Comparisons usually stop at features and price. What you can take with you, what others can see, and what happens when you leave are decided separately, and they matter most at exactly the moment you are considering a change.
Whether you can download your own material in a format that is usable somewhere else.
Who can see your profile, whether it appears in public search, and how much control you have over that.
Whether closing an account removes the content, and how long anything is retained afterwards.
Whether the relationships themselves, not just the text, survive a move to another service.
Described at the category level, because implementations change frequently and vary by region. Always confirm the current position in the provider's own privacy settings and policy before relying on any of it.
Offer a self-service export covering profile information, connections and activity, and a documented account closure route. Profile visibility settings allow you to limit public search indexing and to browse in private mode.
The important limit is relational rather than technical. An exported connection list gives you names and, where shared, contact details. It does not carry the relationship to another platform, because the other person has to be there too.
Hold application history, saved searches and resume documents. A published resume is typically visible to employers who pay for candidate access, and that setting is usually adjustable.
Applications submitted to an employer generally leave the platform and enter that employer's own systems, where the platform's settings no longer apply. Withdrawing a resume from search does not retrieve applications already sent.
The most varied category, because the workspace owner rather than the platform often controls retention and access. In many workspaces an administrator can see more than members expect, and message history may be retained under a plan you have no say over.
The upside for privacy is that content in closed workspaces is generally not publicly searchable. The downside is that you usually cannot export a conversation you took part in.
The strongest position on portability in this comparison. Newsletter platforms commonly allow a full subscriber list export, which means the audience relationship survives a move to a different provider.
Public by design, so visibility controls are correspondingly limited. Published work is intended to be found, indexed and shared.
In the European Union and the United Kingdom, data protection law gives individuals rights of access, portability and erasure that apply regardless of what a product's settings offer. Several jurisdictions elsewhere, including a growing number of United States states, provide comparable rights with different scope and thresholds.
The practical consequence: where a platform offers an export tool, it is usually implementing an obligation rather than providing a differentiator. Comparing platforms on this point is therefore less informative than it looks in most of Europe.
This is a general summary of a complex area and is not legal advice. Rights, exemptions and procedures vary by jurisdiction. Consult a qualified adviser or your national data protection authority for guidance on a specific situation.