Two of the most popular blogging platforms online are Blogger and WordPress.  With both platforms, users can sign up for a free blog and are given the additional option of purchasing a custom domain for their blog. There are many key differences between accounts at Blogger.com and WordPress.com, and your decision to use the former or the latter to host your blog is based solely upon what features you think a content management system should include.

Let’s begin with themes, because every blogger is obsessed with how their website looks. With Blogger, you are free to edit any of the themes, style sheets and colors, and you can also install a third party theme (a popular website that offers free downloadable Blogger themes is BlogSkins). There’s a catch, however, and that is that Blogger has a unique markup language, so in order to create your own theme, some learning is involved. WordPress seems to fall on the entirely opposite end of the spectrum, where there is no template editing available to users, and style sheet editing is available as a paid upgrade. Select WordPress themes allow you to upload a header image, and even then, many of the available WordPress themes are quite disappointing.

The next issue that arises is how images are stored and how much storage space you get. Unless you have an image heavy blog (like a photo blog or a showcase of your work), bloggers don’t tend to use that much image space. Blogger gives users 1GB of image storage and all images are uploaded to a Picasa Web Album gallery that is linked to your Google Account. WordPress on the other hand, gives users 3GBs (paid upgrades are available) of images, .ppt, .doc, and .pdf file storage and you can add an image gallery to any post. If you’re concerned about uploading other types of files on Blogger, you can always upload .ppt, .doc, and .pdf files to Google Docs.

Another thing that will tear bloggers’ opinions is the static page feature. WordPress has consistently allowed the publishing, editing, and deleting of static pages. Blogger, on the other hand, does not offer the same time of availability. At a first glance, the unavailability of this feature on Blogger seems a little disappointing, however, with some patience and time, static pages can be artificially created.

Those are the main ones, but of course, there are many more feature differences that I didn’t discuss.  Or of course you could always create your own from scratch like Corporate Search Optimization and NetScope did.