Wealthy Affiliate vs WordPress.com: The ultimate comparison of 2021

Everyone is into affiliate marketing and websites these days. It is because they have a VERY huge potential and can bring you thousands of dollars of additional income per month without too much of a hassle.

Are you looking for an unbiased Wealthy Affiliate vs WordPress.com comparison? I am a user of both these platforms for years and I really know them by heart.

Every single company differs from each other in terms of features and pricing. This post is absolutely necessary because both of the above are excellent platforms for building a successful website. The best way to make an informed decision about which is better for your business is to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses against each other.

This guide will help you out to choose whether it is Wealthy Affiliate or Worpdress.com that suits your needs, and how you can leverage the opportunity with your personal favorite one.

Before we begin, I want to point out that these reviews are completely my personal opinion, and that I was not approached by any of the above companies to write in favor of them.

With that in mind, let’s begin! Feel free to jump into sections using the table of contents given below to aid you on the way.

What is Wealthy Affiliate?

Wealthy Affiliate is an all-in-one affiliate training platform that was created in 2005 by two Canadians named Kyle and Carson. I use Wealthy Affiliate myself and it is one of my favorite platforms.

WA contains video lessons, guides, tutorials, and teaches affiliate marketing. The most notable feature is that Wealthy Affiliate can be used as a place to create websites with the self-hosted open-source CMS WordPress. Besides this, you also get access to the CEO of the company, Kyle, personally.

The lessons are well-packed with awesome content and include all the resources you would ever require to grow in the blogging field.

When it comes to the hosting of your website part, Wealthy Affiliate uses WordPress as the content management system, while it runs on SiteRubix, a powerful software that can boost the website’s performance.

With the free plan, you can build websites with their subdomain (Like this: ‘yourwebsite.siterubix.com’). Or you can buy a domain name and then host it with Wealthy Affiliate.

Oh, and did I mention that Wealthy Affiliate has this great free keyword research tool Jaaxy with it?

Advantages of Wealthy Affiliate

I strongly recommend you join this platform even if you are very advanced. These are some pros of using Wealthy Affiliate:

Disadvantages of using Wealthy Affiliate

Not going to lie to you, not everything is perfect for everyone. Like so, Wealthy Affiliate has its own cons ( but compared with the benefits, it is readily negligible):

What is WordPress.com?

WordPress.com is a blog hosting service provider that was established ages ago. It is created and maintained by Automattic, the same guy behind the plugin JetPack. Worpdress.com is similar to Wealthy Affiliate but does not come with as many features as WA( like the training or Keyword tool).

People usually confuse WordPress.com with WordPress.org which are two entirely different things. To come to the point, WordPress.org is an open-source CMS that anyone can use for free to build their websites. Since it is open-source, it is this same piece of software that Wealthy Affiliate and WordPress.com use to build, offer and run their own business.

WordPress.com is exactly like a managed WordPress hosting provider. When you use WordPress.com, you are actually using their hosting solution (plus some other features).

Unlike Wealthy Affiliate, WordPress.com does not provide any training or access to any keyword research tool. But this does not mean WordPress.com is ready to stand back.

WordPress.com, on the other hand, saves you a ton of hard work and time. Since it’s managed to host, you would not have to worry about your website’s performance, security, or any of the technological factors.

Major brands that you probably would have heard or used, like TIME and TED, uses WordPress.com to run their business website.

Advantages of WordPress.com

WordPress.com too has its own benefits like Wealthy Affiliate. Some of them are shared here below:

Disadvantage of WordPress.com

WordPress.com too has cons like WA. Unfortunately, the cons are way more than the benefits. Here are some to make you clear:

Related read: Best Wealthy Affiliate alternatives to consider

Wealthy Affiliate vs WordPress.com : Which is better?

Here comes the real question: which is actually better? Does Wealthy Affiliate outperform WordPress.com or is it the reverse that is happening?

There are many differences between these two, which is usual to see among internet marketing companies.

