10 Best Free Blogging Sites to Build Your Blog for Free in 2024: Tested, Compared and Reviewed

Starting a blog without spending a penny is absolutely possible, and you’re in the right place to find out how to do it. Over the years, I’ve experimented with dozens of different blogging sites and tested how they perform for various purposes and needs. This post documents my findings (as of 2024) and aims to help you pick the best solution for your project.

I will cover five great blogging platforms that allow you to easily create, customize, and host your blog at no upfront cost. I focus on options that are not only user-friendly but also come packed with all the essential tools and features you need to start your blog today.

Here’s what I’m going to cover:

✨ Quick summaries of what makes each platform good
🚀 How to start a blog for free with each of them
🛠️ Features and ease of use – what these sites are capable of and what skills are required
🎨 Customization and design – how you can personalize your blog with templates or cool design options
👥 Community and reach – looking at each platform’s built-in audience and how to leverage it (if available)
⚖️ Free plan limitations and pros/cons – what’s possible on these free plans, plus what options for growth there are as your blog expands

Ready to find your perfect blogging home without breaking the bank? Let’s dive in:

1. Wix

While Wix mainly promotes its paid plans for website building, it actually also offers a completely free plan that can be enough for some users. This plan allows you to create and launch a website with blog functionality without any financial commitment, making it an accessible option for beginners or those on a very tight budget.

Features and ease of use

Starting with Wix is pretty easy. To create a free blog, just visit the Wix website, sign up (no credit card required), and follow the guided steps. Wix takes you by the hand from there. You’ll answer a few questions (AI-powered), and based on your responses, Wix will set up a new website (and blog) for you.

Choosing a design is straightforward, too – Wix narrows down choices by asking about your design preferences before letting you customize your homepage. Once satisfied, just click the Publish button to make your site visible online.

Adding blog posts is similarly easy. You can do that from the Wix dashboard in the Blog section. The interface lets you add text, images, and more, and then publish everything.

Overall, creating a blog with Wix is accessible to anyone, regardless of technical skill. However, navigating the Wix panel might seem daunting at first due to its many features. Wix is a fully-featured website platform first of all, so depending on how comfortable you are with tools like this, you might need to spend a while in the dashboard to find your way around all the options and ignore the things you don’t need.

👉 If you want to learn more, here’s how to build a site on Wix from scratch.

Customization and design

Wix has a library of over 800 themes. If you want to, you can browse that list manually, or you can use the guided setup I mentioned earlier. You also get to tune up your design later on and edit various details of it.

However, keep in mind that while you can customize what you see, you can’t really switch the main theme/template that your blog uses. This part of using Wix can be confusing, as it suggests that completely revamping your site’s design post-launch may pose some challenges. That’s probably because while Wix says they allow you to change your template, what they actually mean is that you can start a new site on a new template and then migrate all your info to it.

Despite this, the variety and design quality of the available themes are noteworthy, offering good modern options for users to explore.

👉 Here are some Wix website examples for your inspiration.

Free plan limitations

Domain – free plan users get a Wix-assigned URL, which is not very good-looking (accountname.wixsite.com/sitename); upgraded plans allow connecting a custom domain.
Wix ads – free plan places ads on every page; upgrading removes these ads.
Storage – free users have up to 500MB; upgraded plans offer 2GB or more.
Bandwidth – free plan provides up to 1GB; unlimited bandwidth with upgrades.
There’s also no possibility to collect payments on the free plan, limited customer support, and no Google Analytics.

Who should use Wix as a free blogging site

For me, the main advantage of starting a free blog on Wix is that you’re being taken by the hand through the (usually difficult) stages of the process, ending up with a working blog very quickly. It really takes less than 10 minutes to set up a basic blog and have it published.

This makes Wix a good choice for users just entering this space who are eager to launch a blog swiftly as an experiment. It’s also a great option if you’re considering growing your presence in the future and adding further components to your site, like an ecommerce module, more pronounced pages about your business, and so on – all those options are pretty affordable.

However, keep in mind that since Wix is a hosted platform, they also control your website to an extent, which can be limiting user autonomy over their web presence. For example, while you do have practical control of your blog – meaning that you can do whatever you want with it – you still don’t want to find yourself violating any of their website guidelines or they could take your site down. If you’d like to be the sole person in control over your blog, consider other options – for example, WordPress (read below).

