Best Free Blogging Platforms In Canada For May 2024

WordPress.org is open-source software, meaning you can use it to build your blog for free. Its abundant features offered via plugins and themes make building your blog relatively easy compared to some other open-source options. There are over 55,000 plugins available to users—many of them for free—including drag-and-drop builders. You can combine this drag-and-drop functionality with free templates to create a custom blog site easily.

As open-source software, WordPress.org does not come with website hosting or a domain. You’ll need to buy them elsewhere and connect them to your WordPress account. However, many hosting services offer a free domain with their paid plans. GoDaddy, for example, offers a free domain with WordPress hosting starting at $6.49 CAD per month. Hosting providers’ customer support is often willing to help plan users add hosting and a domain to a WordPress account.

WordPress.org is best for bloggers who want a deeply customized site with no need for coding experience.

Wix’s free plan offers an assigned URL (accountname.wixsite.com/siteaddress), 500 MB of storage and bandwidth, plus web hosting. Creating a Wix blogging site is a simple process. You can either choose from over 800 website templates and use its “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor to build a custom site or you can answer a few questions and Wix will create the site for you. You will likely need to further tweak the automated site to your needs and wants but Wix’s automated websites are a good start for building a quick and attractive blog.

As with many free plans, there are some limiting factors that will very likely encourage you to upgrade as soon as possible. Wix ads appear on every website page. You also cannot add a custom domain even if you buy one elsewhere. Finally, you cannot sell any items on the free site. However, you can set up a fully functioning blogging website with the free plan, then upgrade to a premium plan when you are able.

Its most affordable Combo plan is $15 CAD per month and offers 2 GB of storage, a custom domain (free for one year), an SSL certificate, and 24/7 support. Its reported best-value VIPplan is $44 CAD per month and offers everything in the Combo plus a logo, social media logo files, ad vouchers, 35 GB of storage space and visitor analytics (so you know how your posts perform). Business and e-commerce plans are $28 CAD to $49 CAD per month.

Learn More:Read our full Wix review.

Wix is best for companies needing a website catered to a niche market, such as a tech, music or coaching blog. With hundreds of templates, niche bloggers can quickly create a blogging website that uniquely speaks to their niche audience.

Weebly’s free plan offers a WYSIWYG editor to build a free blog. Design options include custom fonts, parallax and reveal animation effects, an image editor, video backgrounds and custom design capabilities via HTML/CSS and JavaScript (JS). The plan further offers an SSL certificate (for website security), a shopping cart, unlimited e-commerce items, inventory management, a tax calculator, SEO and lead capture tools and chat and email support.

Weebly’s free plan offers a limited 500 MB of storage. You will also have to use a Weebly-branded subdomain instead of a custom domain that matches your brand. You will need to upgrade to a premium plan to use a custom domain. It also does not offer phone support if you run into an issue while building or managing your blog. Finally, unless you upgrade to the Professional or Performance premium plan, Square ads will appear on your blog pages.

While Weebly’s free plan offers a means to get your blog started, its premium plans will undoubtedly offer more features to take your blog to the next level. Starting with the very affordable $7 CAD per month (if billed annually) Personal plan, you can connect a custom domain to your blog. Its $15 CAD per month (if billed annually) plan further offers blog-friendly features including unlimited storage, analytics, a free domain, an ad-free blogging experience and phone support.

Learn More:Read our full Weebly review.

With over 50 website themes to choose from, a WYSIWYG editor, free website hosting, a dashboard where you can manage your whole website from one place, a drag-and-drop photo editor, automatically mobile-responsive sites and an extensive library of royalty-free images, Weebly is one of the easiest blogging platforms to use. As such, it is best for brands or individuals looking for an overly easy and customizable blog-design experience.

Drupal is free open-source content management system (CMS). You can download the software for free to build your blog. The beauty of Drupal is that it can be used for blogs with high volumes of traffic and customized with granularity. An endless array of plugins allow you to expand your blog’s functionality. If you can imagine it, you can build it with Drupal. But most Drupal developers customize their blogs via coding, which requires a steep learning curve.

