The Best Technical Blogging Platforms
One of the first decisions any developer marketing team needs to make is which technical blogging platform and content management system to use. There are a lot of viable options, from well-known public platforms like Medium to specialized tools like Jekyll. You could even get your engineering team to build your own in-house platform on a headless CMS.
This question comes up a lot in calls with clients, so I wanted to round up some of the best writing platforms for running your technical blog, and share a little bit about why you might choose each of them. Note that we’ve also written detailed tutorials and comparisons for many of these, so be sure to check out the articles linked in each section.
Medium
One of the most popular blog platforms for developers out there is Medium. People often choose it because of the built-in distribution that receives millions of unique monthly visitors. The more eyeballs on your online blog platform, the better, right? Medium’s audience tends to skew towards articles relating to technology, startups, and all business topics, so that makes it very compelling for software engineering blogs.
Another positive that Medium presents is its Domain Authority (DA). DA gives us a statistical measure of how well your site will rank in search engines. Medium’s high DA means that you’ll be getting a lot of traffic organically because articles on Medium will likely be indexed and ranked faster than those on a brand new website. Finally, Medium allows readers to add comments and “claps” - basically “likes” - to each post, showing how popular each piece is.
The big drawback to Medium (and similar platforms like Dev.to or Hashnode) is that you don’t have full control over the ads and articles surrounding your content. You also don’t build domain authority on your site, so publishing on Medium alone won’t help your primary domain rank higher in Google.
For that reason, I recommend syndicating your content to Medium, but not publishing there exclusively.
Gatsby
Gatsby is an open source platform that generates blazing fast static sites and includes lots of features for search engine optimization and publication. Gatsby is purpose-built for developers and is based on React.js, making it familiar to many frontend developers.
A static site generator (SSG) like Gatsby is a great option for more technical users because the performance is fantastic and there’s no server vulnerabilities to worry about. Gatsby sites don’t have to deal with server requests because everything is pre-rendered when application is built and deployed.
Gatsby uses GraphQL to manage data through its vibrant plugin ecosystem. If you use something like Netlify in conjunction with Gatsby, you can easily manage your content with the use of these plugins. Or, you can use their gatsby-image and gatsby-plugin-favicon to easily process and size your images.
One of the biggest issues with Gatsby is searching large content libraries. Because there’s no server-side code, you have to do all that processing on the front-end, and that can get really slow if you have a lot of content. Finally, Gatsby takes some technical chops to work with, so it’s not appropriate for non-technical developer marketing teams.
If you’re using Gatsby, you might also want to check out our guide to creating Gatsby starters.
WordPress
Almost everyone has heard of WordPress as it’s probably the most widely-used blogging platform on the internet. The upside to this is that there is a huge ecosystem of plugins and themes to help you get started, but is it the best fit for a technical blog?
One that can be a bit confusing is what the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.org is where you’ll go if you’re hosting your own site with your own domain name, which I’d typically recommended. While you’ll have to manage your own updates, backups, deployments, and maintenance, you get much more flexibility and ownership of your content.
You can use WordPress.com if you don’t want to deal with the technical intricacies of Wordpress.org or just want to get started as quickly as possible. If you want plugins, you’ll also have to pay $300 per year for their Business Plan.
If you’re interested in getting started developing with WordPress, check out our guide here. And, if you want to compare WordPress to our next platform, Jekyll, check out this post.
Jekyll
If you aren’t intimidated by HTML, CSS, Markdown, you might want to give Jekyll a shot. Jekyll doesn’t have a user-friendly back end like WordPress does, but if your team are mostly developers, they may be very comfortable with editing markdown files in Github anyway. You can see more of the differences between Jekyll and Wordpress in this comparison, but the difference is substantial. Because Jekyll generates a static website (similar to Gatsby), you’ll find that it’s fast and takes very little effort on your end to optimize the user interface.
Jekyll uses Liquid and gives you a blank slate when it comes to templates. There will be little built-in code, so you’ll have to rely on Jekyll plugins or writing your own code. But, you can host it for free on GitHub Pages so your costs are basically nil. You’ll never have to worry about losing your content because it’s automatically backed up and stored in GitHub.
Finally, Jekyll’s been round for a while now, so there are plenty of fans out there creating free and paid themes as well as helping support the open source tool.
Like Gatsby though, the downside to Jekyll is that you’ll need to be at least somewhat technical to use it and maintain it.
Hugo
Yet another static site generator to consider is Hugo. It can go toe-to-toe with Jekyll and the two are generally compared against each other in reviews. The main advantage that you’ll find it has over any other SSG is its speed and thriving, active community. Another benefit is that it’s significantly easier to set up, especially when you compare it to Jekyll. As for content, it’s simply stored in text files within your project.
Hugo also supports a variety of formats, from Markdown to HTML or Asciidoc. Though it’s a bit of a newbie on the scene, there are still a variety of themes available thanks to its community of users. If you’re a beginner, you might find the template engine confusing. Also, there aren’t any extensions so you won’t have plugin support. Despite those issues, it’s still a very strong contender.
Ghost
Ghost has been around for quite some time but it’s not as well known as some of the others on this list.
Ghost is written in Node.js and relies on a minimal user interface. If all you’re looking for is a simple blogging platform, this one might be for you. Many people give a lot of praise for their live blog previewing which makes editing or writing code easier than some of the other platforms.
Ghost requires web hosting or one of its paid plans to deploy to the public. It uses Markdown, like many tech blogging platforms, and allows you to customize your themes to fit anything your heart desires.
The biggest downside, besides needing technical expertise to use and deploy is that there isn’t a free hosted plan. But its simplicity and growing feature-set is enticing.
Final Thoughts
The landscape of technical blogging platforms continues to improve and change every year, so I’d love to hear from you if you have any feedback on these platforms (or others). Reach out to us or find me on X to continue the conversation.
By Karl Hughes
Karl is a former startup CTO and the founder of Draft.dev. He writes about technical blogging and content management.
Build a Blog that Software Developers Will Read
The Technical Content Manager’s Playbook is a collection of resources you can use to manage a high-quality, technical blog:
- A template for creating content briefs
- An Airtable publishing calendar
- A technical blogging style guide