You want to start a blog. Not a media company, not a newsletter empire — a blog. Words on the internet, cleanly presented, reliably hosted. You looked at WordPress, spent forty minutes reading about plugins and databases and hosting plans, and closed the tab.

Good call. WordPress is a content management system for people who need to manage content. If you want to write, there are simpler paths.

Here are six of them. I’ve tried to be honest about each one — what it’s actually good at, where it breaks down, and who it’s really for.

#Bear Blog: Text-first and unashamed about it

Bear Blog is what a blog looked like in 2005, minus the nostalgia and plus the intentionality. No JavaScript on reader-facing pages. Loads fast. Does almost nothing except put your words on the internet.

The free tier gets you a blog at a bearblog.dev subdomain. Custom domains require the paid upgrade — $5/month, or$49/year, or $189 once for lifetime access.

What Bear does well: radical simplicity. If you’re writing 500-word essays and want them to load instantly on a slow connection, this is a serious contender. The editor is barebones Markdown. There’s not much to configure, which means there’s not much to procrastinate over.

What Bear doesn’t do: formatting beyond the basics. No image galleries, no complex layouts, no embeds. If you want anything visually elaborate, Bear will frustrate you. The community features are minimal. You’re publishing into the void unless you build your own audience.

Bear is for: writers who want a blank page on the internet and nothing else.

#Mataroa: Smaller than you think is possible

Mataroa is Bear with even more removed. Markdown-based, fast, no tracking, no analytics by default. The premium plan is $9 a year — not a typo, nine dollars annually — with a free tier that covers most of it.

That price is remarkable. The reason it can be that cheap is that the product does almost nothing. Mataroa is almost aggressively minimal — no social features, no themes beyond a light/dark toggle, no way to add custom JavaScript.

The tradeoff is real. Mataroa is so stripped down that there’s not much surface area to complain about, but there’s also not much to grow into. If you start writing more and want more control over how your blog looks or how it integrates with other tools, you’ll hit walls fast.

Mataroa is for: people who want to pay as little as possible for the most honest, no-frills publishing experience that exists.

#Write.as: Minimalism with a philosophical position

Write.as is minimal by design and private by default. Anonymous publishing is a first-class feature — you can post without an account. The Pro plan — $6/month billed annually — adds custom domains and some customization.

The distinctive thing about Write.as is ActivityPub federation. Your blog posts can show up in Mastodon feeds. If you’re interested in the IndieWeb and the idea of publishing to a network that isn’t controlled by a single company, Write.as thinks about this seriously.

What Write.as doesn’t do well: customization. The themes are limited. If you want your blog to look like anything other than “a Write.as blog,” your options are narrow. The editing interface is functional but not particularly pleasant.

Write.as is for: privacy-conscious writers who want to participate in the federated web without building their own infrastructure.

#Micro.blog: A blog that’s also a social network

Micro.blog is harder to explain than the others. It’s a hosted blog platform, but it’s also a social network built around IndieWeb principles. You can follow other Micro.blog users, reply to posts, and cross-post to Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms. The base plan is $5/month.

That breadth is both the appeal and the complication. Micro.blog is genuinely good at what it does, but what it does is more than just blogging. There’s a community aspect that some people love and others find distracting.

The platform supports longer posts, short-form posts, and photos. It has themes and email newsletters, with podcast hosting available on the $10/month Premium tier. It’s the most “platform-y” of the simple options — meaning you get the most features but also the most platform dependence.

Micro.blog is for: people who want to own their content but also participate in an active community of independent web writers. If you’re already thinking about the IndieWeb, you’ll feel at home here.

#Blot: Files become a blog, which is the whole idea

Blot is the closest conceptual cousin to FolderPress. Drop files into a Dropbox, Google Drive, or Git folder. They become blog posts. No dashboard, no editor, no publish button. It’s $6/month per site.

Blot accepts multiple file formats: Markdown, Word documents, plain text, images. If you drop a JPEG into the folder, it becomes a photo post. If you drop a Word document, it becomes a blog post formatted as you’d expect. That format flexibility is something no other platform here matches.

The theme system is more capable than most minimal platforms. There are existing themes, and if you’re comfortable with HTML and CSS, you can build custom layouts. Blot is minimal in its publishing workflow but not minimal in what it can produce.

Where Blot gets complicated: the setup takes some attention. Connecting your sync folder, picking a theme, understanding how Blot interprets different file types — it’s not hard, but it’s not as instant as Bear or Mataroa. The documentation is good but assumes some comfort with the concept of file-based publishing.

Blot is for: writers who want file-based publishing without being limited to Markdown, or who want more design control than Bear allows.

#FolderPress: Narrower than all of them

FolderPress is the tool I built because nothing else did exactly what I wanted. It’s worth being direct about what that means: it’s the most constrained option on this list.

FolderPress connects to a Dropbox folder. Markdown files in that folder become blog posts. That’s the entire product. No image management, no themes beyond what’s built in, no social features, no federation.

What it does well: zero friction between writing and publishing. If you already write in Markdown and already use Dropbox, your workflow doesn’t change at all. Save a file, it’s live. Rename a file, the URL updates. Add .draft to the filename, it disappears from the public site. The folder is the CMS.

What it doesn’t do: anything else. You can’t import Word documents like Blot. There’s no federated posting like Write.as. No community like Micro.blog. No themes to browse. If you want to embed videos or build complex page layouts, FolderPress is the wrong choice.

The honest pitch: this is a tool for people who write in Markdown already, trust Dropbox, and want a blog that stays out of the way. That’s a small intersection. For people in that intersection, nothing else is quite as frictionless. For people outside it, one of the other platforms on this list is probably a better fit.

#How to actually choose

There’s no universal answer here, which is why this comparison exists. The question is what you’re optimizing for.

If you want the lowest possible cost and the most stripped-down experience: Mataroa. It does the least, costs the least, gets out of the way.

If you care about privacy and want to participate in the federated web: Write.as. The ActivityPub integration is real, not a checkbox.

If you want community alongside your blog: Micro.blog. You’re not just publishing into a void; you’re joining a network of people who care about independent publishing.

If you want file-based publishing but aren’t limited to Markdown: Blot. The format flexibility is genuinely useful, and the design options are better than most.

If you write Markdown in Dropbox already and want zero new tools: FolderPress. The workflow is already there. FolderPress is just the last step.

If you want something simple and fast with no strong opinions about any of the above: Bear Blog. Solid, reliable, fast, honest.

The pattern: the simpler the platform, the fewer wrong reasons to pick it. If Bear loads fast and doesn’t have the feature you want, that’s the right outcome — you can pick something else. None of these platforms are trying to do everything. That’s why they exist.

The wrong question is “which is the best?” The right question is “which removes the most friction for how I actually write?” The answer is different for every person who asks it.