DEV.to vs Medium vs Hashnode vs Hackernoon

A graph showing interest over time between: dev.to, Medium, Hashnode and Hackernoon

Introduction

So, you want to publish tutorials or technical articles, whether it’s for yourself or for a brand you manage. Creating and hosting your own blog from scratch is no easy task; luckily there are pre-built and managed platforms where you can publish your work without having to run your own site.

These platforms mostly let you create an account and start writing. From there they handle distribution and take care of all the other platform management tasks.

If you are running your own blog already, it is still a good idea to take advantage of the large communities of these platforms to redistribute your articles and gain more exposure.

There are a plethora of blogging platforms to choose from, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we aim to make the decision a little easier by comparing the top blogging platforms for developers.

Just tell me which to use

If you just want to know which to use and get on with it you should probably use:

Quick overview

Before we dive into detailed comparisons, here’s a quick overview of each platform.

DEv.to

An image showing the reading and text editing experience on Dev.to

Medium

An image showing the reading and text editing experience on Medium

Hashnode

An image showing the reading and text editing experience on Hashnode

Hackernoon

An image showing the reading and text editing experience on Hackernoon.

Dev.to vs Medium

Dev.to is an online community of developers sharing their developer journey from complete beginners to experts through articles, blog posts and discussions while Medium is a publishing platform for all kinds of writing where short, opinionated posts seem to be prioritized over more lengthy technical articles.

Dev.to vs Hashnode

Dev.to and Hashnode are both blogging platforms that have large developer communities. However, Dev.to is an open-source blogging platform that you can use to build your own (although most people just sign up for an account and publish on the dev.to domain). Hashnode is a proprietary blogging platform that allows you to easily build your own blog page with custom CSS and link it to your own domain name.

Dev.to vs Hackernoon

Dev.to is an open community where developers can write about anything they wish: they can write technical articles, how-to guides and even start discussions. Hackernoon is a developers’ publication that migrated from Medium to their own platform. They don’t allow you to just post what you like: they are a publication so you submit your articles for review by their editors; once approved your article will be published to their reader base.

Hashnode vs Medium

Hashnode is a free blogging platform with a large community specifically of developers while Medium is a publication service with the largest existing general audience but some dark monetizing patterns that can be off-putting for readers. The other main difference especially for technical writing is that the Hashnode text editor uses Markdown formatting with built-in syntax highlighting where with Medium’s editor you’ll have to do some hacking to get similar results.

Hackernoon vs Medium

Hackernoon is similar to Medium in that they are both publication platforms where you can submit articles to be published. In fact, Hackernoon started as a publication on Medium but moved to its own (similar) platform. The difference between the two is that Hackernoon is purely a developer’s publication service and their content is free to read and write as a developer whereas Medium caters to all types of content but they charge their readers a fee to read.

Final remarks

While each platform has its own advantages and disadvantages, it is up to you to find the one that aligns with your specific needs. You can always choose more than one in order to reach more readers but remember to specify the canonical URL when redistributing your article. All of the above platforms allow you to configure a canonical URL. This will help your domain to rank better on Google: if you don’t set the canonical URL Google sees it as duplicate content.