The key difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org is who’s actually hosting your website.
With WordPress.org, you host your own site (we recommend this).
With WordPress.com, on the other hand, it’s WordPress.com that takes care of all of this for you (easier to start, less freedom). And that’s the major difference.
Nowadays, hosting companies are as easy to start with as WordPress.com, cheaper and with more freedom.
The cost of using WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
WordPress.com does allow you to set up a website entirely for free, but there are some downsides to this:
- You can only place your site under a subdomain
- You cannot remove WordPress.com’s own ads and branding from your site
- You get limited disk space of 3GB
- You can’t monetize your blog or website
- You can’t install plugins or any themes that aren’t available on the platform by default