GitHub Pages is the default answer for "how do I host a free blog" if you already live in GitHub. It's free, it's reliable, and it's one repo away from anyone reading your code. The trade-off is that "free hosting" only covers the hosting — everything else about running a blog is still on you.
This is a straight comparison of what each actually requires, for developers deciding between them. For the broader landscape of options, see best developer blogging platforms.
What GitHub Pages actually gives you
GitHub Pages serves static files straight from a repo — push to a branch (or a /docs folder) and the site is live. If you use Jekyll, GitHub builds it for you automatically; anything else (Hugo, Astro, plain HTML), you build locally and push the output.
What's included: free hosting, HTTPS, and custom domain support via a CNAME file plus a DNS record you configure yourself.
What's not included, and is entirely on you to build: a sitemap, an RSS feed, Open Graph image generation, canonical tags, and any kind of publishing workflow beyond git push. Jekyll has plugins for some of this (jekyll-sitemap, jekyll-feed), which helps, but they're still dependencies you add, configure, and keep working through version bumps. If you're not using Jekyll, you're writing that plumbing from scratch.
There's also no draft/publish state, no dashboard, and no way to update a post without a commit and a rebuild — which is fine if that's already your workflow, and friction if it isn't.
What Blogizi gives you instead
Blogizi starts from the same place — Markdown files, written locally, versioned however you like — but the publishing step is a single CLI command rather than a build-and-push pipeline: blogizi publish path/to/post.md. The file's frontmatter (title, description, keyword, slug) is read directly; word count and reading time are recalculated on publish.
Hosting is handled per project: posts go live on a [yourslug].app.blogizi.com subdomain by default, or on your own custom domain via a CNAME record, with domain verification handled automatically rather than requiring manual DNS troubleshooting. There's also a path mode for teams who want the blog to live at yourapp.com/blog behind their own existing reverse proxy, without touching DNS at all.
The SEO plumbing that GitHub Pages leaves to you is generated per post automatically: a sitemap, per-post Open Graph images rendered to match your blog's actual theme (not a generic placeholder), and canonical URLs that resolve correctly whether you're on a subdomain, a custom domain, or path mode. See the technical SEO checklist for the full list of what this covers.
The actual trade-off
Pick GitHub Pages if: your blog is small, tightly coupled to a project's own repo and README, or you specifically want zero dependency on any third-party service beyond GitHub itself — and you're fine building or wiring up the sitemap, OG images, and RSS yourself, once, and maintaining that setup over time.
Pick Blogizi if: you'd rather spend that setup time writing, want custom domain hosting without hand-configuring Vercel or Cloudflare, and want the sitemap and OG image generation to just exist rather than being something you build and maintain per project.
Both approaches keep your posts as portable Markdown files — neither locks you in the way a fully hosted platform like Medium does. The real difference is how much of the non-writing work you're doing yourself versus how much is handled for you. For what the day-to-day writing and publishing loop looks like on the Blogizi side, see blogging from your terminal.