Drupal allows you to reach large and diverse audiences. Its analytics offer the ability to deeply segment audiences, then send content via email based on demographic, interest and behaviour. Accessibility tools mean you can reach audiences that need unique support to access your content, such as structured metadata that is readable by screen readers. Further, Drupal’s multilingual capabilities automatically translate content into over 100 languages.

Despite it being free open-source software to download, building a publishable website via Drupal can be costly when all is said and done. You must pay for hosting and for a domain name. A hosting provider will ensure your website can be made accessible to your audiences once it is built. Further, if you want a customized Drupal blogging site and are not versed in coding, you will have to pay a developer.

Drupal offers the ability to reach large audiences but its design process comes with a steep learning curve. For this reason, it is best for developers who are building blogs for large brands and their large audiences.

Craft CMS offers a free forever plan with content organization features (such as categories and fields), the ability to run multiple related sites on one account, localization capabilities and a single admin account. The platform offers advanced content management features such as built-in category and tag support and Structures (which store content in a set hierarchy or order). Craft CMS’s Matrix also allows you to create mixed-content posts easily.

If you are a content manager at an agency, you may want to build content projects for clients. The free plan limits your ability to do so by restricting users to only one admin account, control panel branding (that adds a professional look for clients) and developer support. In addition to these limitations, as open-source free software, you will have to pay for a hosting solution and custom domain.

So, if you would like to build a professional blog with advanced content strategy for a client, it is best to go with Craft CMS’s paid plans. The good news is you can pay per project. Its $299 USD ($393.39 CAD)per-project Pro plan, for example, gives you unlimited user accounts, enhanced content previewing, system branding, developer support, one year of updates and more. Then, updates cost $59 USD ($77.62 CAD) per year. You can pass that cost to clients or have them pay a fee to keep the blog site updated.

Craft CMS is best for content strategists who are looking to create a great reading experience with a highly organized blog, using features such as tags, content categories and content hierarchies. It is also for individuals with technical developer skills needing to create a custom blogging experience.

Write.as used to offer a free platform for building a minimalist blog. However, in the last year, it has transitioned to completely paid plans. To continue servicing people who want to blog for free, Write.as provides the WriteFreely open-source software. Using WriteFreely, you can build a minimalist blog without the distractions of traditional blogging. This means there are no claps, likes, alerts or comments to distract you from your primary task of writing.

However, as open-source software, it doesn’t offer free blog hosting. You will also have to pay for a custom domain if you want to brand your site. So, you will likely need to turn to Write.as’ paid plans to make WriteFreely’s deployment easy. The Write.as Pro plan is $6 USD ($7.89 CAD) a month (if billed annually) and hosts up to three personal blogs, unlimited posts per day, unlimited views per month, a custom domain with SSL, email publishing and up to 500 newsletter subscribers.

Bloggers who are looking for a distraction-free environment to help them push past writer’s block and freely express their ideas should consider Write.as. In addition, writers who would like to publish their thoughts anonymously should consider Write.as.

Medium is a blogging platform to which anyone can add content. Similar to starting a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, users simply sign up for an account, create a profile and publish content. The good news is that Medium already has a large audience. Since its founding in 2012, it has built an audience of 100 million strong and enjoys a 140% year-over-year visitor increase. You can create a personal blog on the platform or a publication with a branded domain.

Of course, the downside to building a free blog on Medium is that you cannot design a website nor use a custom domain that represents your brand. You also cannot have multiple contributors to your blog.

Medium Publications can help you get around these limitations but you must pay for a subscription at $9.99 USD ($13.14 CAD) a month to do so. A subscription allows you to enjoy a custom domain, promo blocks for your publication’s home page, links to a feature page, a lead generation form, a post or an external link (such as your website), background colours and image options and call-to-action buttons. You can also invite contributors to your publication based on their subject matter expertise. You can even reach readers by delivering stories to their inboxes.

Companies that want an instant audience on a low budget should consider Medium.