I started publishing technical articles on dev.to in 2021. The reach was real — my posts about Python and machine learning picked up thousands of views without me doing any promotion. And that was precisely the problem. I owned none of that audience. When a post got read, the reader stayed on dev.to, the claps and follows stayed on dev.to, and my byline was a guest in someone else's house. The day I asked myself where my readers were going after they finished a post, I could not answer it. That is the moment I started testing every free alternative I could find.
This comparison is the result of that testing, refreshed for 2026. It covers five free blogging platforms you can start on today: Hashnode, Substack, Medium, Ghost (self-hosted free tier), and the AI-first platform I now publish much of my work on, misar.blog. I have published on all of them in the last two years, so every score below is earned from direct experience rather than a feature checklist.
Before the scores, a quick disclaimer: dev.to is not a bad platform. It is excellent for one thing — surfacing writing to developers who already visit dev.to. The problem is that the platform owns the relationship. If you are serious about growing an audience that compounds, you need to own the relationship. Every platform in this list is a different answer to that single problem.
The Criteria
These are the five things I judge every blogging platform on, and the weights reflect what actually moved the needle for me:
| Criterion | Why it matters | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Audience & discovery | Will strangers find your post, or must you bring all the traffic? | 30% |
| Ownership & SEO | Do you own your content, domain, and search rankings? | 25% |
| AI & algorithm discovery | Do LLMs and answer engines cite you, and does the platform surface you? | 20% |
| Monetization | Can you earn from the platform itself, or must you leave? | 15% |
| Cost & portability | What does free actually cost you, and can you leave easily? | 10% |
Scores are out of 10. I have published on all five platforms within the last two years.
Hashnode
Hashnode gives you a free subdomain, a blog that looks like a product, and the option to connect your own domain. It is the closest philosophically to dev.to while letting you own the surface.
- Audience & discovery: 7/10. Hashnode has a growing network effect and a decent home feed, but nothing like dev.to's density of developer traffic. Most readers will come from your own distribution.
- Ownership & SEO: 9/10. You own the content, and with a custom domain you own the rankings. SEO is solid out of the box — sitemaps, structured data, and clean URLs are default.
- AI & algorithm discovery: 7/10. The platform indexes well and its articles get picked up by answer engines, but it does not do much to accelerate that beyond standard SEO hygiene.
- Monetization: 6/10. No native revenue share. You monetize through sponsorships or your own products.
- Cost & portability: 9/10. Free with your domain, and export is easy. No lock-in worth worrying about.
Verdict: the most developer-friendly owned blog, but you are responsible for your own traffic.
Substack
Substack flips the model: readers subscribe to your email, and the platform handles distribution to inboxes. It is the strongest free option if you want a newsletter-first audience that you can actually reach tomorrow.
- Audience & discovery: 7/10. Substack's recommendation engine sends some discovery traffic, and Notes works, but the real engine is email. People who subscribe are yours — that is the point.
- Ownership & SEO: 5/10. You own the subscriber list in practice, but your content lives on a subdomain and your SEO lives inside Substack's URL structure. Google ranks Substack, not you.
- AI & algorithm discovery: 6/10. Articles are indexed normally, but the platform is not engineered for answer-engine citations. The email-first model means content does not surface to non-subscribers.
- Monetization: 9/10. Native paid subscriptions are the best monetization story of the group. You can charge for a subscription within days.
- Cost & portability: 7/10. Free, but leaving means exporting emails and re-hosting articles. The export works; the audience migration is manual.
Verdict: the best choice when your product is a newsletter, not a blog.
Medium
The 800-pound gorilla. Medium still has the largest built-in reader base, and the algorithm still surfaces articles to people who never knew you existed.
- Audience & discovery: 9/10. No free platform matches Medium's organic discovery for a brand-new writer. This is the whole reason it is still relevant.
- Ownership & SEO: 4/10. You own nothing — no custom domain, no export of search equity, and Google increasingly treats Medium posts as platform pages. Your readers stay on Medium.
- AI & algorithm discovery: 6/10. Medium articles get cited by answer engines because of their age and authority, but the platform is not doing anything new to court AI discovery.
- Monetization: 8/10. The Partner Program pays per engagement time, and it is real money for some writers. The flip side is that it pays you to keep readers inside Medium.
- Cost & portability: 5/10. Free to write, but your audience, your metrics, and your SEO all live behind Medium's walls.
Verdict: unmatched reach, unmatched lock-in. Use it for exposure; do not build your home there.
Ghost (Self-Hosted Free)
Ghost is a publishing platform, and its free tier — self-hosted on your own server — gives you total ownership in exchange for total responsibility.