Go to Wix

2. WordPress

WordPress is by far the most popular blog engine and website platform online. As of today, 43.4% of all websites on the web run on WordPress. Again, that’s all websites. These numbers are not accidental. WordPress is the most functional and powerful tool on this list. Okay, so why isn’t it at No. 1? There are some disadvantages:

WordPress is free* (with an asterisk)

To build your blog on WordPress, and have that blog published on the web, you need three things: WordPress software itself (completely free), a domain name (sometimes free), and a hosting account (sometimes free).

Most of the quality web hosts are paid (like Bluehost – our actual top recommendation for all WordPress sites). If you want to keep things 100% free, you’ll need to dig a bit deeper in search of a company offering such a service.

These companies are constantly changing, due to the obvious challenges in their business models, but one that’s stuck around for a while is 000webhost. They will host your blog for free for one year, which should be more than enough for you to test out if this whole blogging thing is for you. They will also give you a free subdomain. Though a couple of things to know about this free setup:

You get only 300MB of SSD storage and 3GB of bandwidth.
There are user reviews on Trustpilot saying that 000webhost will archive (turn off) your site if it’s not in active use over a period of time. And you also have to log in to your hosting panel periodically to “avoid abuse of the free service.”

My take? 🤷‍♂️ Just avoid all that and spend the $2.75 / month to get started with Bluehost. They will give you great service, a free domain name, and an easy-to-use panel that’s purpose-built for beginners to use. It’s the perfect blend of cost-efficiency and quality for those looking to use WordPress for a live site.

Features and ease of use

WordPress is your ultimate do-it-all blogging platform. It can handle small blogs with little content, as well as huge enterprise publications or online magazines.

Now, your exact WordPress experience will also depend on your web host. For example, if you sign up with Bluehost, they will take care of installing the WordPress software for you (in one click). That way, you will be able to simply focus on writing content and customizing your blog.

If you’re with a different host – maybe one that doesn’t handle the installation process for you – then all the technical heavy lifting is going to be on you, which has to be considered a detriment to WordPress’ overall perceived ease of use.

That being said, once you have hosting configured and WordPress installed and ready to go, the ease of use shifts completely, and WordPress becomes a true breeze to work with.

There’s a clean interface that points you in all the right directions – highlighting the key sections for creating new blog posts, customizing your site, adding new features, moderating comments, and so on.

The part of the panel where you create new posts is also very easy to use – just add your post title, content, and media (images, videos, etc.) – and click the publish button to make the whole thing public.

Customization and design

With WordPress, there are truly endless ways to customize your blog. Basically, no matter what feature you might decide you need, there’s a plugin for that. In fact, there are 59,650 free plugins available in the official WordPress directory.

There are plugins for contact forms, SEO, added security, ecommerce, backups, social media, analytics, website optimization, content organization, and much much more.

Then, there’s the topic of design. While WordPress comes with a very good-looking default look, it’s true power is in the tens of thousands of free themes available on the web. We should know something about that – we make one of the most popular themes out there.

You can use either ours or other people’s themes to build a blog that fits not only the topics covered but also your own design aesthetic, needs, and brand. This list of the best free themes is a good start if you need some help.

Who should use WordPress as a blogging platform

WordPress is an ideal tool for anyone who wants to test the waters, see what blogging is all about and is also not intimidated by things like signing up for web hosting and configuring a couple of smaller details. It is the most popular blogging tool of them all. Learning how to use WordPress is a great investment in your online proficiency, and will make it easier to transition to bigger and better projects later on.

Moreover, WordPress can still be a viable way to start a blog for free as long as you’re willing to tradeoff a couple of things. First, you can only run your blog on a subdomain, and, second, you have to be ready to switch to a paid hosting account if you decide to continue blogging beyond the one-year mark.

If this is all okay by you, then go to 000webhost and see how you like the experience. If you’re ready for a small investment ($2.75 / month), go straight to Bluehost, which has great support, strong parametersAs tested in our monthly analysis of the WordPress hosting market. (such as site speed and availability), plus throws in a free domain name (for the first year).

