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Write Freely is free and open source software for starting a minimalist, federated blog — or an entire community.

WordPress
Ghost
Blogger
Medium
ClassicPress
Grav
Bludit
A self-hosted blog for any website that isn't WordPress, existing or new. It keeps your site's own design and is ready for SEO and AI search. Free plan, no time limit.

Which is more popular?
Based on our record, WriteFreely seems to be more popular. It has been mentioned 37 times since March 2021.
Website, pricing, platforms and company facts side by side.
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| Website | writefreely.org | donkeycms.com |
| Pricing | ||
| Platforms | — | |
| Company | Startup from the United States | Startup from Romania · 1 - 9 employees · 2026 |
| Listed in |
In their own words, as submitted to SaaSHub.


No description of WriteFreely yet.
DonkeyCMS is a lightweight, self-hosted blog system for websites that are not built on WordPress. It installs into a subfolder of your site and takes on your own header, footer and design, so the blog looks like part of your website instead of a separate product. It works with a website you...
What each product offers, as listed by its team.


Possible disadvantages
An editorial look at what each product does well and who it suits.


Overall verdict
Why this product is good
Recommended for
No analysis of DonkeyCMS yet.
How often each product is chosen within a category, 0–100% relative to the other.


As answered by people managing WriteFreely and DonkeyCMS.
DonkeyCMS's answer:
It adds a blog to a website you already built, instead of asking you to rebuild the site around a CMS. DonkeyCMS installs into a subfolder of a custom-coded HTML site and takes on that site's own header, footer and design, so visitors never feel they left your website. There is no theme to convert and no plugin collection to maintain.
DonkeyCMS's answer:
Choose it if you have a custom-coded website and only want a good blog on it. WordPress would mean converting your design into a theme and keeping plugins updated. Static site generators and headless CMSs need a developer for every change. DonkeyCMS sits in between: it installs in minutes on ordinary PHP hosting, anyone on the team can write and publish from a clean admin, and the SEO groundwork (structured data, sitemap, RSS, share tags) is built in on every plan, including the free one.
DonkeyCMS's answer:
Freelance web designers, small agencies and small businesses whose websites are custom-coded rather than built on WordPress, and who want to add a blog without changing how the site is built. Agencies can run it across many client sites and white-label it.
DonkeyCMS's answer:
I'm a designer, not a programmer. The websites I make for my own projects and for clients are custom HTML sites, not WordPress ones, and I wanted the perfect blog system to plug into them. It had to be as strong as WordPress for SEO, but without the weight: very light, fast, and good-looking out of the box. Nothing I found did all of that inside a site that was already built, so I decided to have it made, at first just to use for my own clients. Version 1.0 was released in October 2026.
DonkeyCMS's answer:
PHP and MySQL, so it runs on standard shared hosting. The post editor is built on Tiptap. The admin and the blog use plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no front-end framework, which keeps pages small and fast.
Share your experience with using WriteFreely and DonkeyCMS. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
External articles and on-site reviews we used to compare the two products.


WriteFreely is designed for writing, with little distraction and an easy-to-use interface. It’s free to use and can be edited on any browser, which makes it very versatile.
It is siple to use, the words are the center:)
We have no reviews of DonkeyCMS yet. Be the first one to post
Recommendations tracked on public social media and blogs since March 2021.


This looks cool! How does it compare to something like WriteFreely (https://writefreely.org/)? - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
And it's very easy to start with something that is also "social": - https://write.as - a https://writefreely.org instance that also syncs with Mastodon, so people can see/discover/subscribe/ comment on your posts without extra hassle of... - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
When looking for something more dynamic, I initially though about using Plume, since it's easy to integrate with some applications I plan to deploy later, but unfortunately it's not well maintained anymore. As Ghost or Wordpress seem... - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
Tracking DonkeyCMS since Oct 2026.
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