Opinions In Social Media

The Great Blog CMS Showdown: WordPress vs Tumblr vs Posterous

Posted by Chad on Feb 25th, 2010 | View Comments

Although I have been extremely happy with the use of Tumblr as my blogging platform I can’t help but feel a little jealous of the WordPress users and their never ending supply of free themes and plugins to enhance the look and functionality of their blogs. Lately I have been thinking of leaving Tumblr and going back to running my own self hosted WordPress blog but in order to decide if moving my blog from Tumblr elsewhere would serve my needs best I decided to do a little pro and con comparison between the more well known blogging sites of WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Tumblr and Posterous.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com is the commercial half of WordPress.org and is a fantastic blogging solution for anyone looking to get into blogging. It gives users the power of the WordPress CMS while taking away the hassle of upgrading the WordPress software. The downfall of this system is it costs you if you wish to use a custom domain name or your own CSS for styling your site.

Pros

  • Easy to set up account (takes under 5 minutes)
  • Runs the powerful CMS WordPress
  • Choose from 81 different available themes
  • Can activate the ability to use a mobile theme when users visit using a mobile browser
  • Widget support
  • Change themes with the click of a button
  • No hosting costs as bandwidth is covered by WordPress.com
  • Free to use, unless you choose to purchase upgrades
  • 3 GB of file hosting
  • No maintenance or upgrading of software is required

Cons

  • Must pay to edit the CSS of your theme at a price of 14.97 per year
  • Costs 9.97 per year to use a custom domain
  • Have to pay to remove ads from your site
  • Only WordPress.com is allowed to run advertising on your blog. Only special case sites are allowed to run any advertising besides what WordPress.com already runs.
  • Limited to only the themes they provide
  • Limited to using only the widgets that have been pre-selected by WordPress
  • No plugin support
  • Admin suite could be seen as overly complex for some users not familiar with a CMS

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is the freely available open source software that powers many of the world’s largest blogs and while very powerful and customizable with its thousands of free and premium themes and plugins it does require that you have your own hosting and are comfortable either installing the software yourself or paying someone else to install and configure it for you.

Pros

  • Thousands of free and premium themes to choose from
  • Thousands of great plugins and widgets to enhance the usability and feature set of your blog
  • Open source so you can make changes to the software as you see fit
  • Easy to install on most servers. Many hosting plans include a one click install for WordPress
  • WordPress is more than just blogging software and can be used as a really powerful CMS
  • Can import your old blog into WordPress with one click
  • Spam protection on comments using the Akami Akismet plugin
  • You can set up your blog to accept multiple authors
  • Automatic pinging
  • Large community and well documented so you can find answers to most questions quickly

Cons

  • Requires that you have web hosting
  • Must be comfortable FTPing files and creating a database on your host so that you can install the software
  • Some security flaws due to poorly coded plugins
  • Admin suite could be seen as overly complex for some users not familiar with a CMS
  • Must always ensure to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress to ensure your software contains the latest security fixes
  • Plugins must be upgraded to ensure they have the latest security fixes and features
  • Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress could break your theme or plugins
  • If something goes wrong you are the site admin and must take care of the issue by searching for the answer

Tumblr.com

I currently host my blog on Tumblr and find it to be an extremely easy to use micro-blogging platform that is not only free to use but allows for a great amount of customization. The Tumblr admin panel is broken up into categories that make it easy to decide where to place your content but this simplicity comes at a price as you do not get storage space and the expandability afforded with WordPress plugins is missing. Premium theme development seems to be missing with Tumblr as well making it difficult to find a developer willing to create custom themes for you.

Pros

  • Free to use
  • Account setup is quick
  • Custom domain hosting for free
  • Admin area is extremely easy to use
  • Theme support and template customization
  • Well written API
  • Great social media features such as Like, Reblog and Follow
  • No maintenance or upgrading of software is required
  • Auto-post to your Facebook and Twitter feeds
  • Hosted by Tumblr so no additional hosting costs

Cons

  • No built in commenting system
  • No file hosting
  • Can’t install or configure plugins for additional features
  • Have had speed issues
  • Not a large selection of freely available themes to choose from
  • Almost no premium themes to choose from and hard to find developers who do custom themes
  • To customize your theme you must be familiar with html/css/javascript

Posterous.com

Posterous describes themselves as the dead simple place to post anything and their claim is mostly true. Unlike other blogging platforms you don’t create an account but instead by simply emailing in your fist post an account is auto created for you. Again, unlike other blogging you post your content by emailing it from your email program of choice instead of creating it from within an admin panel. This is a unique and easy way to post content but unfortunately I also found it confusing after being used to using an admin panel in other blogging CMS’s. Posterous allows for theme customization but there are very few themes currently available and the lack of javascript support from within the themes is also an annoyance.

