WordPress.com vs WordPress.org – Which one is better?

Are you new to WordPress and wondering about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Then this WordPress.com vs WordPress.org comparison will clear all of your doubts! This might be confusing for beginners to choose the right one from these two options. Because of the same founder, often users confuse WordPress.com with the popular WordPress.org software.

WordPress.com and wordpress.org both provide responsive and customizable themes for your website. But there are a few essential differences between wordpress.com and wordpress.org about which you should aware to make the right decision so that you don’t have to regret yourself after setting up your website.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org:

The one major difference between Wordpress.com and WordPress.org is who’s hosting your website?

WordPress.com :

WordPress.com is a hosting service created by the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg. It is one of the best platforms to create static as well as a blogging site but it has limitations.

Though WordPress.com has limitations, if you want to just make a site to get an idea of how things work in WordPress then there is no trouble to use it.

The WordPress.com hosting service has 5 plans:

• Free – Very limited.
• Personal – $35.86 per year
• Premium – $62.75 per year
• Business – $143.42 per year
• VIP – starting at $5000 per month

Pros :

• Regular updates and security backups by wordpress.com. That means you don’t have to pay extra attention to protect your website from spam and hackers. WordPress.com will do it for you!
• You can start blogging by just registering on wordpress.com. You don’t have to pay anything for that.
• Promotion and SEO optimization will be easy with your wordpress.com website. The service will put your blog on the map and other users will be able to get to your site more easily.

 Cons :

• As I mentioned above, it’s limited. Built-in plugins option and basic customization only.
• In the free version, it provides a subdomain instead of your own domain i.e yourdomain.wordpress.com.
• WordPress.com provides hosting by itself so you don’t have full control of your site. WordPress community can shut down your website at any time if any offensive data is found on your site.
• You have to go with either premium or business plan For unlimited themes and plugins.
• It’ll cost you to remove WordPress ads from your site.
• To monetize your website, you have to purchase either a premium or a business plan.
• Features like SEO tools, install plugins, Google Analytics Integration, upload themes are only available in the business plan.

WordPress.org :

WordPress.org was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg, and Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog. There are no restrictions in wordpress.org as far as you don’t do any illegal activity and it’s also a free and open-source content management system(CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. The only real cost is web hosting and domain.

With WordPress.org, you have full control of your website. You are free to do anything you want and customize it as much as you need. Here are some of the pros and cons of choosing WordPress.org to build your website.

Pros :

• It’s open-source software. So anyone can use, study, change and redistribute its source code.
• User-friendly content management system(CMS)
• You host your website which means you are the real owner of your site and no one can remove or make changes to your site without your permission.
• You can monetize your site.
• It has plenty of free as well as paid plugins and themes.
• There are unlimited possibilities of customizing themes by CSS, HTML, and PHP code modification.

Cons :

• The software is free to install but you have to pay for hosting service and domain for your site.
• The speed and performance of the site depend upon the hosting service you choose.
• You have to take care of security, updates, and backups by yourself.
• WordPress sites are vulnerable. It means these sites can be easily hacked if you don’t pay attention to the security of your site.

Conclusion :

Limitations are ridiculous and irritating if you want to grow your website in the future. So from the above article and  “WordPress.com vs WordPress.org” comparison table, it’s clear that you should obviously go with wordpress.org if you are capable of paying a little amount for a personal domain and web hosting service.

Let me explain to you with an example. Suppose you are living as a PG. There you can live free but you can’t ask for anything you want like home…right?! So, here the situation is you are paying for the living but still you don’t get full independence like home. Here, that PG is wordpress.com and home is wordpress.org. Hence, according to me, if you are capable to invest some money and serious about your website then you should choose WordPress.org.

Now, some people would have a question about the cost of hosting and domain like “how much I have to pay for it?”, “is it affordable or not?” Don’t panic! There are many hosting services available. You can choose any of them according to your need and budget.

Now, what if you don’t want to invest even a single penny and still want to monetize your website. Then you should use a blogger which is one of the services provided by Google. Honestly, there are not as many features as WordPress but if you are not able to invest anything in your website then it’s a good choice. Here, the good news is that unlike wordpress.com it provides a monetization facility!

Also in case, if you are confused between WordPress and Blogger, don’t forget to check out our article on Blogger Vs WordPress to get a clear idea on which one to choose, either WordPress (Self-Hosted) or Blogger.

Thanks for reading the article. I hope this comparison of “WordPress.com vs WordPress.org” helped you and you know the difference between WordPress.com and Wordrpess.org and which one is better for you. Still, if you have any queries, feel free to comment down below. Also, share it with your friends.