Blogging Platforms for Your Startup
There are many good reasons to start a blog for your startup: to update your customers, to generate content that ranks in search engines, or to establish your founders as subject matter experts. After you come up with some ideas, understand why you’re writing, and create a content plan, you need to decide on a blogging platform.
How to Pick a Blogging Platform
There are a few key factors that will influence your choice of a blogging platform. While I could devote an article to each of these, I’ll save that for another day, and just leave you with a brief summary.
Here are the five things I consider when choosing a blogging platform:
- Cost to set up and maintain
- Ease of use
- Customizability
- Distribution
- Speed and scalability
You should weigh each of these factors based on your needs and the team who will be managing the blog.
Startup Blogging Platforms
Setting up a blog doesn’t have to be a headache - there are many platforms out there that will help you build a professional-looking one. Below I’ve collected a few of the best options for your startup’s blog in 2021.
Squarespace ($12) - Squarespace is my go-to recommendation for non-technical people who need a website. Squarespace works just as well for basic landing pages as it does for a full-featured website and blog.
GraphCMS ($0) - Brings your content to any platform or static site builder. With GraphCMS, you build the essential GraphQL infrastructure and they build a headless CMS for your content creators.
Jekyll ($0) - If you don’t mind writing a little HTML yourself, Jekyll is an awesome landing page and blogging platform. It can scale pretty much infinitely and it’s free to use with Github pages. You can also read our comparison with Wordpress and our comparison with Hugo.
Gatsby ($0) - The new, hot static site builder has a great reputation among developers, and they’re growing quickly. If your tech team uses React, you might want to consider Gatsby.
Linkedin Publishing ($0) - Linkedin has a publishing tool that allows anyone to write blog posts that are immediately shared with their Linkedin network and profile. You don’t get any options for customizing your posts or calls to action, but it’s simple and gets automatic distribution.
ButterCMS ($24) - If you’d prefer to use a CMS as a backend and integrate your blog into your site, an option like ButterCMS would work. This works best with a static site builder or single-page application.
Cockpit ($0) - Cockpit is perfect if you need a flexible content structure but don’t want to be limited in how to use the content. You can use Cockpit for much more than blogging if you like.
Contentful ($0) - Like ButterCMS, Contentful can be used as a complete content management system with an API that will hook into your site. Both solutions are only recommended for developers.
Drupal ($0) - Free, open-source, and built on PHP, Drupal is a full-fledged content management system with a huge community. It’s more flexible than WordPress in many ways, but also requires more work to customize.
Ghost ($0) - An open-source NodeJS blogging platform, Ghost can be installed on your server or you can use Ghost Pro to let them serve it up. In either case, Ghost provides a nice-looking theme and great options for customizing your blog.
Medium ($0) - Medium has become really popular for startup blogs. While you don’t get to customize the look of your blog, it gets some free distribution on Medium.com.
Postach.io ($9) - Allows you to use Evernote as your blog’s backend.
Postagon ($0) - Many of the blogging platforms on this list have more features than Postagon, but if you like a clean, minimal experience, you can start writing on Postagon in less than a minute.
Stitcher ($0) - A PHP-based static site generator. Offers the speed and flexibility of pure HTML for developers who might prefer PHP.
Tumblr ($0) - Tumblr is simple and customizable, plus you can make it work with your own subdomain. The community features also give you some built-in distribution although it’s less popular than Medium today.
Weebly ($0) - Weebly is a great all-in-one website and blog creator with many templates and tools to choose from.
Wix ($0) - Wix gives you everything you need for a stunning website or blog and it’s free.
WordPress.com ($0) - WordPress.com is a hosted blogging service. It makes setup easier, but allows for less flexibility and includes fewer plugin options than WordPress.org.
WordPress.org ($0) - While you’ll have to install WordPress on your own server, hosting is usually cheap. The biggest downside to WordPress now is the spam that shows up because it’s so popular.
Write.as ($0) - Quick, free (or cheap to upgrade), does custom domains, custom CSS, and it’s easy to create a bunch of blogs from one account if you upgrade.
Need help generating high-quality content for your startup’s blog? Check out Draft.dev and let us know if we can help.
By Karl Hughes
Karl is a former startup CTO and the founder of Draft.dev. He writes about technical blogging and content management.
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