, a form of blogging that is longer than a Tweet but not as long or professional as a full-blown article or post. Therefore, a Tumblr account is ideal for first-time users looking to start posting instantly, but not commit to a full-time project.
Tumblr has a huge array of beautiful themes and it’s reasonably easy to customize your theme to make it your own .it has a basic Control Panel which helps in managing multiple blogs effortlessly.
The Tumblr blogging platform is mobile friendly via dedicated Smartphone apps which make it easy to submit content to a Tumblr blog from anywhere by using SMS, email, or audio message.
Tumblr lacks good caching and anti-virus plug-in. This can result in a slow loading or hacked site. It is not optimized for building a high traffic website focused on Text or Writing content. It is a great choice for casual bloggers who want to share visual content (video, photography, food, art, infographics etc.) and have no interest in looking professional.
Tumblr was recently bought by Yahoo, who has interesting plans for the whole blog advertising thing.
Medium
Medium is a free blogging platform for sharing your stories and ideas on the go. It has a set of features designed to help you focus on your writing. You can edit a published post from anywhere. You can also use voice dictation to speak and write.
Just Start writing your draft in the app, it will automatically save locally on your phone and sent up to Medium.com when you choose to publish. You won’t find any advanced content management on Medium. Medium is a platform for writing, publishing, and sharing content with a community of like-minded individuals.
Svbtle
Svbtle is a stripped-back free blogging platform for long-form writing. SVBTLE is for writing and reading network designed from the ground up to work the same way your brain does. It helps you curate ideas and includes everything you need to develop and publish your thoughts to the world.
It has a much-narrowed set of features i.e. you can only change your icon and main color. There is no interaction with readers, as there is no way to comment on anything, readers may contact the writer via Twitter or email if the writer chooses to share that information.
If you just want to write your own ideas and make them available for anyone interested in your words, then Svbtle is a good place to be.
Live Journal
LiveJournal combines blog and social networking where Users share thoughts, experiences, guidance, artwork, fiction, and more by posting to journals and interest-based communities.
Users can create free blogs or pay for an account that offers more features, fewer ads, and increased customization. LiveJournal is a vibrant, social journaling platform that allows users to publish online journals, join into communities of users interested in the same topics, friend one another, and comment on each other’s journal entries.
Free LiveJournal accounts offer limited functionality, but for casual bloggers, that functionality might be enough. Many bloggers need the ability to upload a lot of images, publish polls, control ads, control design, track analytics and performance, and more. To get those types of features, you need to upgrade to one of the paid LiveJournal accounts.
LiveJournal is very much about community and friends rather than a stand-alone blogging tool.
Weebly
Weebly is a website creation tool that includes free blogging templates. Weebly is one of the easiest website builders in the market. However, blogging is also part of the system, and you get access to customizable layouts, a bunch of free themes, and the usual sharing features you’d expect, to spread your words far and wide.
The flexible Drag-and-drop feature helps the user to build blog content quickly. It has decent but a wide range of templates, suiting different intentions of your website. It has Powerful design and publishing elements that let you focus on your content while Weebly services pull all the weight in the background.
Weebly’s free blog templates can work as standalone sites or parts of a larger website or online store. Free blog hosting ensures your content loads quickly and remains available to readers. Blog templates can be fully customized and altered to fit your goals.
Weebly is the best choice when you have to create static pages for your blog. You can add various elements such as text, code embeds and other media.
Postach.io
Postach.io is a free blogging platform from the creators of Evernote.Postach.io claims it’s the “easiest way to blog”. Essentially, you just connect a notebook to Postach.io and then tag notes as ‘published’ to make them public.
However, you get some customization, too, including a bunch of themes, the means to embed content from other sites and the option to instead use Drop box for storing content.
Pen.io is one of the only free blogging platforms which don’t require a login — instead; you define a URL for a post and set a password. Images can be dragged into place, and you can create multi-page posts using a tag. And that’s about it.
It’s a decent option for banging out the odd sporadic post, especially if you don’t want any personal info stored.
Ghost
Open source platform, Ghost is free if you install it on your own system. Unlike the others on this list, Ghost is only free if you download and install it yourself. Use the Ghost site and you pay on the basis of traffic. However, this system differentiates itself in other important ways: it’s entirely open source, and while writing you get a live preview of how your post will end up.