Tumblr Vs. Medium: which is best and why

Blogging platforms such as Blogger and WordPress have been big on the web for years now, and at least two have been moving in on their territory: Tumblr.com and Medium.com.

While both are used for similar purposes, they're quite different when you get down to comparing some of their best qualities and details. We've reviewed both to help you discover which has the features you want most.

Overall Findings

Tumblr	Medium
Highly visual blogging platform. Share individual photos, groups of photos, animated GIFs, and videos. Users love to reblog posts from others.	Recognized as a high-quality publishing platform. Users can't "reblog" posts from others. Users can press a heart icon to recommend content.

You may have heard that Tumblr is big with teenagers and Medium is used a lot by people who work in the tech and media industries. That may be partially true, but if anything else is for certain, it's that these two blogging platforms are among the trendiest and fastest growing social web publishing sites today.

Text posts are popular on Tumblr, but the visual content is what rocks this platform. Some posts can rack up hundreds of thousands of reblogs, along with multiple conversational captions left by users.

Some of the most talented writers use Medium to craft everything from the most detailed, long-form research pieces to short, personal stories. Medium has close ties with Twitter, so lots of bloggers share their posts there as well.

Design: Custom or Minimalist

Tumblr	Medium
Customize appearance using themes. Install unique skins. Use coding for more customization.	Clean, minimal appearance. Few customizable features. No themes.

There are thousands of themes available out there, all of which can make your blog look like a professional website, complete with sidebars, social buttons, pages, comments and more. If you have coding skills, you can even play around with it to customize it further.

Unlike Tumblr, you can't install a new theme with sidebars and music and menus to change its entire look. Instead, Medium's blog design looks a lot like Twitter. You get a profile photo, a cover photo and a brief bio description to be displayed on your blog, and that's it.

Blogging: Multimedia Abounds

Tumblr	Medium
Known for different multimedia post types. Queue drafts for later. Text formatting features.	User-friendly. Intuitive formatting. Automatic saving.

You can make a post specifically featuring text, photos, links, chat dialogues, audio files or video on Tumblr. The platform also has Medium-like formatting features, which you can access by pressing the plus (+) sign when you're writing a post, or by highlighting any text. You can save draft posts and set them up in your queue to be posted over a selected period of time.

Medium is known for its easy and intuitive formatting features. Select the plus sign (+) when creating a new post to add photos, videos, links or to break up paragraphs. Highlight any text to set a heading style or paragraph, add a quote, set the alignment or add a link. Drafts are automatically saved and you can click to share it as a draft if you want inputs or edits from someone before publishing it.

Community: It's Nice to Share

Tumblr	Medium
Impressive user dashboard. Follow other blogs. Easy to reblog.	Recommend posts. Leave notes and comments. View followed people in feed.

Tumblr's user dashboard is where the magic all happens. When you follow other blogs, you can scroll to your heart's content and do all your liking, reblogging and replying to posts from the dash. "Notes," which represent all the likes and reblogs a post gets, can reach the hundreds of thousands when they get passed around and reach enough users. You can also privately message users as yourself or anonymously, and submit posts to other blogs for featuring if they enable that option.

You can't reblog Medium posts, but you can recommend them so they show up on your profile and in the home feeds of people who follow you. When you hover your mouse over a paragraph, you should see a small plus sign (+) button appear to the right, which you can press to leave a note or comment. Once it's left there, it will appear as a numbered button to click on and expand. Other users or the author may respond to it.

Mobile: Interactive App

Tumblr	Medium
Mobile-friendly. Powerful app. Post and interact.	Personalized feed. No ads. Compose on the go.

Tumblr has a powerful blogging app. A huge chunk of Tumblr activity comes from mobile devices, including posting and interacting. It's a lot like the Twitter app, but with more visual content and posting features. You can do everything on Tumblr's mobile app that you can on the web version.

With Medium's app, you can view your home feed, top stories, and your bookmarks. Create posts from the mobile app or interact by following users, recommending posts and sharing them.

Final Verdict

Both are great blog platforms, but there are others that might suit your purposes even better. Some of the best articles to read have been from authors who publish their work on Medium, so Tumblr is the big winner for discovering the best visual content while Medium wins for the best-written content.