WordPress on Bluehost … on 000webhost

3. Substack

Substack is a free, subscription-focused platform that allows writers, journalists, and bloggers to tap into an existing community, attract a portion of it to their content, and eventually accept payment for their work. It provides a simple publishing interface, and in recent years, it has also added features to give users additional tools for growing and engaging their audience.

Features and ease of use

Substack has been intentionally designed for non-tech-savvy individuals and the backend interface is evidence of that. The navigation menu at the top is straightforward. You can gradually explore your way through it, but if you want to start writing right away, you can quickly tap the impossible-to-miss New post button:

This will take you to the post layout, which has all of the fundamental blogging tools you’d expect – text, images, videos, and so on. There are also some useful extra features like the ability to insert code blocks and LaTeX blocks (for technical writers), and polls, to gauge how your audience is feeling about whatever you want to ask them about:

Over the past few years, Substack has also added mini-platforms within the platform. For example, there is now a micro-blogging feature called “Notes” which functions as a competitor to X (Twitter). There is also a podcasting option, so that you can run a podcast alongside your blogging newsletter, and a chat feature that lets you have real-time conversations with your readers.

In terms of analytics, Substack gives you data about your account and your individual posts. You can view your subscriber growth rate, where your visitors are coming from, what links they’re clicking on, and more.

Monetizing your audience is also easy, and Substack even throws in some unique elements like “pledges.” These allow you to get a sense of how willing your current audience would be to pay you, if you were to convert your blog from being free to being paywalled.

Overall, Substack offers a fast way to open an account, publish your work, and to grow your audience in various ways.

Customization and design

One of the trade-offs with using Substack is that while it’s very beginner-friendly, you also sacrifice a lot of web design customization for that ease of use. The very few elements you can tweak are things like whether or not you want your links to be colored or black/underlined, or whether you want to use smart cropping or center cropping for your post thumbnails:

In short, the look is the look. If you don’t like it, well, then either you live with it, or you go with Wix or WordPress. Even the URLs are all structured the same: https://yourblog.substack.com/. If you want to connect a custom domain so that your blog has a more conventional looking website address, it will cost you a one-time fee of $50.

Community and reach

As of February 2023, Substack publicly stated that they had more than 20 million monthly active subscribers using the platform, with two million of those being paid subscriptions. That matters because Substack’s social and community elements are built directly into the platform itself – which means that if you start a blog there, you’ll get partial exposure to that audience of millions. Here are a few ways that Substack does it:

Recommendations: When users subscribe to one newsletter, they are shown other similar newsletters through recommendations.
Promotions: Creators on Substack can promote each other’s blogs. This is often seen where two writers collaborate or when one writer features another in a post.
Search: Users can use the search function to find blogs that match specific topics or keywords. If your blog happens to meet the search criteria, then you may show up in the search results.
Featured blogs: Substack has a page called “Substack Reads,” which is a weekly, curated round-up of newsletters from across the platform. If your work comes across the right set of eyes, it might end up there.
Simplicity of interaction: The interaction mechanisms on Substack (like commenting, liking, and sharing) are integrated directly into each page. This makes it easier for readers to engage without needing to log into some third-party service.

Overall, the Substack community is extremely active. You still have to put in the work, create exceptional content, and network your way around the place, but the bottom line is that you’ll have an easier time growing your audience here than on most other blogging platforms.

👉 Here’s a more detailed look on how Substack compares to WordPress.

Who should use Substack for blogging

The prototype Substack blogger is someone who wants to turn their blog into a newsletter and who wants to focus on their writing without distractions. If you don’t care about things like color schemes, typography (font choices), layouts, or other aesthetic aspects of your blog, then Substack is a great fit.

You’ll get an ultra easy-to-use interface, access to analytics, tons of tools to help you grow your audience, and a highly-active community that’s hungry to consume quality writing. The startup cost is also $0 (hence why it’s featured here), and even if you do want to splurge on the custom domain, it’s only a one-time connection fee to get it done. Other than that, Substack is free.

Go to Substack

4. LinkedIn

You probably didn’t see this one coming. LinkedIn isn’t most people’s first thought when considering which of the free blogging sites to use. That being said, it really does deserve some attention! There are two main reasons for this: easy-to-use tools and a pre-existing audience.

