Ten years ago, WordPress was the coolest, easiest platform in the Blogosphere. It was lightweight, intuitive, and completely free, a novelty of blogging platforms at the time. Now WordPress is no longer the latest-and-greatest and is, in fact, the gold standard of blog platforms. Unfortunately, that comes with too many options, too many plugins, and an overwhelming network of APIs, themes, and CMS code. WordPress is no longer the only real option when it comes to blogging, and it may not be the best either.
7 Great WordPress Alternatives:
Here are seven great WordPress alternatives to consider.
1. Tumblr
Tumblr is everything WordPress used to be. While it lacks many of the components of a WordPress blog, Tumbr is the best microblogging platform out there, perfect for sharing short posts and images. It’s a good solution for users who don’t want to deal with any code (or even hosting) and it’s only limited in its lack of customization options and plugins. Tumblr has none of the bells and whistles of WordPress (except the “free” part) but maybe that’s a good thing.
2. Squarespace
What Squarespace lacks in customization it makes up for in the friendliest customer service in the biz. For less than $200 a year you can count on Squarespace to host your business site and even several different e-commerce solutions for selling products or services online. Particularly if you’ve been used to working on WordPress, Squarespace will be an easy transition.
3. Blogger
Blogger was actually founded by Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, back in the 1990s. It’s now owned by Google and remains the best option for complete and total newbies to blogging but it lacks a lot of the features of WordPress. Blogger has great integration with other Google products which makes uploading pictures and the like simple. It’s free, too, so if you don’t mind the few customization options it may be a great choice.
4. Moveable Type
The worst thing about Moveable Type is its cost. But if you’ve got the $500+ to shell out on multiple-user licenses you’ll love the ease, aesthetics, and community of MT. The tools available on Moveable Type are incredibly useful, from analytics to excellent customer service, and take a lot of the management hassles out of running a blog. And if you’re not sure what kind of traffic your blog’s likely to have, Moveable Type can accommodate whatever’s thrown your way.
5. Habari
Habari’s only a couple of years old but it’s already giving WordPress a run for its money. It’s also free and very developer-supported so cool new features are popping up daily. With easy WordPress integration it’s pretty simple for jilted users to migrate their blogs to Habari and the platform supports just about any kind of database you could be using.
6. Expression Engine
Expression Engine is probably the best suited blogging platform for professionals and large businesses because it’s incredibly secure. Since it takes a licensing fee (usually a few hundred dollars) to become part of the Expression Engine family you can count on superior development capabilities and round-the-clock customer service. Since you’re paying for it, you get a lot more hand-holding with Expression Engine and your expectations are allowed to be a little higher.
7. Drupal
Drupal is only going to work as a solution for you if you’ve got some development skills. It’s open-source and there are tens of thousands of plugins (called modules) available to customize a site any which way. While you won’t find Drupal easy to use if you’re not highly tech-inclined you will appreciate the admin controls if you’re setting up a site for someone else.
