WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

One sentence: WordPress.org is the software, free to download, that you install on hosting you choose and control completely. WordPress.com is a hosting company that runs that software for you, on plans that restrict what you may install.

Everything else follows from that. The decision is not about features on a comparison page — it is about whether you will ever need to install a plugin.

What each one is

The software is the same. The constraints are commercial, not technical.

The plugin line

This is the decision, and everything else is detail. On the free and entry-level .com plans you cannot install third-party plugins or upload a theme. That rules out, entirely:

• an SEO plugin of your choosing;
• a form plugin, a booking system, a membership system;
• WooCommerce and any real store;
• caching and performance plugins;
• anything a client or a developer hands you.

If you can name a plugin you will need, you either pay for a business-tier .com plan or you self-host. There is no third answer.

When WordPress.com is the right choice

It is a good product for the case it serves, and the case is bigger than developers admit:

• A personal blog or portfolio where writing matters and the platform does not.
• Someone who will never patch a site, take a backup, or think about a PHP version — the platform does all of it, and it does it well.
• A site that must not go down while nobody is watching it.
• A first site, where the goal is to find out whether you will keep doing this.

The free tier is a genuinely reasonable way to start writing today with no cost and no maintenance. You give up control, a clean domain and monetisation, and for a first blog that is often the right trade.

When self-hosting is the right choice

• Any store. WooCommerce means self-hosting or a top-tier .com plan.
• Any site that needs specific plugins, which is most business sites.
• Client work. You cannot hand over a site you do not control.
• Anything with a custom theme or a child theme.
• Sites where you want the database, the files and the ability to move hosts — the whole point of migrating to a new host is that you can.

The obligation you take on is real and it is not optional: updates, backups, security, and being the person who fixes it at an inconvenient hour. A managed host absorbs a lot of that — hosting services for WordPress covers who does what.

The cost comparison, honestly

Self-hosting is not automatically cheaper. The software is free; nothing else is.

Self-hosted, realistic minimum: hosting, a domain, and eventually a paid theme or a plugin licence or two. Cheap shared hosting is genuinely cheap, and genuinely slow, and the difference shows up as a slow site rather than as a bill.

WordPress.com: the free tier costs nothing but carries platform branding and a .wordpress.com subdomain. The plan that unlocks plugins and custom themes is priced against managed WordPress hosting, not against budget shared hosting — which is fair, because that is what it is.

At the tier where both routes do the same job, the prices converge. Choose on control, not on price. What a site actually costs to run is broken down in how much does a WordPress website cost.

Moving between them

From .com to self-hosted is the common direction and it is well-trodden. Export content from the .com dashboard, import into the new install, move the media, then rebuild the theme and settings by hand — those do not travel. Then handle the URLs: if you were on a .wordpress.com subdomain, every indexed URL changes, so plan redirects deliberately or accept the loss. Picking a domain name is worth doing before the move, not after.

From self-hosted to .com works too, with the same caveat in reverse: content transfers, plugins and custom code do not, and anything that depended on a plugin has to be rebuilt or abandoned.

Common mistakes

• Starting free on .com for a business site, then discovering the plugin limit after building thirty pages.
• Assuming self-hosted is cheaper, then running a store on the cheapest shared plan.
• Buying a domain from a third party and not connecting it, leaving the site on a subdomain.
• Confusing "WordPress hosting" with WordPress.com. Most hosts sell WordPress hosting for self-hosted installs; that is a different product.
• Migrating without redirects, which is how a move costs you the traffic you moved to protect.

How to decide in two minutes

Write down the plugins you know you need. If the list is empty and you only want to publish, start on WordPress.com free and stop reading. If the list has anything on it — a store, a form, an SEO plugin, a booking system — self-host, and pick a host that will not make you regret it. If you are unsure, self-hosting keeps every option open, at the cost of being responsible for the site.