The best free blogging platforms, and what free costs you

Before the list: we are not on it

We make Content Autopilot, which publishes articles to a blog it hosts on your own domain. That is part of a paid product, and our pricing is not published yet, so it does not belong in a list of free plans. We have no relationship with any platform below.

Every fact here was read on the platform's own pricing page or help centre on 14 November 2026, and each entry links what we read. Where a platform's own pages did not say something, the table says "not stated" rather than repeat what other sites claim.

The free plans side by side

Kit is a newsletter platform with landing pages rather than a blog, but it is often where people end up when they want to write to an audience for free, so it is here.

Which to pick

The platforms, one by one

WordPress.com

The hosted version of WordPress. The free plan has no time limit and 1 GB of storage, and includes built-in newsletters. The catch is on the pricing page itself: "Free sites display WordPress.com ads to visitors". Using your own domain and turning the ads off needs the Personal plan.

Pick it when you want to start free and grow on the same platform. It is not the same as self-hosted WordPress from WordPress.org, which is free software but needs hosting you pay for.

Blogger

Google's blogging service. You can point your own domain at it with a CNAME record, and show AdSense and other ads on your pages. You can back up everything through Google Takeout and import it elsewhere.

It is free and stable, and its templates look their age. For a business that wants its own domain and nothing else, it does the job.

Wix

A website builder with a blog. Building a site is free, at an address of the form username.wixsite.com/sitename. Connecting a domain and removing Wix branding needs a paid plan; Light was shown at $17.77 a month on yearly billing, with a domain free for the first year.

Pick it when you want a whole website with a blog attached and are likely to pay for the domain soon.

Medium

A publishing network with readers already on it. Writing is free. Connecting your own domain is a membership benefit; the Member plan was shown at $5 a month under a welcome offer. Medium's reach is the reason to use it, and the reason not to: readers find your work through Medium, and the relationship is with Medium.

Substack

A newsletter platform with a web archive. Publishing is free "no matter how many subscribers you have". If you charge, Substack keeps 10% of subscription revenue and Stripe takes its processing fee, 2.9% plus 30 cents for a US card. A custom domain is a one-time $50.

Pick it when the goal is a paid newsletter. For a business blog meant to bring in search traffic, everything you publish lives under substack.com unless you pay for the domain.

beehiiv

A newsletter platform. The free plan covers up to 2,500 subscribers and unlimited sends, with beehiiv branding. The pricing page lists custom domains among the free plan's features in one place and as paid-only in its comparison table; the help article says paid plans only. Lite, the cheapest paid plan, is $49 a month billed yearly.

Ghost

Ghost is free software under the MIT licence, and if you host it yourself it costs what your server costs. You can export your content and members at any time. Ghost charges no transaction fee on paid memberships; Stripe charges its own. Its hosted service, Ghost(Pro), has no free plan; Starter was $18 a month billed yearly.

Pick self-hosted Ghost if you or someone on your team is comfortable running a server, and you want a modern editor, newsletters and memberships on your own domain without paying a platform.

Hashnode

A blogging platform for developers. The free plan gives a hashnode.dev blog with unlimited posts and analytics, and every post can be exported as Markdown. A custom domain needs Pro, $5 a month per seat billed yearly.

HubSpot

HubSpot's free CMS includes one blog with up to 100 posts, 20 authors and 50 tags, with HubSpot branding. Worth it if you already use HubSpot's free CRM, because the blog and your contacts live in one place.

Notion

You can publish pages from Notion for free at a notion.site address. Connecting your own domain costs $8 a month per domain on yearly billing, and removes Notion's branding. Pick it if your team already writes in Notion.

GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages publishes a site straight from a repository, at owner.github.io, and supports custom domains. Your posts are files in a repository you control. It suits developers, and nobody else.

Bear Blog

A deliberately minimal blog with "No trackers, ads, or scripts". Blogs live at your-blog.bearblog.dev, and custom domains are supported. Email lists are only for upgraded blogs. The upgrade price was not shown on the pages we could read.

Tumblr

Free, at yourblog.tumblr.com, with a custom domain connected by DNS. Tumblr Premium removes ads. You can export a blog as a ZIP file, up to four times a month. It is a social network first.

Kit

A newsletter platform. The free plan covers up to 10,000 subscribers, with landing pages, forms and unlimited broadcasts, and lets you customise your domain. You can sell paid newsletters on it, with a fee the pricing page gives as 3.5% plus 30 cents.

Not free

Squarespace says plainly that it "doesn't offer a free plan"; there is a 14-day trial, and the Basic plan was €12 a month billed yearly. Ghost(Pro) starts at $18 a month billed yearly. Write.as lists a free plan, but its sign-up button read "Closed for now" when we looked.

What free really costs

Your address. On most free plans the blog lives at the platform's address. Links other sites give you build up the platform's domain, not yours, and moving later breaks them unless you can redirect.

The upgrade you will need. Own domain, no platform ads, no branding: on most of these, that is the first paid plan.

A cut of what you earn. Substack's 10%, Kit's per-sale fee, and Stripe's processing fee on everything.

The exit. Check before you start that you can export your posts, and your subscribers if you have them. Blogger, Ghost, Hashnode and Tumblr say how on their own pages; for the others we could not confirm it.

If you already have a website

The best place for a business blog is on your own domain, ideally at yourbrand.com/blog, so that every link and every visit builds up the site you are trying to grow. Most free hosted platforms can give you blog.yourbrand.com at best, and some not even that on the free plan. Putting a hosted blog under a folder of your main site needs either a platform that supports it or a reverse proxy set up on your side.

When you are ready to start, How to start a blog for free walks through it step by step.