You now have a pretty good idea of What is WordPress?
When the absolute newbies to WordPress type in the keyword WordPress on Google, the first two search results they get come from 1) WordPress.com and 2) WordPress.org.
Thus starts the confusion.
Every single person who started using WordPress had this question at some point of time.
What is the difference between WordPress.org vs WordPress.com?
WordPress.org provides you self-hosted CMS whereby you host your website on your server while WordPress.com provides you hosted CMS whereby -Automattic – the company behind WordPress.com hosts your website on its servers.
With WordPress.org you get completed freedom to design your site as per your liking. You can install themes from the free WordPress.org repository or you can choose to install the third party commercial themes. WordPress.com restricts you to the themes present in the WordPress.com repository.
The self hosted CMS is available as a single download (also available as a one-click-install solution with almost all major webhosting providers). The hosted CMS is a freemium offering and comes with several plans. It starts with a free plan and moves up to the paid personal, premium and business plans.
With the self-hosted option you need to care about servers, WordPress updates, theme and plugin updates, security and maintenance. The hosted CMS is completely hands-off, you just need to work on your content, the background heavy lifting would be done by Automattic.
When to choose WordPress.org and when to choose WordPress.com?
We have seen that the self-hosted WordPress.org provides you excellent flexibility in terms of designing and extending the site to your liking, though you have to take care of maintenance and security aspects of your site.
In our opinion, the pros of self-hosted CMS far outweighs the cons. Here is our golden rule to choose between WordPress.org and WordPress.com
If you ever plan to commercialize your website, run ads on it or want to use it for your business needs, go with the self-hosted CMS. If, however, you are running a personal site with no intention of monetary benefits out of it, you may go for the hosted option.