There's no single best platform for developer blogging — there's a best fit for how much time you want to spend on setup versus writing. Every option below is a reasonable choice; they just trade ownership, speed, and control differently. This post breaks them into three groups so you can pick based on what you're actually optimizing for, not brand familiarity.
If you haven't settled on Markdown vs. a rich-text editor yet, read Markdown vs Notion for blogging first — it affects which of these fit naturally.
Static site generators: full control, more setup
Tools like Astro, Hugo, and Jekyll turn Markdown files into a static site you host yourself, usually on Vercel, Netlify, or GitHub Pages.
What you get: total control over design and code, no vendor lock-in, and typically the fastest possible page loads since there's no server rendering pages on request.
What it costs: you're responsible for everything a blogging platform normally handles for you — sitemap generation, RSS feeds, Open Graph images, syntax highlighting, tag pages, search. None of it is hard individually, but it adds up to real setup time before you publish your first post, and it's maintenance you own indefinitely (dependency updates, build breakage, theme upkeep).
This is the right choice if your blog is part of a larger site you're already building with code, or if owning every line of the stack matters more to you than speed to publish. See Astro blog vs Blogizi for a detailed look at what that setup actually involves.
Hosted platforms: fast to start, less control
Ghost, Medium, dev.to, and Hashnode all let you sign up and start writing within minutes, with hosting, themes, and basic SEO handled for you.
What you get: speed. No hosting to configure, no build pipeline, and built-in audience on platforms like dev.to and Medium that can surface your posts to readers who weren't looking for your specific blog.
What it costs: varies by platform. Medium doesn't let you use a fully custom domain on its free tier and takes a cut of attention through its own recommendation feed rather than sending it straight to you. Ghost is closer to full ownership (it's open source and self-hostable) but still means managing an application, not just files. dev.to and Hashnode are strong for developer audience reach but design customization is limited, and your content lives inside someone else's platform and format.
This is the right choice if you want to publish today and don't want to think about infrastructure, or if platform-native audience reach matters more to you than owning the exact presentation.
Markdown-first publishing tools: write locally, publish without the CMS
A newer category — Blogizi is one example — sits between the two: you write plain Markdown files in your own editor and repo, then publish with a single CLI command. No CMS to log into, no theme to build, but you still own the source files the way you would with a static site generator.
What you get: the portability of Markdown (see Markdown vs Notion for blogging) combined with hosting, SEO formatting, sitemaps, RSS, and OG images handled automatically — the parts of a static site generator that are tedious rather than interesting. blogizi publish path/to/post.md reads the frontmatter, recalculates word count and reading time, and makes the post live.
What it costs: less design control than hand-building a static site, since you're working within a hosted structure rather than raw templates. It also means depending on a platform for hosting, the same trade-off any hosted tool carries.
This is the right choice if your bottleneck is genuinely the writing, not the infrastructure — you want the technical SEO basics (sitemap, RSS, OG images) handled without building them yourself, but still want your posts as Markdown files in your own repo rather than trapped in a platform's database. See GitHub Pages vs Blogizi and blogging from your terminal for what the day-to-day workflow looks like.
How to actually decide
Ask which constraint you care about most:
Design control above everything → a static site generator (Astro, Hugo, Jekyll).
Built-in audience and zero setup → a hosted platform (dev.to, Medium, Ghost).
Markdown ownership without building the plumbing yourself → a Markdown-first tool like Blogizi.
None of these are permanent commitments — Markdown files move between all three with minimal friction, which is exactly why writing in Markdown from the start (rather than a platform-locked editor) is the decision that actually matters most. Whichever platform you pick, get the technical SEO checklist right before your first post goes live — it matters more than which of these three you chose.