Web Development Magazine

Tumblr vs Wordpress: Which is right for you?

A lot of people have trouble deciding what backend to use for their blog, and all the time (alright, occasionally), I have people asking me what to use, and it always boils down to two things: Wordpress, and Tumblr. But which one is better?
Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide, but I’m going to help push you in the right direction by providing my view on both systems.

With the experience I’ve got with both Wordpress and Tumblr, I’m probably the right guy to be helping you out here. I’ve used both for several websites, and know them like the back of my hand.
Let’s start off with a simple list of pros and cons…

Wordpress
Pros:

• Customizability
• Open-source
• Huge modding / themeing community
• Multi-user (with permissions)

Cons:

• Difficult for a new user to understand
• Intimidating dashboard
• Ugly and generic looking out of the box
• Not very streamlined; feels clunky

Tumblr
Pros:

• Very nice design
• Easy to understand, whether you’re a weathered internetter or a noob
• Nice social networking-esque system (similar to Twitter, with follows)
• Easy to skin
• Pleasant default theme
• Different types of posts for images, text, links, etc…
• Post to Twitter feed without any modification

Cons:

• You must use their server (although you can use your own domain name)
• One audio file upload per day
• Not a huge themeing community (although one is present)

All in all, it’s up to personal preference.
The way I see it is, if you need more functionality and more control over what goes on with the website, Wordpress is definitely the way to go, without a doubt.
But, if you’re just looking for something that’s easy to hop on and start a post in ten seconds without any distractions and a nice, clean design, and don’t really mind loss of control and awesome plugins, Tumblr is the system for you.

On my personal blog, I use Tumblr. I used to use Wordpress, but found that I wasn’t quite utilizing all of the plugins available, which was pretty much the only thing that kept me from switching. Plus, the design of Tumblr was definitely a huge factor in pulling me over… I’m a sucker for eye candy, and that site just looks great.

As far as I can tell, the biggest decider is this: Will your blog be a personal blog, or a content-driven one? If it’s content-driven, you will probably want to get some more authors on there, so Wordpress will be the way to go. With Tumblr, however, the blog itself is tied to your Tumblr username, and you cannot allow others to post content, so it’s more of a personal system, and it serves well as just that.

What’s your blog platform of choice? Sound off in the comments, let me know.