Pros

  • Create an account simply by emailing them
  • Auto-posting to a ridiculous amount of other services
  • Custom themes
  • Ability to have group blogs
  • Accepts almost any file you send to it and converts it to the most friendly web format
  • Creates iTunes ready podcasts out of MP3 files you send to it
  • Free custom domains
  • Ability to import from other blogging platforms
  • Hosted by Posterous so no additional hosting fees

Cons

  • No account creation instead an account is created when you email them. This was a little confusing at first and I think others may be confused by this as well
  • Expected to post by email instead of an admin interface. Found this confusing at first as well
  • Only 1GB of file storage
  • Very limited theme selection
  • No javascript support currently for themes
  • Must use the Posterous commenting system and can’t change to Disqus, Echo or IntenseDebate
  • Ability to auto-subscribe those in your email contact book to a daily digest of your blog
  • Post by web is limited in functionality and features compared to other services

This is by no means a complete feature list for each of these blogging platforms but I do hope that there is enough information provided to help new bloggers determine which blogging solution may be right for them. As with all blogging software you run the risk of finding out after the fact that don’t like the software after using it for some time and then you run into the issue of exporting your content out of the CMS and into a new CMS. This is the current position I am in as I decide whether or not a custom Tumblr theme is the way I wish to proceed with my blog or if it would be better to move back to a self hosted WordPress installation.

Let me know in the comments below which blogging software you currently use. If I didn’t include the blogging CMS you currently use let me know the pros and cons of it in the comments as well.

*Update* Since first publishing this post I have since switched to a self-hosted WordPress install. Although I still like Tumblr as my platform of choice for users looking for an easy to use hosted blogging solution for my needs I wanted the full power that a CMS like WordPress offers with its choice of plugins and themes.

  • markwitt

    Wordpress wins buy a landslide because of their ease of use and my personal favorite their blog posting software.

  • http://www.thehockeyzen.com chrisnadeau

    Love the showdown Chad. I could of saved some time writing mine and just shared yours. :-) I am a Posteorus fan first, but Tumblr is a very close second. The speed of posting is what makes me a huge fan of the life streaming platforms.

  • http://chadegeland.com Chad Egeland

    Thanks for the comment Chris. I enjoyed your take on hosted blogging platforms: http://cnadeau.evolvingsolutions.ca/click-here-...

    I have tried all three platforms that you mentioned in your post but for me Tumblr is my favorite hosted blogging platform because of it's integration with Disqus, great themes available and it's ease of use.

  • http://claimid.com/onuryasar Onur

    i am also at the same turning point. i hosted my own blog for years with wordpress but now many other easy posting options and auto-post features of posterous makes me want to switch. i tried to make wordpress the same (almost) as posterous with adding necessarry plug-ins like posty, wp2twitter etc. but that doesn't feel the same. on the other hand it's good to know that you have everything under your own hands with a self-hosted wordpress. i also edit the theme to fit it to my needs. not being able to do it with posterous/tumblr annoys me.

  • Bas

    Have used tumblr, switched to WordPress.org a week ago, mainly because of the (almost built-in) stats, and additionally the ease of adding pages, configuring the sidebar with different widgets & links, and the great free themes that come with it.

    However, one great pain in the butt is finding plugins to autopost new blogposts to twitter & facebook. I have found a decent one for twitter now, but still searching for a facebook-plugin that works. Double annoying because in Tumblr it's as easy as ticking a box >:-(

  • http://chadegeland.com Chad Egeland

    Thanks for the comment!
    One of my favorite features of Tumblr is the one tick of a box to enable auto-posting to Twitter and Facebook. Fortunately the best feature of WordPress is the enormous community dedicated to creating fantastic themes and plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress itself. I did a little searching and found: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordbook/ I haven't used it but it's supposed to be one of the best plugins available for WordPress to auto-post your blog posts to Facebook. Hope this helps.

  • http://twitter.com/FrannLeach FrannLeach

    If you're on a cpanel host with fantastico, you can use that to install wordpress.org with no ftp experience required, also there's a one click install on Dreamhost.

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