- Audience & discovery: 3/10. There is no built-in audience at all. You bring every single reader.
- Ownership & SEO: 10/10. This is the purest version of owning your blog. Your domain, your server, your data, your rankings. Nothing belongs to anyone else.
- AI & algorithm discovery: 8/10. Clean, fast, well-structured pages are exactly what answer engines cite. A self-hosted Ghost site with good content earns citations on merit.
- Monetization: 8/10. Native paid memberships built in. Monetization is first-class, same as Substack.
- Cost & portability: 6/10. Free software, but you pay in maintenance: updates, SSL, backups, uptime. That is real work every month.
Verdict: maximum ownership, minimum hand-holding. Only for people comfortable running a server.
misar.blog
The platform I now publish a meaningful share of my work on. It is a free, AI-first blogging platform: your own domain, no reader paywalls, and the platform is built so that content surfaces to AI answer engines and search rather than being trapped inside a walled garden.
- Audience & discovery: 7/10. Discovery is powered by SEO and AI indexing rather than a social feed, so it builds slowly and compounds — the same curve as owning your own site.
- Ownership & SEO: 9/10. You own the content, the custom domain, and the search equity. The platform is engineered for indexability from day one.
- AI & algorithm discovery: 9/10. This is the strongest part of the platform. Articles are structured for LLM citation — clean metadata, fast rendering, and sitemap-first architecture — which is the same reason I moved my AI deep-dives there.
- Monetization: 7/10. No native paywall by design — the model is that you own your audience and monetize on your own terms, which I prefer anyway.
- Cost & portability: 8/10. Free with your domain, and no reader-facing paywall means leaving is a simple export.
Verdict: the best answer I have found to the "grow without giving up ownership" problem.
The Distribution Trap Most Comparisons Miss
Every platform comparison stops at features, but the real difference in growth comes from how each platform treats distribution. Dev.to and Medium feed you readers algorithmically; Hashnode and self-hosted Ghost feed you nothing and expect you to bring traffic; Substack feeds you via email; and the AI-first platforms feed you via search and answer-engine citations. The trap is choosing a platform for its feed and then discovering the feed is also the ceiling — you rent reach, and the rent is due in your time and your ownership.
Two years of publishing has taught me the sustainable pattern: use one platform for the discovery feed you need right now, and mirror every article to a platform you own. The owned copy is the one that compounds — it accumulates search equity, backlinks, and citations that survive algorithm changes. The feed platform is a marketing channel, full stop.
This is exactly why I run my long-form work on a platform where I own the domain and the search equity, and syndicate shorter pieces to the big feeds for reach. The strategy is never "which single platform." It is "which platform for reach, and which for ownership" — and keeping those two answers separate is what keeps the decision honest.
The Comparison Table
| Criterion (weight) | Hashnode | Substack | Medium | Ghost (self-hosted) | misar.blog |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audience & discovery (30%) | 7 | 7 | 9 | 3 | 7 |
| Ownership & SEO (25%) | 9 | 5 | 4 | 10 | 9 |
| AI & algorithm discovery (20%) | 7 | 6 | 6 | 8 | 9 |
| Monetization (15%) | 6 | 9 | 8 | 8 | 7 |
| Cost & portability (10%) | 9 | 7 | 5 | 6 | 8 |
| Weighted total | 7.6 | 6.8 | 6.5 | 6.7 | 8.0 |
The Verdict
Here is the decision rule I now give people, and it is the one I follow myself:
- You want maximum reach for zero effort, and you accept the lock-in: Medium. It is a traffic rental, not a home.
- Your product is a newsletter: Substack. Email ownership beats every other trade-off.
- You want a developer blog you fully own: Hashnode, or self-hosted Ghost if you do not mind server maintenance.
- You want to grow an owned audience that also gets discovered by AI answer engines: misar.blog — it is the platform that solved the exact problem I started with, which is why I use it.
The real lesson from two years of testing: the platform is a distribution channel, not a strategy. dev.to gave me reach I did not have to earn, and I am grateful for it. But the readers I own today all came from platforms where I controlled the domain, the content, and the search equity. Start with whichever platform gets you writing this week — but connect your own domain on day one, and make sure the platform can export what you build. The audience you can move is the only audience you actually have.
Who should skip each option: skip Medium if you want to own the audience. Skip Substack if your goal is search rankings rather than email. Skip Hashnode if you do not want to write for a developer-centric community. Skip Ghost if you will never patch a server on a Sunday. And skip misar.blog if you need a built-in social feed — its discovery is search and answer-engine driven, which builds slower than a feed but belongs to you once it does.
*Gulshan Yad
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