Comparing Blogger.com and WordPress.com

For the past few weeks, I have been comparing the free blogging facilities offered by Blogger.com and WordPress.com.

First, the similarities:

• Both are free.
• Both have fairly easy-to-use Web user interfaces.
• Both let you create private blogs and limited-access blogs.
• Both allow readers to post comments; both allow comment moderation and spam control.
• Both allow a single user ID to have multiple blogs.
• Both allow blogs to have multiple authors.
• Both let you display your tag counts: Blogger calls them “Labels” and WordPress calls them “tags”.

Now, the differences.

Where Blogger scrores:

• Blogger lets you add javascript to your pages. Because WordPress does not, you may not be able to add to your blog third-party widgets that use javascript.
• Blogger lets you customise the CSS of your blog. Because WordPress does not, you are limited by their themes; as a consolation, you can change the picture in the header of their themes. Also, because WordPress themes cannot be customised, you cannot add third-party javascript to the CSS. Google Analytics, for example, needs you to add a code snippet in the CSS.
• Blogger lets you analyse your blog through Google Analytics. Because WordPress has only a stat tool, it’s analytical potential is limited only to the number of visits to your blog.

Where WordPress scores:

• WordPress lets you add Pages (in addition to Posts). Pages are static (unlike posts, which keep changing according to your “Recent posts” settings). And Pages, if you choose the correct theme, appear as tabs at the top of your blog screen. WordPress, thus, offers you a combination of a journal (of posts) and a notebook (of pages). The workaround I could think for Blogger is: Add a text gadget to the sidebar, and put your page text into it. Not a very elegant workaround if the content of your page is something on the lines of, say, “Frequently asked questions”.
• WordPress lets you nest pages. This is my favourite feature – it gives me an almost TOC-like facility for the blog.
• WordPress lets you control who can see individual pages. This control is in addition to the blog-level access control.
• WordPress lets you import the contents from another blog; even a non-WordPress one.
• WordPress lets you put the spotlight on your blog visitors; it has a “Recent Comments” widget
• WordPress lets you highlight your most popular posts through a “Top Posts” widget. The workaround I could think for Blogger is: Add a text gadget to the sidebar, and enter the posts you think are top (through your Google Analytics data).
• WordPress lets you add tag your posts into categories; so, you have two levels of tagging – one as tags and another as categories. You can have clouds for both on your blog. Blogger has only labels.

An ideal blogging solution according to me would be any of the following:

• Blogger + Page-like feature + multi-tagging of posts + Recent-comments widget + Top-posts widget + Page-level access control
• WordPress + Google-Analytics-like features + javascript functionality

But hey! Am I asking too much? The product in question is supposed to be a blog, not a Web domain.