If you are someone who sees coding as gibberish but still wants to design their own site, then you need to get yourself a website builder! Our website builder comparison chart will help you with that.
The platforms we’ll discuss in this post target different users, and come with various benefits and limitations. Some of them are basic blogging platforms; others are fully hosted solutions or developer tools. Therefore, it’s crucial to assess your needs and make an informed decision.
Unfortunately, when you go ahead and start searching for the best website builders out there, you’ll find yourself in a sea of site building tools with no real info to help you choose the best one. Most of the top tools claim to offer a lot, and while that is good, it might not hold water when you subject them to comparison.
With that sentiment in mind, I have tested the top website builders and came up with real information (updated regularly) to help you choose a site builder that has the exact features that are key for you.
📊 Detailed website builder comparison chart
There are quite a lot of things to consider when you’re selecting a website builder. Below is our website builder comparison chart, and, in it, we are going to compare the top contenders across different fields.
The best part about a website builder is that you will have complete design flexibility. You’ll have to consider the amount of traffic and the pricing that goes along with it, though. Overall, the features you’d want might vary. On average, a good site builder will cost you $20-$30 / month (with features essential for monetization).
| WordPress | Wix | Squarespace | Web.com | Weebly | Shopify | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Known for | All-in-one blogging | AI website builder | Beautiful templates | AI builder for basic sites | Drag and drop tools | Top ecommerce platform | |
| Overall rating | 4/5 | 5/5 | 5/5 | 3/5 | 4/5 | 4/5 | |
| Essential features | |||||||
| Free domain | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | |
| SSL | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Themes/templates | 200 | 300 | 110 | 40 | 1000 | ||
| Responsive | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| SEO rating | 5/5 | 4.5/5 | 4/5 | 3.5/5 | 4 | 4.5 | |
| Backups | Automated (in higher tier plans) | Manual | Manual | Manual | No | Automated (with apps) | |
| Plugins/apps/extensions | 55,000+ | 300+ | 22 | N/A | 383 | 4000+ | |
| Blogging features | |||||||
| Archive | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Comments | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Search feature | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | |
| Analytics | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| ecommerce features | |||||||
| Dropshipping friendly | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Unlimited products | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Scalable business plans | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ | |
| Support | |||||||
| Knowledge base | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Phone | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Live chat | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| Help forums | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Pricing | |||||||
| Free trial and limit | Unlimited | 14 days | 14 days | ❌ | ❌ | 14 days | |
| Starting price for a blog | $4/mo (billed yearly) | $17.00/mo (billed yearly) | $16.00/mo | $4.95/mo (billed yearly) | $10/mo | $5/mo | |
| Starting price for ecommerce | $45/mo (billed yearly) | $36.00/mo (billed yearly) | $27/mo | $13.95/mo (billed yearly) | $12.00/mo | $29.00/mo | |
| Annual discount | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | |
📋 FAQ
What is a website builder?
A website builder is an online tool that lets you construct your site from scratch without having to learn coding. You can either start by choosing a pre-built template or decide to create your website or landing page from scratch.
What makes website builders better than manually built sites is the excessive design flexibility. You can tweak any element on your website.
Do website builders provide hosting flexibility?
Web hosting is something your site can’t survive without. Website builders usually cover the hosting plan in their packages, but some do allow you to use external hosting services.
Will I get a free custom domain?
When you are just starting out and don’t have a domain name, your site will be hosted under the website builder’s subdomain. Based on the site builder plan, you will get a custom domain name as well.
Some builders, like Wix, will provide you with a free custom domain name on your plan for the first year. After that, you’ll have to pay to keep your domain online – around $10-$15 annually.
What are the other alternatives to website builders?
If you’d like to have more control over your website, you can choose to download the WordPress.org software for free and then have it installed on any web server of your choosing.
WordPress is the most popular website platform on the web (more than 43.4% of all websites use it). More importantly, you can get quality hosting for WordPress for around $3-$4 / month. Having WordPress running on a third-party host will give you complete control of what you have on your site, and how you choose to run it.
👊 More on the companies from the website builder comparison chart
WordPress.com
WordPress.com can be a great solution for anyone who wants to build a blog or a simple business website.
The best part about this website builder is the robust functionality backed by thousands of free WordPress plugins. One of my favorites is the Elementor page builder that lets you customize the smallest thing on your website. The downside is that you’ll need to select a business plan to be able to install WordPress plugins.
That said, you can use WordPress.com even for free if you’re okay with the limited features.
