Comparison between Vocal Media and Medium

They look very similar. I'd like to try them both and compare their pros and cons.

First, when writing an article, vocal.media shows "Submit for review will become available after you add a title, subtitle, plus a featured image, video, and content." That seems to mean you must write a subtitle and add an image before you can publish your article. I add an image and a subtitle, then click the "Save changes" button, but do not see the "Submit for review" or "Publish" button. Do I need to add a video? That would be a great trouble for me. I don't think Medium require its users to add a subtitle/image/video to be able to publish an article. Finally, I see the "Submit for Review" button replaces the "Save changes" button, which means you do not need to add a video. But I'm still not clear if it requires a subtitle and an image. g

Second, on the editing tool bar, there is a button to create an unordered list and a button to create an ordered list. This is better than Medium as it has so such options although you can do it using other methods. There is also a heading button to make a paragraph be a header. Medium has also such functionality and it has two buttons to make medium-large headers and large headers.

Third, on Medium, you can add an alt text and a caption for an image, but on Vocal.media, it seems you can only add a caption for an image.

Fourth, when I try to submit this article for a review, it shows the following information:

Not enough words

This community requires stories with at least 600 words. Your story might be rejected because it has not reached the minimum word count.

and I find you must choose a related community for this article to be reviewed. Medium does not require you to submit your article for a review although I think it also has some kind of review mechanism to enure the quality of articles. And this submission for review step caused some trouble to me. As I decided to go back to add some words to my article to reach the minimum 600 words requirements, I found after clicking the "Save change" button, the "Submit for review" button did not show up. After investigation, I found the subtitle I added disappeared and the caption I added to the feature image also disappeared. But I remember I clicked the "Save changes" button after adding them so this should be a bug. After adding back the subtitle and the image caption and clicking the "Save changes" button, the "Submit for review" showed up finally.

Fifth, when you type the content of your article, vocal.media shows the number of characters you have typed at the bottom of the composition page. This is a great advantage compared to Medium. Users can easily know how much content they have written.

Sixth, Medium has a functionality that adds private notes for some text, i.e, you highlight some text and click the lock icon on the editing toolbar, then add some notes for the selected text. These private notes are not publically seen. Vocal.meida has not such functionality.

Seventh, the review system of vocal turns out not accurate and efficient. I submitted this article for a review, and the article was rejected for the reason of potential spam or not disclosure of AI content, which is nonsense. I sent emails to [email protected] for a re-consideration but got no reply.

Conclusion, both of vocal.media and Medium are good publishing platforms with almost the same functionalities. There are some new features of vocal.media such as submission for review. But the new features seems not mature yet. Vocal is lack of some features such as the notes-adding functionality of Medium. Will add more to this article when I get more experience of using vocal.media.