Blogs have been around since the earliest days of the internet, so most people have a pretty solid idea of what one is—even if they’ve never really thought to spell it out. To us, a blog is a website, maybe with a few other pages, but the most important part is the feed of blog posts in reverse chronological order. 

There’s a thin line between the software you need to create a blog and the kind of content management systems (CMS) used by large companies to power their websites. Many tools like WordPress and Drupal can be used to both build a blog or power a regular website. 

When we were putting together this list, we used two criteria to decide on the essential blog-iness of the tools we were testing. They had to make it quick and easy to set up a real blog, and the backend where you write blog posts had to be nice to use and fully-featured. Squarespace, for example, makes it possible to build a blog, but it’s not particularly intuitive to set up and the backend is awful to use. Drupal is an incredible CMS, but it’s just too hard for non-developers to get started with to really be considered a universal blogging platform. WordPress, on the other hand, is both quick and easy for a regular human to get started with—and the backend is intuitive and great to use. 

So, on this list, you’ll only find tools that pass the essential blog-iness test. But that wasn’t enough. We also required all the blogging tools to be: