Pagecord vs Medium
Pagecord is a European alternative to Medium: same content & media use case, headquartered in United Kingdom and governed by UK GDPR, while Medium is based in the United States.
By the EU Alternatives team Last updated
Publish posts and pages by email, editor or Obsidian, with themes, privacy-friendly analytics, a subscriber newsletter and custom domains on Premium.
- Jurisdiction
- United Kingdom
- Primary privacy law
- UK GDPR
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- No
- Open source
- No
- Free tier
- Yes
A publishing platform with a built-in audience, where a membership paywall funds writers through the Partner Program. Reading costs 5 dollars a month or 50 dollars a year; writing is free, though reach depends on Medium's curation decisions. The site is owned by A Medium Corporation, private and run out of San Francisco, profitable only since 2024.
- Jurisdiction
- United States
- GDPR by default
- Requires DPA + TIA
- US CLOUD Act exposure
- Yes
Pagecord vs Medium at a glance
| Pagecord | Medium | |
|---|---|---|
| Headquarters | United Kingdom | United States |
| Data jurisdiction | United Kingdom | United States |
| Primary privacy law | UK GDPR | Requires DPA + transfer assessment |
| US CLOUD Act exposure | No | Yes |
| Best for | Teams that need content & media built for European data-protection requirements | Teams already invested in the Medium ecosystem |
Choose Pagecord if…
- You want a provider governed by a European privacy regime
- GDPR or public-sector data-protection requirements apply to you
- You want to start free and scale up later
- You'd rather back the European tech ecosystem
Stick with Medium if…
- You depend on integrations only available in the Medium ecosystem
- Your organisation has no EU data-residency constraints
- Migration costs outweigh the jurisdiction benefits for now
About Pagecord
Pagecord is a minimalist blogging platform for people who want a home on the web without running a CMS. You get unlimited posts and pages, a custom home page, tags, search, comments, contact forms and RSS, and you can write in the built-in editor, publish by email, or send posts from Obsidian, iA Writer, the API or a command-line tool.
The free Classic plan keeps unlimited posts and pages and allows 20 image and audio uploads. Premium, at 4 dollars a month or 39 dollars a year with a 14-day trial, adds a custom domain, custom CSS, page view analytics and an email newsletter that sends readers each post or a weekly digest. Everything can be exported as HTML or Markdown at any time.
Key benefits:
- Free forever plan with unlimited posts and pages
- Publish by email or from Obsidian, iA Writer, the API and the CLI
- Themes, fonts and custom CSS for a site that looks like your own
- Email newsletter for up to 250 subscribers on Premium
- Privacy-focused analytics that can be switched off entirely
- Custom domain included with Premium
- Full export in HTML or Markdown, so your writing stays portable
Pagecord is run by Pagecord Ltd, a bootstrapped company registered in Edinburgh, Scotland, and led by its founder Olly Headey. Its privacy policy lists Hetzner servers and an Ubicloud managed database in Germany, with file storage on Cloudflare R2 in Western Europe. Some processors, including OpenAI for content moderation, may handle data outside the UK and EEA under standard contractual clauses.
The code is public on GitHub under the Pagecord Licence, which allows self-hosting but forbids offering it to others as a hosted service, so it is source-available rather than open source in the OSI sense.
Why choose Pagecord over Medium?
The decisive argument is data jurisdiction. Medium is headquartered in the United States, which means personal data processed through it can be subject to non-EU legal regimes: the US CLOUD Act, FISA 702, or similar laws depending on the provider. After the 2020 Schrems II ruling, EU organisations must carry out a transfer impact assessment for every such data flow.
Pagecord removes that overhead. As a United Kingdom-based provider, it operates under UK GDPR, and data stays in the United Kingdom, which the European Commission recognises as offering an adequate level of protection. For regulated sectors such as health, public administration, and finance, that's not a nice-to-have but a requirement. For everyone else, it's concentration-risk insurance: you avoid depending on a single jurisdiction that can change the rules without warning.