Blogger Vs Wordpress

I started blogging in May 2005 on blogger. I found the interface for text editing on blogger very interactive, one button publishing was a superb concept and the fact that I had the ability to change my blog template and add javascripts to it made it even more attractive. I used wordpress 1.5 for the first time when I felt the need for an intra university blogging tool to get feedback and show updates regarding our Annual technical festival. Having enough expertise with PHP, I found it rather easy to install and work with, though the text editing interface was far from interactive. Strangely some of the issues in the current versions of Blogger and Wordpress remain largely similar as they were 2 years back. Here is a comparative study of blogger and Wordpress.


Blogger

1. Text interface interactive and very good response time.
   
2. Blogger search makes it more easy to find blogs on blogger.
3. Portability is a problem. I cannot shift my wordpress blog to blogger just like that.
4. No support for viewing latest comments that I have made or responses of those comments on the dashboard.
5. Blogger does not show popular blogs as wordpress does. For ex there is no emphasis (a small scroller in the middle of the blogger home page) on the top posts or top blogs of the day in blogger. In that sense blogger lays stress on community building to have a sustained regular readership.
6. Blogger has recently introduced the concept of custom widget. This is a very important step towards getting people interested in implementing their own ideas and having an active community involved in working for developing blogger as a whole.
7. The Google Reader's link blog is, in my opinion , by far the most innovative app in the blogging domain till date.

Wordpress

1. The text interface of wordpress is definitely inferior to that of blogger has a very visible slowness in response time.
2. There is no wordpress search. 3rd party apps like technorati or search engines can be used for searching. Blogger thus has a definite edge in this way.
3. Wordpress is a popularity driven blogging platform. The home page displays top blogs and blogs of the minute and also displays top tags. In this sense, it is perfect for people who are looking to get readership by writing really good stuff. Unlike blogger it also shows the faster growing blogs. So it definitely ranks above blogger when it comes to getting more readership. Its friends surfer and blogroll features provide for a very effective community building tool.
4. Portability is a great option with wordpress. Migrating to wordpress from blogger is very easy.
5. Being open source wordpress is open to the coding community. Finding plugins for wordpress is easy and add ons are very frequently added on wordpress but having said that no real innovative plugins have as yet caught my attention. The wordpress to wordpress migration plugin is helpful but does not find much usage in everyday blogging.
6. The facility of blogging in many languages in wordpress is a definite plus.
   

There are certain things like template customization, availability of templates, services (up-time etc) in which both may rank equally.



To summarize I would suggest that for a user new to the idea of blogging, Blogger still seems to be a much better option. Its more interactive and offers very little unnecessary detailing on the dashboard. It probably attracts more user who are first time bloggers.

For a user who has come experience of blogging, Wordpress is a much better tool. It gives the user a power to understand his readership details. Usage stat graphs and per post stats are a wonderful innovation and once a user is used to it, its difficult to live without a dashboard as detailed as Wordpress.