The two worlds of WordPress – the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

This aspect of the WordPress ecosystem is a bit confusing, but there are basically two versions of WordPress available out there. To make this simpler, let me just use the website addresses where you can find them:

• WordPress.com (https://wordpress.com/)
• WordPress.org (https://wordpress.org/)

Surprisingly, those two websites don't lead to the same place. In fact, they lead to two completely different places:

• WordPress.com is a commercial website-building solution. You can go there, sign up for an account, and then configure your website based on the available settings and designs.
• WordPress.org is an open source website software. To use it, you first need to get access to a web server—either rent it out from a hosting company or set up a server on a local machine—and then you can install WordPress on it.