Features and ease of use

LinkedIn is a social media site first of all. The blogging component is a kind of bonus that all LinkedIn users can also take advantage of.

From a technical point of view, publishing on LinkedIn is easy. Just go to LinkedIn and click on Write article, which is a button right below the main box where you can share a status message. You’ll enter a full-screen view that has all the features you’d expect from a blogging site.

You can add text, images, and everything else you need. Then, when you’re done, you can get down to editing your piece.

LinkedIn provides you with all the editing tools that you’re used to – for text formatting, adding images, and more.

Then, when you’re ready, just click on Next and lastly, tell people what your post is about – this part is going to become the status update that appears in the news feed.

Customization and design

There isn’t any. Everyone’s posts on LinkedIn look the same.

Some users do get creative with what’s possible, though. For example, using emojis is a nice trick to make the posts look a bit more appealing. Same for clever image use.

Community and reach

The main power of LinkedIn is that 900 million users are already there and they span across 200 countries and regions. All those people you can treat as your potential audience.

Of course, whether you’ll reach those people or not depends on your own network size on LinkedIn and how eager those people are to share and react to your content.

The good news is that the core user base of LinkedIn is made up of highly focused professionals and business owners. So in many cases, at least if you’re blogging for a career-related reason (which most people are), then this means you’re putting your content right in front of the right eyeballs.

Who should blog on LinkedIn

This is no surprise, but LinkedIn is a platform for working professionals, often Millennials (60% of LinkedIn users), who use the platform for networking and job seeking.

Probably not a place for travel or lifestyle bloggers, though. However, if you’re going to blog about any career-related topics, then it might be an ideal place for you!

In short, LinkedIn works great if the No.1 thing you want from your blogging project is to give you exposure to an existing audience.

Go to LinkedIn

5. Medium

Medium was all the rage back in 2012, when it was launched. As of 2023, the platform is still reported to have between 50 and 60 million registered users and more than 200 million monthly readers (according to Wikipedia). This big audience and the fact that Medium provides some state-of-the-art publishing tools make it one of the places where you can blog for free.

Features and ease of use

Medium is super simple to use – you pretty much just sign up and start writing. There’s no dashboard or anything, just a lone Write button up top.

The basic blogging tools are also all there – you can add text, images, videos, etc. Plus, there are some cool integrations to make your life easier. For instance, you can import images from Unsplash with a couple of clicks; the same is true for searching for videos on YouTube.

In the end, the blogging experience is very nice and truly distraction-free. Before publishing your post, you can also indicate the topic that your post is about (category), which will help Medium show it to the right people.

You also get access to built-in readership stats. Plus, if you ever want to monetize your presence, you can upgrade to the premium plan and get access to member-only stories as well as earn money for your own writing.

Customization and design

Similarly to LinkedIn, there isn’t anything. But in Medium’s case, the default design is more optimized for written content and creates an overall better environment for readers (and writers as well).

Overall, every user gets the same design, same page structure, and even same URL structure, like https://medium.com/@USERNAME. You can only connect a custom domain name if you upgrade to a paid plan.

Community and reach

The great thing about Medium is that it gives you access to its pre-existing user base and has custom tools to help your posts get seen.

When you publish a story on Medium, it can reach readers in two main ways. First, through the “open platform” and your own network. This means your story is immediately live for anyone to see and share, especially through social media, email, or directly from your Medium profile. The second way is through Medium’s distribution and Boost networks. They use algorithms to decide who might find your story interesting and place it in various spots across the site, like the homepage or in topic sections.

This can help a lot, especially if you’re just starting out and don’t have much of an audience of your own.

Who should set up a free blog on Medium

Medium can be a great blogging site for those who want to start publishing content right away and not have to deal with any technical setup at all. Plus, the fact that you get access to Medium’s audience right from day one cannot be overstated.

That being said, it’s not the best tool if you’d like to have complete control over your blog website plus brand it in any way that stands out. Then there’s also the fact that it’s Medium that’s in full control of your content, and they can take your publication down for various reasons.

If you’re okay with the above, though, then Medium can still be a great home for your blog. Plus, if you ever decide that you’ve outgrown it, you can move to a platform like WordPress anyway.