To choose the winner, there are many factors that would have to be compared. In this comparison of Wealthy Affiliate and WordPress.com, we will go over in detail different features and at last, would elect a winner to help you choose the right one.

1. Features comparison

When it comes to features, if you have followed me, you would have already understood that WordPress.com lacks a lot of features than Wealthy Affiliate.

Wealthy Affiliate offers beyond-words explaining affiliate and blogging training and would guide you step by step on creating an awesome life online. Not to mention the free tool Jaaxy. However, wordpress.com, on the other hand, not only lacks these but also does not have a strong community to support you.

The features are way too limited when it comes to WordPress.com, on comparing to Wealthy Affiliate. Instead of having direct contact with the CEO, you are not even given a live chat customer support option in WordPress.com.

Winner: Wealthy Affiliate clearly tops Worpdress.com when the features are compared one by one. To be frank, the latter is nothing other than a normal hosting company.

2. Pricing comaparison

Wealthy Affiliate vs WordPress.com: Which is more affordable?

Both Wealthy Affiliate and WordPress.com offer free plans. However, the free plan on WordPress.com is a pile of complete rubbish. However, Wealthy Affiliate and WordPress.com each provide you with a free subdomain with website(s) to build.

But when carefully analyzed, WordPress.com, unlike WA, would not let you install any plugins or themes on your site, which is one of the main benefits of using ‘WordPress’ as your CMS. This means that the website you just created would be nearly impossible to customize. And if you forgot, there is still that big, ugly banner on the front end!

The paid plans too list out some things worth noting. The highest-priced plan on Worpdress.com starts at $45 per month, while that at Wealthy Affiliate costs $19 for the first month and then $49 for the rest.

For just the addition of $4, the features you benefit from the latter are just more than something great…

Winner: Like in features, Wealthy Affiliate again outperforms WordPress.com by offering a ton of more features for the same price. It’s a two to zero now.

3. Rating based on real reviews

WordPress.com vs Wealthy Affiliate: Which has got a better opinion among users?

Nothing tells it more clearly than reviews and ratings left by real users of both companies. In this section, we will compare the reviews of Worpdress.com as well as that of Wealthy Affiliate to come to a conclusion.

Trustpilot is a famous source for unbiased reviews of different companies. Let us first analyze the scores on Trustpilot.

This is the rating of WordPress.com on Trustpilot based on more than 3000 reviews by users:

And this is a snapshot of Wealthy Affiliate‘s rating on Trustpilot based on comments from people:

Boom! This is a real game-changer. From the reviews of more than 3200 people, WordPress.com just scores a very poor 2.8 star rating on 5 (which is pretty low for a company). On the other hand, as you can see, Wealthy Affiliate secured a CRAZY 4.9 star rating out of 5.

This means one thing: Customers are really happy with Wealthy Affiliate, while with WordPress(.com), it’s the reverse.

Winner: Without a doubt, WordPress.com is again beaten down by Wealthy Affiliate with a huge fan base and positive reviews. And if you forgot, it is a 3 to 0 now.

Wealthy Affiliate vs WordPress.com: Conclusion

Wealthy Affiliate wins over WordPress.com with a massive difference, hosting a whole lot of great features in store for their customers. WordPress.com, even though it tries its level best to reach Wealthy Affiliate’s standards, is NOWHERE near.

Both platforms are very similar in functionality, but there are some key differences between them that may affect which one you choose to use.

But a word of wisdom: it is really up to you, after all, to decide what works best for you. If you find that, after all this information we went through, Wrodpress.com would do the job, then do not hesitate to give it a whirl.

To be straightforward: go with ‘Wealthy Affiliate‘ rather than selecting WordPress.com as your preferred solution.

With that being said, please bear in mind that WordPress.com is not at all a bad choice, especially if you are considering buying the paid premium plans. It is just that WA has got a lot more for the same cost, and is a ‘thing’ you can rely on.

Hope you liked this post. Really looking forward to your insights and opinions and also to your experience with Wealthy Affiliate and WordPress.com. In the meantime, why not share as a token of appreciation 🙂

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