Price-wise, it’s the cheapest of all site builders and will get your personal blog live for just $4 per month. When taking ecommerce into consideration as well, your bill will grow to $45 per month.
- Price from: $4 / mo for blogs or $45 / mo for ecommerce
- Sites allowed: 1
- Free trial: ✅ (unlimited)
- Free domain: ✅
- SSL: ✅
- Features Rating: 4/5
- SEO Rating: 5/5
- Overall Rating: 4/5
Wix
Wix is one of the easiest to use website builders out there. Their Wix ADI module helps you build a beautiful site on autopilot. This AI-made site can be further customized using Wix’s tools.
Another ground where Wix defeats WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace (okay, all of them) is a highly scalable pricing module. For instance, the business plans are broken into four sub-plans that will let you pick and match the features you need. You can select Wix pricing plans based on features like subscription, shipping discount, level of support, loyalty marketing, and so on. Shopify also offers scalable plans. However, you’ll notice a huge gap between each plan.
- Price from: $17.00 / mo for blogs or $36.00 / mo for ecommerce
- Sites allowed: 1
- Free trial: ✅ (14 days)
- Free domain: ✅
- SSL: ✅
- Features Rating: 5/5
- SEO Rating: 4.5/5
- Overall Rating: 5/5
Squarespace
Squarespace is great for complete beginners to website building.
While it has some limitations, I like their templates more than the other site builders here. Though Wix is tough competition, Squarespace templates are the best by far!
What’s slightly disappointing with Squarespace is their lack of a straightforward backup module. While I don’t believe that Squarespace won’t restore your site in case of trouble, there’s no immediate access to these tools on user level.
On the plus side, Squarespace has cheap prices to get started with. Currently, the entry-level plan is $16.00 per month.
- Price from: $16.00 / mo for blogs or $27 / mo for ecommerce
- Sites allowed: 1
- Free trial: ✅ (14 days)
- Free domain: ✅
- SSL: ✅
- Features Rating: 5/5
- SEO Rating: 4/5
- Overall Rating: 5/5
Web.com
Web.com is an AI-powered website builder that can create your site within minutes. All you have to do is answer some questions, and the tool will design your pages based on your needs and preferences. You can then edit them with the drag-and-drop builder.
If you’re looking for an enterprise solution, Web.com isn’t the best option as it’s mainly designed for small websites. However, if you just want to set up a blog or a basic site for your online store or small business, Web.com can help you get started right away.
- Price from: $4.95 / mo for blogs or $13.95 / mo for ecommerce
- Sites allowed: 1
- Free trial: ❌
- Free domain: ✅
- SSL: ✅
- Features Rating: 3/5
- SEO Rating: 3.5/5
- Overall Rating: 3/5
Weebly
Weebly is a regular in our roundups of the best website builders. Simply put, Weebly is a great website builder with a lot of drag-and-drop tools and hundreds of useful extensions.
It shows great compatibility with add-ons. Furthermore, the professionally made templates will give your website an elegant touch (and all for a competitive price too).
That said, some features are not there, such as bookings. And, you might find it challenging to do more significant customizations to your designs.
- Price from: $10 / mo for blogs or $12.00 / mo for ecommerce
- Sites allowed: 1
- Free trial: ❌
- Free domain: ✅
- SSL: ✅
- Features Rating: 4/5
- SEO Rating: 4/5
- Overall Rating: 4/5
Shopify
Shopify is most known for its top-of-the-line ecommerce tools. Quite frankly, if you want to build an online store of any kind, Shopify is likely the best platform to use for that! It comes with all features that an online store might need and a straightforward customization module.
If you want to build another type of website – not ecommerce – then you will have more control of your site with the other site builders. Shopify isn’t your ideal tool for blogging or classic online publishing, for example. Still, it’s hard to hold this against it; Shopify was meant to be a great ecommerce platform first of all, and that’s what it is!
- Price from: $5 / mo for blogs or $29.00 / mo for ecommerce
- Sites allowed: 1
- Free trial: ✅ (14 days)
- Free domain: ❌
- SSL: ✅
- Features Rating: 3.5/5
- SEO Rating: 4.5/5
- Overall Rating: 4/5
🤔 Website builder comparison: pick your winner
Finding the right website builder for your needs is quite tricky. You will have to decide which features are your priority and which you can live without. Nevertheless, something to look for in all website builders are things like design flexibility, good pricing, scalability, and ease of use. Apart from those, your choice will come down to one or two key features that you deem necessary.
These key features might vary, and it is due to this reason that a website builder for small business might not be a good site builder for designers.
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