Go to Medium

6. Weebly

Direct alternative to: Wix.
Use if you’re finding the Wix interface a bit too confusing, plus you don’t like Wix’s ad in the top bar of your site.

Weebly is a versatile website builder overall that also has a strong module for blogging. Above that, you can also showcase your portfolio or even sell products on the free plan (there are transaction fees). The tool is very similar in principle to Wix, with its user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and features.

There are some good design options and customizations available, too, alongside popular website modules like photo galleries, slideshows, social media icons, newsletter subscription boxes, built-in analytics, and more.

The free plan allows you to host your blog under a SITE.weebly.com subdomain. You have to verify your user information before you can make the blog public.

7. Ghost

Direct alternative to: WordPress.
Use if you think that WordPress is a bit bloated and slow, you’d like to be on a more trendy platform that’s cleaner, and, most importantly, you’re not afraid of the technical setup process.

There was a lot of buzz around Ghost when it was first released around 2013 or 2014. The main selling point of this platform was that it was meant to be a clean, minimalist tool set and interface optimized for writing and publishing content. It also played into some opinions around WordPress growing to be too bloated and no longer optimal for “normal” blogging needs.

Moreover, Ghost has some built-in features for things like newsletters and subscriptions, making it a good choice for bloggers who’d like to get started with a more pro-blogging-centered brand from day one.

On the flip side, there are only limited options to host Ghost blogs for free, and you still have to deal with the installation process mostly by hand (and Ghost is not the easiest to install). The only sensible free hosting options for Ghost are: DigitalPress and…Amazon AWS (which is free for up to a year on the “micro” tier).

8. Notion

Direct alternative to: nothing really, completely unique.
Use if you’d like to be able to publish blog posts right from your desktop or mobile app.

This is a suggestion that might seem like it’s coming out of left field, but Notion has grown a lot in recent years and has proven to be a viable solution for multiple different purposes. It’s most known for being an Apple Notes alternative, an Evernote alternative, or a project management tool, etc. However, Notion also has a nice feature that allows you to make any Notion page public on the web.

Thus, with some slight configuration of your Notion setup, you can make it into a functional blog, too. Better yet, that blog can be 100% free, and you can interact with it fully through a desktop or mobile Notion app.

Want to know how? Here’s a full tutorial by Thomas Frank, a Notion influencer.

9. Jekyll

Direct alternative to: developing a blog by hand.
Use if you’re a developer and you want to experiment with database-less, static blog generation.

Jekyll is a static site generator with blog abilities. Being static means that it serves the user static web pages instead of getting data from a database (like the other tools on this list do). This makes it very fast and secure.

At its core, Jekyll takes text written in your favorite markup language (like Markdown), applies a template you’ve chosen, and then generates a website.

If you want to set up a Jekyll blog for free, you can do it by deploying to GitHub Pages. The exact how-to is a bit advanced, but any web developer not afraid of the command line will be able to do it in no time.

10. Blogger

Direct alternative to: whatever the top solution was back in 1999, I guess.
Please don’t use it.

I’m only listing it here since I know some of you will ask about it.

It’s 2024, and there really is no reason to use a blogging platform invented in 1999 that hasn’t really been updated since.

For everything that Blogger does, any of the other platforms on this list do better.

Conclusion and how to pick your blogging platform/site

The platforms I’ve mentioned are all different, and that’s on purpose. I wanted to find sites that do one important thing really well: let you write posts and share them with everyone.

But above that, I wanted to show you different ways to blog. That’s why you see platforms like Wix, WordPress, and even Substack or Notion together in this list of best blogging sites. Each one offers a unique way to blog, but all make it easy to get your words out there.

Here’s a short summary of the ratings we listed above (the top five of the best blogging sites and platforms):

PlatformIn a sentenceEase of useFeaturesDesignWixA true 100% free option for a blog from scratch 🌱454WordPress*The ultimate DIY pick for beginners and power users 💪455SubstackGet a blog+newsletter combo with audience from day one 📰532LinkedInA social network that lets you publish articles 👁️‍🗨️521MediumEasy-to-use blogging tools and audience from day one 👥532* WordPress we recommend you host through Bluehost

But what do *you* think? Which of these platforms and blogging sites sounds like the best solution for you?

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