The Editors, Compared: Where Your Words Actually Get Written

Feature comparisons rank blogging platforms on things you configure once and then forget: storage limits, theme counts, plan tiers. They almost never rank the thing you touch every single time you use the product, which is the editor. If you publish weekly, you will spend something like a hundred hours a year inside that writing surface. You will spend twenty minutes in the settings.

This is an attempt to correct the weighting. Five editing philosophies, assessed on one question: does this help you write a long piece, or does it interrupt you?

The two philosophies

Almost every editor in publishing descends from one of two ideas, and knowing which one you are dealing with predicts most of the experience.

The document model treats your post as continuous text. You type, it flows, formatting is applied to a stream. Markdown editors work this way, and so does Ghost’s. The mental model is a page.

The block model treats your post as a stack of independent objects. Each paragraph, image and heading is a discrete thing with its own settings and its own toolbar. The block editor on WordPress.com works this way. The mental model is a layout.

Neither is correct. They are optimised for different jobs. The block model is genuinely better for building a page with varied components; the document model is genuinely better for writing three thousand words of continuous prose. Most of the frustration people report with editors is the frustration of using one model for the other model’s job.

Ghost’s editor

The best writing surface of any hosted platform, and it is not particularly close.

The screen is nearly empty: a title, a body, and a slash menu that appears when you ask for it and vanishes when you do not. Markdown shortcuts work natively, so typing formatting produces formatting without a round trip to a toolbar. Nothing floats. Nothing suggests. Nothing counts your words at you unless you ask.

What this produces, in practice, is an editor you stop noticing. That is the highest compliment available to a piece of writing software and the hardest thing to demonstrate in a screenshot, which is why it almost never appears in comparisons. It is a substantial part of why Ghost tops our best blogging platforms ranking, and the full assessment is in the Ghost review.

The limit: it is not a page builder and does not pretend to be. Complex layouts are not what it does. If you want each post to be designed, this editor will frustrate you steadily.

The block editor

The most capable and the most divisive.

Its strengths are real. Building a page with mixed components — columns, galleries, embeds, callouts — is genuinely approachable without writing code. Reusable patterns save meaningful time on repeated structures. It has improved steadily rather than in lurches.

Its weakness for long-form writing is equally real, and it is structural rather than a matter of polish. Every paragraph is an object. Objects have handles, toolbars and settings panels. Writing a long essay means accumulating hundreds of objects, and the interface keeps reminding you they are objects. For writers who draft continuously — start at the top, keep going, revise later — that is a rhythm interrupted several times a page.

There is no supported classic alternative on the hosted service, so this is temperament rather than preference: either it suits you or the platform does not. Anyone evaluating it should write two or three real posts in it before committing to a year, as noted in our WordPress.com review.

The best editor is the one you forget you are using.

Medium’s editor

Beautifully restrained and deliberately shallow.

You get a title, body text, three or four formatting options and essentially nothing else. There are no layout decisions to make because there are none available. For a certain kind of writer this is bliss — every Medium post looks decent because no Medium post can look bad.

The corresponding truth is that no Medium post can look distinctive either, and the constraints are the platform’s rather than yours. You have outsourced the design decisions, and you cannot take them back. Whether that is a good trade is the subject of our Medium review.

Substack’s editor

Close in spirit to Medium’s, with an email-shaped bias.

It is clean and fast, and it is built around the assumption that what you are writing will be sent to a list as well as published on a page. That assumption shows up in the formatting options and in how the result renders. For writing intended to arrive in an inbox, it is well-judged. For a piece that lives on a page and is read from a search result, the design ceiling is low and visibly so.

Plain Markdown

The purist option, and — for the people it suits — untouchable.

A text file. No interface at all, or whatever interface you have chosen independently of your publishing platform. Complete separation between writing and publishing. Your drafts are files: they diff, they version, they open in anything, they will still open in twenty years.

Bear Blog and the other minimalist platforms publish Markdown directly; Hashnode treats it as a first-class input. The cost is that you must already know Markdown and must not want any visual assistance whatsoever. For those who do know it, no editor is faster, because there is no editor.

How to actually choose

Do not read comparisons, including this one, as the final word. Do this instead.

Write a real post in it. Not a test. An actual piece you intend to publish, at your usual length. Ninety percent of editor friction only appears after the eight hundredth word.

Notice the interruptions. Count the times you stop writing to interact with the interface. Low counts are the whole game.

Paste from wherever you draft. If you write elsewhere first, test that specifically — this is where editors most often behave badly, silently importing formatting you cannot see.

Try it on a phone. Not because you will draft there, but because fixing a typo from a bus is the most common editing task anyone actually performs.

Check what your formatting becomes. View the published page’s source. Clean semantic markup is a good sign about a platform’s engineering generally; a thicket of nested divs is a sign too.

The editor is the most-used and least-compared component of any blogging platform. If you are torn between two, it should be the tiebreaker — not storage, not theme counts, and certainly not a feature you will configure once and never revisit.