Firstly i must say that I'm not an expert and that's why i thought of writing this review as i have around 7 years of experience in this field. I will try my best to keep the information accurate in this article. And if i do get anything wrong than you are free to criticize. Here is what i have inferred from blogger and wordpress in terms of performance, popularity and ease of use.
Blogger.com started in 1999 :
Blogger came out in 1999. It was know as an automated web publishing tool that allowed you to update your page frequently with instant result and no cost at all. It was powered by Pyra and was one of the first company to come up with the idea of blogging.
Afterwards it was bought by Google in 2001 and some more features were added.
Blogger And Wordpress in 2009 :
Popularity :
Now you know something about its background lets start from total number of blogs blogger has. Presently blogger.com is hosting around
314,000,000 blogs. That is three hundred and fourteen million blogs... WOW !!! Click
here to see the results in Google. That is out of
19,420,000,000 which is in 19.5 billion approx. So blogger occupies around
1.6 % out of all the websites on internet.
Google has around 68.4 million subdomains.
Facebook has 512 million and etc.
Lets take wordpress now. Presently wordpress is hosting around
113,000,000 blogs approx. ( 113 Million ) . Click
here to see it in Google. It occupies around 0.58 % approx out of all the websites on internet. Remember that i'm only talking about wordpress.com .. not wordpress.org or self hosted wordpress as it is only used as tool for writing and editing not hosting.
So in the race of popularity.. the above numbers show that blogger wins leaving wordpress in the beginning of the race track when it is still gaining its required momentum. If i compare the total number of blogs on wordpress and on blogger.. it is 75 % blogs on blogger and 25 % blogs on wordpress approx.
Blogger Performance :
Reliability :
Downtime on blogger.com is like 10 minutes/year. The reason is its hosted by Google .. and Well you know for your self that Google hardly faces downtimes.
So 9/10 in reliability.
Speed :
In terms of speed a normal blogger blog takes around 0.06 sec/50 kbs on 1mb broadband connection. So i will give
it 9/10 in speed.
Help And Support :
Help and support of blogger is possibly the worst i have ever seen. Its like no support. They have just created a help and support center where you can ask a question and wait a month for someone to reply .. and sometimes that reply doesn't help and you get so much frustrated on having the same problem again and again. There is no email or ticket filing that can get you some accurate information on your error. So
2/10 in terms of support. Thats the best i can give them.
Wordpress Performace :
Reliability :
Wordpress.com doesn't face any downtimes also. But its not very reliable as they have much faster staff which is noticing each and every step you take. So they have the right to delete your stuff when every they want to. So
8/10 in reliability.
Speed :
Speed is also not a consideration for wordpress.
It will surely get 9/10.
Help And Support :
Help and support of wordpress is surely No 1 compared to all other blog hosting companies. It is so fast and accurate that you will never find your self in trouble. They are also very aware of copyrights or any sort of virus infected file. They report you to remove any sorts of file that is not allowed and give you time to perform the action. In mean time you can ask them about the alternative you can take and they reply in instants.
So i will give them 8/10 to wordpress in Help And Support.
Ease Of Use :
Blogger Is Just Too Simple :
From the start blogger was the most simple tool for blogging. It takes less than 20 seconds to have your own domain and blog hosted. And from there if you have the information, the archives, labels, drafts, layout all these options are just very simple to use that about anyone who doesn't know anything about blogging can start from here. Here are some factors i'll discuss with you about blogger from sign up to publishing your first post.
How Much Time It Takes To Create A Blog In Blogger ?
First 5 Seconds to sign in with Google account
6th second > Clicked create a blog
8th second > Entering title , domain name, captcha
15th second > Choosing template
19th second > Pressing the button start blogging
20th second > I'm writing my post ..
So now it took me 20 seconds to make my blog. That is actually the speed i have gained after lots of experience so it can vary accordingly.
Design As You Like :
Now talking about editing template. You can install third party templates from site like
btemplates.com ,
blogger-template.blogspot.com etc. Also a huge variety of widgets you can get from
bloggerbuster.com . Other than that the complete freedom of editing your template and installing an Html template makes it the best for having your desired design.
Post Publishing :
Writing a post is the most simple , secure and reliable. Simple because you can add link, pictures and videos both directly from internet and by uploading. No need to sign up for some other hosting company for you pictures. You can add labels ( Categories ) and enable or disable comments for any post.
Reliable :
The auto save feature is specially great for folks in Pakistan as you don't have any clue that when the power will go off ( 5-6 hours of daily load shedding in Pakistan ) and you will lose your work. So the post are saved automatically as you are writing. They are saved as drafts and can be published later.
A wide variety of gadgets are available in default from google which includes games, timers, world clock , news feeds and just about anything.
You can change your blogs domain name, add upto 100 authors, make blog private and other similar settings.
Free Advertisement :
The best of all .. You can earn money from it. You can display adds from more than 73 advertising companies. Private adds are also allowed. And i guess this is the only purpose people still blog so they can get there pocket money out of this.
What can i say ... i can just write on and on from here because i have been using blogger for such a long time that i can't add full details about everything here even if i try . In fact i am a human and i have a limit to remember.
Wordpress is Flexible :
Wordpress is neat and far more flexible than blogger. Say that if you have to add a widget. Wordpress has the drag and drop feature that enable you to add a widget and then put it anywhere in the template you want. While in blogger you have to copy long lines of code and than paste it at specific places and than hope that you get it right or most of the time you wont as you need to have sufficient knowledge about Html before you use blogger.
Wordpress has its own counter so you don't have to look for any other third party for your stats. Also pluggins and widgets for wordpress are much more reliable and neater than blogger. As they are only designed specifically for wordpress.
The draw back of wordpress is that you can't earn money until you don't pay money. That means you have to pay to advertise on your blog. And that is something that made me leave wordpress. Obviously when i can put my ads for free on blogger .. why would i like to pay for adding widgets, editing template and each and everything i perform. So wordpress is not free actually. Its a semi paid company.
So i think i have taken enough of your time on this post. I will touch this topic again when i get some more thoughts. For now thanx so much for reading all of this. Hope this was informative. Please comment about what you think. I like to hear any sort of criticism and suggestion my readers can give me.